Seize the Moment (34 page)

We can readily summon the will and resources to make practical idealism the hallmark of our role in the world. We should not set out to try to remake the world in our image, but neither should we retreat from our global responsibilities. We should set goals within the limits of our resources while working to the limits of our power. We should remain dedicated to the ideals of freedom and justice that have served as the beacons of our foreign policy, but be realistic and practical about what it takes to move the world in their direction.

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Does the United States have the means to play this role? The military forces, foreign aid programs, and other instruments needed to play a great-power role are expensive. But with a GNP over $5 trillion, we have the resources to meet the challenge. As Herbert Stein has written, “America is a very rich country. We are not rich enough to do everything, but we are rich enough to do everything important.”

We can afford the military forces necessary to ensure our security and defend our interests. But we must radically alter our force structure. The potential challenges of the next two
decades are vastly different from those we confronted in the past. During the cold war, military planners spoke of building forces capable of simultaneously fighting one and a half wars—a major war in Europe and a minor war in a secondary theater. With the Soviet Union's disintegration as a world power, those days are gone. To prepare for the wars of the future, we must overhaul the military forces we used to deter those of the past.

We must recognize that we live in a dangerous world where the former Soviet Union still has thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on the United States and where aggressive nations in the developing world will soon have nuclear programs and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Arms control has failed to neutralize either of these potential threats. Even if the START agreement and the additional Bush and Gorbachev weapons reductions are implemented, the former Soviet Union will have a more potent first-strike capability than it did when I signed the SALT I treaty in 1972. In addition, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty not only failed to restrain Iraq's acquisition of nuclear technologies but the mandated inspections even helped provide cover for its covert nuclear program. The United States must commit itself to deploying by the end of the decade a limited space- and ground-based defense against ballistic missiles through the SDI. With nuclear weapons and their delivery systems proliferating, we cannot count on the chimera of arms control alone. We need defenses.

On the conventional level, we should put a premium on the flexibility of our forces. When the clear and present danger was Moscow's armies in Europe, we needed to build heavy forces dedicated solely to NATO's defense. In today's world, we need lighter forces and a smaller but more flexible force posture capable of responding to unforeseeable contingencies
in other parts of the world. We must retain active forces adequate to respond to crises like the invasion of Kuwait and well-trained and-equipped reserves capable of reinforcing our allies in Europe and Japan in a major crisis. We must sharpen our technological edge. As the Gulf War demonstrated, this saves lives. But while we should vigorously research new technologies and develop new systems, we should not make the mistake we have too often made in the past of ordering huge numbers of new weapons that become obsolete before the final units roll off the assembly line.

Economically, we should not panic but must not become complacent. Our industrial productivity and technological innovation still lead the world. Our GNP leads that of our nearest rival by a factor of two. Our economy attracts more foreign investment than any other major industrial power. Although our advantage is narrowing, our per capita productivity is still higher than that of Japan, our closest competitor. But to stay ahead we must move ahead. To ensure we have the economic means needed to lead the world politically, we must seize the moment to renew and extend our commitment to the values of competition, education, and investment.

Instead of complaining about international competition, we should welcome it. Finland's Paavo Nurmi, the champion Olympic long-distance runner in 1924, had no competition. He had to run with a watch strapped to his wrist so that he could see whether he was running in championship form. He never broke four minutes in the mile. Had Nurmi faced strong competition, he would probably have broken the four-minute barrier thirty years before Britain's Roger Bannister did in 1954. Rather than hunkering down in the foxhole of protectionism or behind the wall of restrictive immigration, we should relish the opportunity to achieve excellence by competing with others. As St. Thomas Aquinas
observed seven centuries ago, “If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.”

America needs a National Economic Council with a status equal to the National Security Council. In our embassies abroad and our bureaucracies at home, economic issues must receive the same priority attention as political and military issues. Today they seldom get it. In Japan, government is an ally—and some say even an instrument—of business. Too often in America, government is an opponent of business. This does not mean that we should adopt a national industrial policy under which unqualified bureaucrats would dictate business decisions. Nor does it mean we should subsidize American industry to even the score with Japan or other industrialized powers. But it does mean that we must take steps to ensure that we have a coherent strategy to prevail in the global economic competition and that U.S. multinational corporations are enabled to compete on a fair and equal basis with their foreign rivals.

The United States will lose its economic and technological edge if we fail to do a better job of educating young Americans for the tasks they must perform as we move from an industrial to a high-tech economy. Over 25 percent of Americans do not graduate from high school, and many who do graduate lack the basic skills needed in a modern society. In the crucial disciplines of math and science, our teenagers trail those of virtually every other industrialized country. While some of our public schools perform well, many are less effective than schools in many countries of the underdeveloped world. Most school standards have become so lax that students no longer feel a need to work hard, with two-thirds of today's high school seniors spending an hour or less on homework, reading ten or fewer pages of text, and watching over three hours of mind-numbing television each day.

America is on a downward spiral toward scientific and technological illiteracy not because Americans have lost their aptitude for science but because the kind of discipline it requires has gone out of style. We are raising a new generation, both in inner-city slums and in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, that might be characterized as the “MTV generation.” The appalling ignorance of so many members of this generation is due not to their being less intelligent but because their intelligence is not used. They inhabit a world of hard-rock rhythms pounded at earsplitting volume, MTV images that flash across the screen in barely the time it takes the eye to follow, and sensual stimuli that appear in rapid succession. There is no room for ideas beyond the most banal. There is even less room for the information on which any sensible ideas have to be based. The once-ubiquitous bumper-sticker slogan has given way to the T-shirt slogan, but the content level has not improved.

To arrest this decline, we must move in six areas. We must reform the profession of teaching. At Whittier College in the 1930s, my classmates who were going into teaching almost universally complained about the boring, useless courses in education theory they were required to take. Teachers today share that frustration. School systems should place less emphasis on education theory and more on a teacher's knowledge of his substantive discipline. Teachers are taught how to teach but not enough about the subjects they are teaching—and a teacher who does not know his subject can neither teach it effectively nor convey enthusiasm for learning it.

We must raise the standards in schools. Students will deliver only as much as we demand of them. The erosion of standards—typified by policies of grade inflation and automatic advancement—has undermined the schools. Students will develop intellectual strength only by pedaling uphill. Unfortunately,
in many school systems they can coast right through, with only students who seek admission into elite universities feeling any necessity to apply themselves fully.

We should focus more actively on motivation. Children are born with a vivid, innate curiosity—every child asks “Why?” until his parents' ears grow numb—but along the way too many fail to connect that curiosity to the wonders of science, the challenges of math, the insights of history, or the rich rewards of language. Instead of being turned on by the process of learning, they are turned off by it. The only classroom learning they absorb is what they are force-fed, and the force-feeding only turns them off further. Both inside the classroom and outside it, we need to do far more to catch their imaginations and to lead them—especially in those early formative years when attitudes are being so crucially and often permanently shaped—to want to learn. This means exciting them not just about the process of learning but about what there is to learn. They have to be wakened to the inherent fascination of history, science, and the other disciplines. Once they want to learn, they will learn.

We must break the monopoly of the education establishment over public schools and introduce competitive market forces into the system to improve its performance. I support public schools. I attended them until I entered college, and Mrs. Nixon was a teacher in an excellent public high school. But today the difference between the performance of public and private schools in America is shocking. Public high school seniors who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test scored significantly lower than the private school seniors who did so. Many public schools are top-heavy, spending excessively on bloated administrative bureaucracies concerned more about maintaining their monopoly on public funds than about improving their performance. As
The Economist
reported,
“New York's public-sector schools employ ten times as many administrators per pupil as private schools do.” Private schools ultimately must satisfy their customers—parents and students—by providing effective educational services. In this competitive environment, they must continuously strive to upgrade their programs or risk going out of business.

To improve the public schools, we should subject them to the same competitive pressures that have made our private schools the envy of the world. The money each state spends on education should be pooled and then disbursed to parents of students in equal individual vouchers that can be spent at any school, public or private. This so-called “choice” program has already transformed some school systems. Since 1973, in New York City's East Harlem district, it has boosted the graduation rate from under 50 percent to over 90 percent. When parents are given the power to choose, they become more involved in their schools and their children's education. When students bear responsibility for their own future, they apply themselves more and develop greater self-discipline. Choice will create market pressures that will break the stranglehold of the education bureaucracy on the system and will force the public schools to reorganize and measure up to the competition of private schools. If we do not move decisively, the battle for education reform will be lost in the school boardroom before it ever gets to the classroom.

We must dispel the patronizing and destructive myth that all young people need to go to college and develop alternate career tracks based more on modern-day apprenticeship than on classroom learning. Today, too many students unsuited to college and uninterested in it waste four years that could have been better spent gaining practical workplace experience.
To accommodate the aptitudes of the unsuited, many colleges have loosened their standards. This exacerbates “degree inflation,” which forces stronger students to spend more years “credentialing” themselves with graduate diplomas. Meanwhile, weaker students find that the first task an employer gives them is to enroll in a training program that will actually provide them with basic skills. Enabling all students to attend college might sound appealing in the abstract, especially to intellectuals, but for many young people hands-on training in workplace skills would be more appealing, more useful, and more appropriate. And we should recognize that a good carpenter is a lot more useful to society than a bad lawyer.

We must demand more of our universities. In recent decades, a silent conspiracy has developed between professors uninterested in teaching and students too lazy to study. Faculty, particularly at our best universities, often put first priority on their own research. Tenure and advancement are awarded on the basis of how many papers and books they publish rather than on what teachers do for their students. To reduce the burden of teaching, professors relax standards, often giving exams that demand little mastery of the material. Students, to a great extent, happily play along. The result is the paradox of declining competence of graduates amidst widespread grade inflation comparable to the currency inflation of Germany's Weimar Republic.

Members of the educational establishment reflexively insist that whatever the problem, the answer is more money. But the United States already outspends all other major industrial democracies on education per student, even while their schools outperform ours. The answer is not more spending but better-targeted spending. Countless studies have linked student achievement not to higher budgets but
to such essentials as student motivation, active family involvement, and well-organized and disciplined schools. America does not need to make a greater financial investment in its educational system but rather to demand a greater return on its current investment. The 180-day school year is a ridiculous carryover from the time when children were needed to harvest crops in the summer months. Germany has a 195-day school year. Japan has a 225-day school year. Lengthening the school year will give our students more opportunity to learn and make more efficient use of our school facilities.