[Mb-civic] Worried About India's and China's Booms? So Are They By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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March 24, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Worried About India's and China's Booms? So Are They
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The more I cover foreign affairs, the more I wish I had studied education in
college, because the more I travel, the more I find that the most heated
debates in many countries are around education. And here's what's really
funny ‹ every country thinks it's behind.

Tony Blair has been fighting with his own party over permitting more
innovative charter schools. Singapore is obsessed with improving its already
world-leading math scores before others catch up. And America agonizes that
its K-12 public schools badly need improvement in math and science. I was
just in Mumbai attending the annual meeting of India's high-tech
association, Nasscom, where many speakers worried aloud that Indian
education wasn't nurturing enough "innovators."

Both India and China, which have mastered rote learning and have everyone
else terrified about their growing armies of engineers, are wondering if too
much math and science ‹ unleavened by art, literature, music and humanities
‹ aren't making Indira and Zhou dull kids and not good innovators. Very few
global products have been spawned by India or China.

"We have no one going into the liberal arts and everyone going into
engineering and M.B.A.'s," said Jerry Rao, chief executive of MphasiS, one
of the top Indian outsourcing companies. "We're becoming a nation of
aspiring programmers and salespeople. If we don't have enough people with
the humanities, we will lose the [next generation of] V. S. Naipauls and
Amartya Sens," he added, referring to the Indian author and the Indian
economist, both Nobel laureates. "That is sad and dangerous."

Innovation is often a synthesis of art and science, and the best innovators
often combine the two. The Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in his compelling
Stanford commencement address last year, recalled how he dropped out of
college but stuck around campus and took a calligraphy course, where he
learned about the artistry of great typography. "None of this had even a
hope of any practical application in my life," he recalled. "But 10 years
later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back
to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with
beautiful typography."

Fifty years ago the Sanskrit scholar was respected in India, Mr. Rao noted,
but today it is all about becoming an engineer, a programmer, an M.B.A. or a
doctor. "More people will get Ph.D.'s [in the study of] Sanskrit in America
this year than in India," Mr. Rao asserted, "and Sanskrit is the root of our
culture!"

Why all this ed-anxiety today? Because computers, fiber-optic cable and the
Internet have leveled the economic playing field, creating a global platform
that more workers anywhere can now plug into and play on. Capital will now
flow faster than ever to tap the most productive talent wherever it is
located, so every country is scrambling to upgrade its human talent base.
When everyone has access to the same technology platform, human talent, as
the consultants John Hagel III and John Seely Brown wrote, is the "only
sustainable edge."

Hence the concern I found in India that it must move quickly from business
process outsourcing (B.P.O.) ‹ running back rooms, answering phones or
writing code for U.S. companies ‹ into knowledge process outsourcing
(K.P.O.): coming up with more original designs and products.

"We need to encourage more incubation of ideas ... to make innovation a
national initiative," said Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, one of
India's premier technology companies. "Are we as Indians creative? Going by
our rich cultural heritage, we have no doubt some of the greatest art and
literature. We need to bring the same spirit into our economic and business
arena."

But to make that leap, Indian entrepreneurs say, will require a big change
in the rigid, never-challenge-the-teacher Indian education system. "If we do
not allow our students to ask why, but just keep on telling them how, then
we are only going to get the transactional type of outsourcing, not the
high-end things that require complex interactions and judgment to understand
another person's needs," said Nirmala Sankaran, C.E.O. of HeyMath, an
Indian-based education company. "We have a creative problem in this
country."

My guess is that we're at the start of a global convergence in education:
China and India will try to inspire more creativity in their students.
America will get more rigorous in math and science. And this convergence
will be a great spur to global growth and innovation. It's a win-win. But
some will win more than others ‹ and it will be those who get this balance
right the fastest, in the most schools.

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