Sunday’s New York Times featured an extensive account of why Apple has its iPhones made in China rather than the U.S. The short version is that “the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”
Key terms: flexibility, diligence, and industrial skills.
Two days later came the president’s State of the Union speech, which, as predicted, focused heavily on the U.S. economy and ways to boost it. His proposals do, in fact, include some education and job-training initiatives. But mostly, what Mr. Obama did was trot out a bunch of government programs and rattle on about ways in which Uncle Sam should enhance the “fairness” of the U.S. economy, particularly its income distribution. He used variations of the word “fair” eight times. He didn’t talk about the economy’s efficiency, productivity, or industriousness. And his only reference to “hard work” was historical. Simply put, although the president spoke of restoring millions of manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores, it’s hard to picture firms like Apple responding — the steps he plans to take have little to do with the “diligence” of American workers, only a bit to do with “flexibility,” and a bit more to do with “skills.”
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Obama deserves some credit on the skills front. Instead of calling for everyone to complete college, for example, he called on community colleges and private firms — duly mustered and disciplined by Uncle Sam, of course — to equip 2 million people with usable, job-related skills.
He covered K–12 education, too, but only on the “compulsory attendance” and “teacher quality” fronts. In addressing the latter, he hinted at merit pay and nodded at schools’ having the flexibility to “replace” instructors “who just aren’t helping kids learn” — but mostly what he did was urge more money for schools-as-we-know-them and those who teach in their classrooms.
As for “flexibility” and “diligence,” qualities important to Apple and myriad other firms — and qualities they’re apparently finding abroad — you didn’t hear anything about those in the State of the Union. My ear heard the opposite, actually: All the talk about federal programs’ and tax policies’ enhancing “fairness” will exacerbate our nanny-state tendencies, our habit of assuming that government will provide and that we need not redouble our efforts to provide for ourselves. Indeed, the president signaled that we should resent those who are better provided-for — and look to Washington to tug the levers of “fairness.”
Tuesday’s address was, in this regard, a reprise of Mr. Obama’s widely noted remarks in Osawatomie, Kansas, last month. There he began by recalling the values of what Tom Brokaw termed “the greatest generation” before fast-forwarding to the present:
Today, we’re still home to the world’s most productive workers. We’re still home to the world’s most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people.
Read that last sentence again: “Hard work stopped paying off for too many people.”
Industriousness is being killed at an early age. In the urban district in which I teach, laziness is extensively taught. From the teacher standpoint, they are often given kids who come in not knowing what a letter is or what a number is. In the lower grades, the lowest grade that is allowed on a report card is 70. It becomes pretty much impossible for the teachers to actually hold the students to any sort of standards.
By the time they reach me in middle school, they are often years behind. They've been taught laziness because their earlier teachers knew that any low grades would bring heat on them, not the students. They also lack basic math skills, often due to the number of elementary level teachers who do not have sufficient math skills (there was a great article a little while back detailing how elementary level mathematics is far more complex than most think )
For many students, high school is the first time that anybody actually tells them "If you do not perform, you will not move on." Having been taught quite the opposite for many years, they are often quite surprised when they reach the end of their fourth year and find out that 1.5 total credits is not sufficient for a diploma.
My biggest disappointment so far has been what was my greatest hope. This year, for the first time, I was able to teach an advanced class to my 8th graders, which will allow them to get high school credit if they pass the exam. Every person in the class is capable. They have never been taught, however, to study or to put forth a modicum of effort. We have to waste time re-hashing things that they should have learned years ago, and in some cases re-hashing things that they knew perfectly well how to do a few weeks ago. At this point, any hope of them actually completing the course prior to the exam is gone, and their only hope is to really know that parts of the course we have gotten to.
Lousy curricula, insane rules, under-qualified teachers, lazy students, and irresponsible parents all combine for a perfect storm of failure. The problem will not be fixed unless we address all of those issues, not just one.
Maybe if our schools taught useful information instead of how to take some standardized test, our work force would turn out a bit better. I have been dismayed that my daughters have been taught FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test). During parent/teacher conferences, their teachers proudly bring out their scores on FCAT-prep tests provided by somebody the state paid to design it and it taught my daughters how to fill in tiny circles. I have done all kinds of work, from roofing and plumbing to fast food and factory work to help desk tech support. I have yet to have a job where my needed skill was filling in tiny circles with a #2 pencil. I understand the gov wants a metric to show that No Child Left Behind is working. I understand they want a way to show that schools are improving. I understand that the money they send (which is not enough to cover the things they mandate) is being used to its greatest efficacy. The thing is, No Kid Can Fail is NOT working because teachers who don't tow the DOE line of All FCAT All the Time get bounced around to the worst schools till they quit or start teaching to the standardized tests. The test does NOT show that the school is improving, it shows that the teachers are doing a better job of learning how to teach the kids to answer C if you don't know. And honestly, if any of the money sent by Washington gets to the schools, it lands in the principals paycheck and the rest of it was already taken as bonuses by school administrators. Fortunately for my daughters, I know how to think and am doing my dead level best to instill that in them along with a love of knowledge, a love of reading and a curious mind. I feel sorry for the parents who don't know this is what our education system has become and just trusts the public schools since they are products of it and they turned out okay.
Kids have great BS detectors and if you want their respect you have to tell them the truth. Giving praise for something that deserves no praise is a sure way to get them to stop listening to you. That does not mean you have to be brutal or demeaning, just honest about the skills they need to get through life and supportive as they learn their own strengths and weaknesses.
I know of two simple steps that could revolutionize education immediately without any new money, programs, or mass efforts at anything.
1) expell troublesome students quicky and permanently as needed
2) vouchers
These could revitalize and refocus children and parents to do what needs to be whatever needs to be done to educate their kids.
I have one more step. Drill it into them from an early age that unless they do become diligent and industrious, they will be left to fend for themselves without any state support paid for by those who ARE diligent and industrious.
This of course would require a political revolution, not merely good teachers, engaged parents and all the rest.
American schools used to be staffed by educators who made kids learn basic knowledge and skills, and as a side benefit, the kids learned industriousness, self-responsibility, and how to behave decently. These days, they are staffed mainly by educators who are mainly concerned about working less for more money, who think that it's oppressive to make children learn multiplication tables and rules about punctuation, and fear to discipline any student lest the little dear lose some self-esteem (or complain that he was mistreated). Having children spend more time in that environment will accomplish no good.
The key to better education is separating school and state -- the very last thing Obama wants.
One point that I have not seen raised in this debate is the destruction of the work ethic in the potential high achievers. If doing no work, and barely paying attention in class K-12, gets you advanced with average grades, why would a child who has the potential to achieve more put out the effort required for nominally better grades. In the early years they usually do simply for the joy of learning. But as they age, and see that their extra efforts receive essentially no reward, they LEARN to underachieve, to make little effort, and will expect that their underachieving will continue to be rewarded in the marketplace. Unfortunately, by the time they realize that it will not, these habits are so ingrained, that they end up "Occupying" rather than working harder.
I'm not sure depending on schools to teach work ethics is such a good idea, especially in this day and age. Schools have historically destroyed children's ability to think and imagine. The did make good automatons to work on the line but we've no more lines to work. Now, you need to think and the school system is set up to put a stop to that. Well, at least until you get into a liberal arts program where their claim to advantage is teaching "critical thinking."
Funny thing is, I recently found a book published in 1909, How to Study and Teaching How to Study by F.M. McMurry. (it's on Google books) The entire book is basically critical thinking and how to teach it to elementary students. Rote memorization and regurgitation is minimized and there is a lot of exposition on its near uselessness in actual assimilation of knowledge. Problem is, real studying teaches thinking, questioning, evaluating. All traits undesired in the classroom and considered disruptive to teaching to the test.
So if we teach by rote, if we discourage questioning, if tamp down those who might rise, you can hardly expect qualified adults. Toss out the regimentation of school with lax enforcement and you've arrived at the product of 130 years of education scholarship.
Sorry to disagree. Thinking questioning evaluating are wonderful things, but you do not need to spend twelve years learning how to do that, though you must spend 12 years practicing those skills .... on facts. The only reason we need those skills is so that we can apply them to facts and data.
I had a wonderful education in thinking skills. But I learned in perhaps 5th grade that adverbs answered the questions how when where why or to what extent, If every one of my students only knew facts like that, and how (in this case) how to apply that formula, or what was the difference between a verb and a noun -- they would be light years ahead of the game.
Thinking, analyzing and questioning must be applied to some thing -- thinking about what? analyzing what? questioning what?
The most serious deficiencies in my own education come because I do not know things.
Our educational system comprises over 14,000 local government monopolies, tasked with educating more than 90% of the students in this country. Don't most government-run systems stress equality over quality? Don't most monopolies tend to protect the status quo rather than promoting innovation and a focus on users and customers?
Why are we so surprised that a system that allows so little choice has turned out to be so unaccountable? What, in anyone's experience, should lead us to expect otherwise?
As are most educators, Mr. Finn is woefully ignorant of economics.
The flexibility, diligence, and industrial skills of Chinese workers have not outpaced their American counterparts.
Those qualities, which positively affect the marginal product of labor, are only great enough to make that marginal product equal the abysmal wages that Chinese workers are forced to work for by their government.
Jobs like Apple's go to China because the workforce is super cheap, not because of industriousness or any other factor. Yes, much of the potential labor force for menial or assembly line jobs in the US won't do those jobs because they perceive the pay is too low, but a lot of that is because we'll pay people to not work. And let's face it, when it costs half as much to have a gizmo made in China even after all the considerable hassles, fees, taxes, duties, and shipping. It is amazingly difficult to keep Chinese companies in-line and making products to specification and with the level of quality that you want. It's really painful and would be so much easier to do in the states. But the cost is the killer.
Second, my experience with my kids says that teachers do send home homework. Lots of it. Too much of it. They'll let the kids sit there for two hours on a Friday and watch a Disney movie, and then send home page after page of math homework that the parent has to get the child to do, and often spend hours of their own time helping with. It's a joke. I send my kid to school to do schoolwork. You know, reading, writing and arithmetic? I don't send them to school to sit there and watch movies.. My kid can talk about the terrible conditions in Ghana, but can't do long division. Our schools are broken and it's mostly because of idiotic feel good, warm and fuzzy hogwash that they teach instead of core competencies.
America must stay ahead of the world and we need to do that with hard work and highly educated workers who think up, design and manage instead of putting screw A into slot B. Let the rest of the world do that work.
Here in NYS you'll need a teachers certificate to teach. You want to teach math? No problem even if you don't know the subject or any other subject, just the certificate is necessary. Now you wonder whats happened to our education, blame the unions. Check on the rubber rooms in NYC for some more data. Can't fire them so they spend their days in what they call the rubber rooms. De fund the Department of Education, get rid of tenure. When all this evidence is starring the educators in the face they shrug their shoulders and exclaim what can we do? Do they listen? If they did would they do anything about it?
This is the worst article I have read in a long time. I stopped reading most of these left-wing or right-wing periodical magazines several years ago after my subscription to American Conservative lapsed, and know I remember why...
The author,Mr. Finn Jr., seems to put no intellectual effort whatsoever into analyzing the intended meaning of Apple's key terms repeated exhaustively in his piece: flexibility, diligence, and industrial skills. This is what the terms mean in the context of which they were given:
Flexibility: In Asia, if Steve Jobs wants to make a last minute change to an iphone design, such as replacing plastic screens with glass, he simply calls the factory's management. Immediately, day or night or weekend or holiday, supervisors assemble hundreds of on-call workers living across the street in shanty-towns to man the assembly lines. (True story)
Diligence: These workers will work for however many hours straight necessary to complete this enormous task, without rest or sustenance, and with full knowledge they will lose their jobs if they even take a break.
Industrial Skills: Given the above, this one kind of explains itself, doesn't it?
So there you go, value judgments aside about whether this type of business activity should be encouraged, this is the proper prism through which to view how foreigners have outpaced American workers in competing for Apple manufacturing jobs.
Thus, this whole article and all of its inferences are vapid and irrelevant.
As a career private school educator, my perspective is that the closer you bring decision-making to the parents, the better likelihood of quality education, including education in intellectual and moral virtues. This is why vouchers are so promising.
I see NO role for the federal government in education and think even the state's role should be eliminated (because the state takes the pot of money and divides it up as it sees fit).
Local control could be the salvation of American education.
To h_ l l with Apple. What they mean isn't that the American worker isn't flexible enough, what they mean is that the American worker can't be treated like a dog, worked in 12-hr shifts for 6 days a week, sleep in nearby company apartments so they can be called at a moments notice to rework a shift. At least that is the "on site story" of what happened on the Chinese plant that makes the glass displays. Americans have a life separate and apart from their work. This life includes time with family, time volunteering in schools, churches, and the community. There wouldn't be Boy Scouts or Girls Scouts without volunteers. Those cookies you love to get every year don't just hop out of the oven and to your doorstep you know. There'd be few little league teams, no local soccer clubs. And on and on and on.
That's the difference. So Apple can take that Americans can't do this or that and shove it up their core as far as I'm concerned. Look, I'm no lover of American unions per se. But when I look at them, it's more their political thuggery and the moronic goons who head them up than the ideals from which they sprang. The American Labor movement has been a valuable part of what's made American Capitalism a success. It's also been what's opened much of the international marketplace. That China treats its citizens as state sponsored robots is their problem. We should not take the myopic techno centric view of one of the tech titan companies in looking at ourself. What I find so ironic is that ExxonMobil is far, far more hospitable, fair, and open with their overseas workforce than any of these golden tech firms. Yet they are beaten up all the time. Apple - who made more profits than most oil companies and pays less in taxes - just lectures us about why Chinese labor is so good.
Hmmmm, I don't need that i-phone after all. I'll just stick with what I have. And that i-Pad. I may just wait till HP or Dell come out with another - more domestic one.
When I read articles such as this, I am deeply saddened by the lack of understanding of the issues at hand.
1. Diligence, flexibility, and skills – in the article cited, Apple made a mistake and roused their Chinese workers out of bed in the middle of the night for a 14 hour day to correct the flaw. This is not some personality trait unique to Asia, but it illustrates the near slave labor conditions in the suicide-stricken Chinese factories. We should not be striving for this. Moreover, it is deplorable that Apple thinks that this is something to be celebrated. Also, by the way, at least for now, Chinese productivity lags that of the US and a number of other nations. It may not lag forever if we encourage money flows there over investment in the United States.
2. Education – when international test score performance is compared across demographic groups, students in the US outscore students in their ancestral regions. We have encouraged immigration from the third world, and now our educational attainment is beginning to mirror those nations. Read, External Link , for a more complete analysis. We have a large underclass that we are undereducating; we also produce a large core of motivated, skilled students. Unfortunately, companies such as Apple use the performance of the former to justify offshoring to near slave laborers in China.
