Community Essay : ‘Here’s to American Public Education’ : Schools: A Los Angeles mother who was educated in Asia and Europe says she may know more facts, but her kids have learned to think for themselves.

Soon it will start again, the litany that says American education is inferior, that we are falling further and further behind other nations. The critics will say that if we don’t do things differently and soon, we will have an inferior work force, become a third-rate economic power.

Algebra and geometry, calculus and trigonometry, science and geography will be pointed to as areas where our children are behind the Koreans, the Japanese, the Germans and the Danes. Hands will be wrung. Dirges will be sung. Our youth and our teachers will be apportioned blame. Parental neglect and television will be cited as causes of this downfall yet again.

I think back on my own education. I know I could place Dieppe and Timbuktu at an age when my sons couldn’t show you where Memphis or Anchorage are. Yes, I remember having learned algebra at an age when the word itself is still a stranger to them. Geometry we started in fifth grade, calculus in ninth--and that was all of us, not just the gifted ones. Even on American history, without ever setting foot in America, I could cite more names and dates than they can. Raised in Asia, Africa and Europe, I was the product of educational systems much praised by critics of the American. They are convinced of the superiority of other nations’ systems, the ones under which I was educated. I find it hard to join their laments.

I might have known more facts at corresponding ages than American children do and yet I would rather have the education that they have. If they don’t know the fact, they know where to find it when they need it--and that is a greater strength. I was spoon fed and asked to regurgitate facts. Many of these facts I fast forgot; others have proved irrelevant in the course of a lifetime. My children’s skill in finding out will serve them well all their lives--whatever fact they need they will be able to locate when they need it. Yet it is only a current knowledge base, embedded in facts, that is measured by standardized tests.

To teach analysis, my teacher analyzed and told us her conclusions. We were then expected to accept her conclusion as gospel and repeat it to her come exam time. An analysis of our own was not expected, a conclusion different from hers never accepted. My sons, on the other hand, have been examining the facts, analyzing, concluding and defending their conclusions since first grade. Independent minds capable of rational analysis and logical conclusions are assets of immeasurable value. I am glad my sons will have these assets.

We were rated by examination performance. We knew by our first-grade marks whether were were “smart” or perhaps “stupid.” We knew we were destined to be artists or perhaps that we were not. We knew we were good in music or perhaps that we weren’t. We were labeled early and the self-images that those labels created would be ours all our lives. We were expected to nourish those areas in which we were supposedly good at while surrendering the parts of us presumably of lower quality. American children have the luxury of trying new things, re-evaluating and redefining themselves all their lives--a luxury most Asian child would give much for.

There is another attribute common to American children, learned somewhere in those childhoods. Resilience. They are willing to try again, try it differently, do it over, try something else until it works. In more rigid societies where we were so efficiently taught the rules and fed the facts, when the rules changed we waited until someone told us the new ones. It never occurred to us we could break or bend a rule and perhaps even make our own. Where the Indian student who fails college and the Japanese businessman who faces bankruptcy are broken, even suicidal, the American dusts himself off, determined to succeed in this venture or start a new one. This is the training that has made America the economic, military and technological leader of the world.

The social scientists and political analysts look at the statistics and bemoan the fate of America in the hands of these children so lacking in their fund of facts. I look at my children and am glad of the skills they are acquiring. Glad they have the education they are getting rather than the one I had. It will make them stronger. It will serve them longer. We will survive and even flourish in the care of minds skilled in looking at old problems in new ways and applying old skills to problems never before faced. So, here’s to American education and here’s to the people that it makes.