The Competitiveness Illusion

THE universally acknowledged decline in American education is said to have given rise to a debate over how to improve the schools. Yet virtually all those active in the so-called debate are in firm agreement on both the nature of the crisis and what should be done about it. The problem, it is agreed, is that America stands in danger of not being able to compete in the highly technologized twenty-first-century world. The solution, it is also agreed, is educational reform emphasizing skills like computer literacy.

Under the heading of “training,” this approach has come to dominate the educational thinking of the incoming Clinton Administration. Labor Secretary designee Robert Reich is identified with training, and he is confident that the education establishment can produce internationally competitive workers. That establishment’s approach, though, no matter how dressed up to sound forward-looking, dynamic, and innovative, only repeats the same orthodoxy that brought about the crisis in the first place.

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Peter Shaw

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THE universally acknowledged decline in American education is said to have given rise to a debate over how to improve the schools. Yet virtually all those active in the so-called debate are in firm agreement on both the nature of the crisis and what should be done about it. The problem, it is agreed, is that America stands in danger of not being able to compete in the highly technologized twenty-first-century world. The solution, it is also agreed, is educational reform emphasizing skills like computer literacy.

Under the heading of “training,” this approach has come to dominate the educational thinking of the incoming Clinton Administration. Labor Secretary designee Robert Reich is identified with training, and he is confident that the education establishment can produce internationally competitive workers. That establishment’s approach, though, no matter how dressed up to sound forward-looking, dynamic, and innovative, only repeats the same orthodoxy that brought about the crisis in the first place.