Education, the Wings of the Dream
No matter how sacred the cause, fundraising dinners usually make for long evenings. One recent benefit dinner for a familiar terrible disease dragged on so long, I worried that half the audience would die too, of boredom. But a recent gala Korean American fund-raising event revived my faith in miracles. It was special, and I think I know why.
The cause was the Los Angeles-based Korean Youth and Community Center. The occasion Thursday night and the audience of accomplished Korean Americans, political figures, a few (too few) corporate leaders and some students served as a vivid and thrilling reminder of America’s future. Over the next half century, more than half the growth in U.S. population will come from young Asians and Latinos. By the year 2040, California will be more than 60% Latino and Asian. By then we should know whether America can make a success of this demographic challenge.
I would like our chances better if we in the West would listen to our friends in the Far East. Many of our Pacific Rim neighbors, whether in Seoul, Singapore, Sydney or an L.A. hotel banquet hall, understand the vital necessity of educating young people. Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of the Australian (Sydney), put it well recently: “Nothing is more important or productive than education. Human capital is the most important capital you can possibly attract. The bottom line is that wealth, security and culture are created by smart, educated people. And we need more of them.”
As does America, which will not retain its world leadership if it fails to meet the test of educating every child, whether that child is a Korean American, a Latina or a daughter of a Daughter of the American Revolution. “I like American schools,” a South Korean diplomat who has two Korean-born kids in public school here told me. “Unlike in Asia, they leave it to the individual to succeed. They don’t drum discipline into everyone and make everyone into robots.” That was nice--our public schools could use a PR break. But more and more of them are struggling. Standards have been lowered and discipline has been eviscerated by woolly-headed notions of egalitarianism and youth rights. Worse yet, too many classrooms are overcrowded and sometimes falling half apart. Teachers are overwhelmed. Rather than allowing teachers to be shot at through classroom windows, society should be rewarding them with raises, midcareer retraining and respect.
All children, immigrant or not, depend on adults for their start in life. Relatively few kids have parents who can afford to send them to Harvard-Westlake or Polytechnic School or USC or Stanford. Quality public education is in everyone’s interest: We will shrivel economically if our work force is not at least as educated as that of our competitors. In a dynamically evolving world marketplace, the most competitive nations will survive by marketing their brains (services of all kinds) rather than their brawn (heavy manufacturing and raw materials.) In a penetrating essay in the upcoming July issue of Foreign Affairs, Professor Richard Rosecrance of UCLA suggests the perilous parameters of the risk befalling any modern nation that stints in its commitment to the education and training of its work force.
What would be horrible is if American public education becomes a divisive generational issue. Older voters often lean toward rejecting public expenditures for education, such as next Tuesday’s extremely significant $3-billion Proposition 203 educational bond issue on California’s ballot. Rejection not only would be morally wrong but also politically self-destructive. Look at it this way: No one can predict what percentage of the new Asian/Latino majority will grow up to vote, but if a lot of young Americans can’t get jobs or make a living because they don’t have the education or training to get hired, there could be political hell to pay. They might look for someone to blame, such as older voters who turned down education. When they get their chance, this new nonwhite majority might well say: Why should we care about the comforts of the older generation? They opposed education and training for us when we needed it most. And even if the new generation isn’t angry and vindictive, without the education to get the well-paying jobs in this increasingly competitive world economy, they won’t be able to afford to support the older generation even if they want to.
At the Korean Youth and Community Center dinner, KYCC board president Paula Daniels, an attorney, underscored the matter with this nice line: “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings.” I like that, but I’d go further: If we don’t help our children to fly educationally, America will crash and burn. The stakes are no less than this: If a lot of younger, out of work, undereducated Americans aren’t able to make ends meet in a U.S. economy that’s being weighed down by an undereducated, noncompetitive work force, you can kiss the American dream goodbye.
Tom Plate’s column runs Tuesdays. His e-mail address is <tplate@ucla.edu>.
