I hope he realized the significance of what he was saying.

On Thursday afternoon this week I joined 14 of our senior students and several teachers to attend a lecture by world famous author, Thomas Friedman.  Organized by the World Affairs Council of Houston (of which Awty is a corporate member) and held at the Hilton Americas Hotel in downtown Houston, I was eagerly anticipating a lecture on politics and economics based on Friedman’s recently released book, “That Used To Be Us”.  What I heard instead was a persuasive case for the supreme

importance of an authentically international education.  Needless to say, I was not disappointed :-)

Thomas Friedman began his lecture by recalling that we often started many of his days in a conversation with others talking about the world - recent events, politics, economics, conflict, and so on - but the conversation that began with the world almost invariably ending up focussing on America.

He noted that after World War II, it was the US that had picked up the pieces of a fractured world (he didn’t mention the parallel role of the Soviet Union at the time), and then posed the question - if the US goes into decline, who will pick up the pieces in the future?  China?  India?  Russia?  Friedman’s position was unashamedly nationalistic; he would prefer it to be the US.

He then recalled an incident when Orson Wells went to a fortune teller to enquire about his future.  “You don’t have a future” replied the fortune teller, “it’s all used up”.  Friedman’s hypothesis is that if the US is to avoid that scenario, then it has a hard choice: it must either commit to a hard decade immediately or an even worse century to follow.  In that context, he described himself as a ‘frustrated optimist’.

The main part of Friedman’s lecture began as he read aloud the first couple of pages from “That Used To Be Us” in which he compared the construction of the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center in China with the repair of the escalators at a subway

station near his home in Maryland.  The convention center in Tianjin had a floor area of 230,000 square meters, had four long escalators at each corner, and was built in 32 weeks.  The escalators in the subway near his home had 21 steps each and had been closed for 24 weeks for repairs.

It was presumably this type of contrast that led President Barack Obama to state these words on November 3, 2010: “It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us.  And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth - that used to be us”.  According to Friedman, a key reason for this situation is the nature of the national conversation - Americans don’t begin each day asking themselves what kind of world they want to live in.

My point is this - at Awty, we do!

Friedman identified three huge challenges: (1) dealing with the combined impact of globalization and information technology; (2) dealing with deficit; and (3) addressing the tension between supplying our energy needs without endangering the planet through climate change.  He spent the rest of his lecture focussing on the first challenge.

In the six years since Friedman wrote “The World is Flat”, Facebook, Twitter and Skype have all emerged to ‘hyperconnect’ the world.  Internet apps now influence revolutions in Syria, debt in Greece, and there is now even mobile phone access from the summit of Mount Everest for climbers to send photos back home using their phone cameras.  Friedman remarked that education has now become also globalized, using as an example the fact that 10% of all applications for Grinnell College in Iowa now come

from China, adding that a majority of them have perfect scores of 800 on their SATs.  Global competition has raised the bar world-wide, in the same way (he suggests) that the end of the Cold War unleashed the energy and creativity of millions of Eastern Europeans into the global economy.

Friedman suggests that these changes are having a profound impact on the global economy.  He contends that it has led to a skills bias polarization in the global workforce, widening the income gap on an international scale.  At one end, routine jobs that can be performed by machines are being eliminated, while at the top end, the demand for people to perform non-routine jobs that require creativity, problem-solving and reasoning is expanding rapidly.  Friedman mentioned research among employers that indicated a strong desire to employ people who are capable of reinventing their jobs as they perform them - people who can devise new, innovative and better ways of performing their tasks.

If true, this all shouts for the need of an education in schools that develops highly transferable skills of creativity, critical thinking and reasoning, not the sponge-like absorption of facts that Friedman suggests characterizes the teaching in many US schools.  He labels this situation “Average is Over”, and devotes an entire chapter to it in his book “That Used To Be Us”, emphasizing the need for schools to encourage ingenuity, creativity, inspiration and aiming for “the extra”.

I would love to share everything that Friedman said during his lecture; I took pages of notes but blog etiquette demands brevity.  Towards the end of his address, he suggested that America reached its pre-eminent position in the world during the

20th century by following a five point formula that seems to have been forgotten and which needs to be reinvigorated: (1) having a population of highly educated people; (2) building the world’s best infrastructure; (3) following an immigration policy that attracted highly creative people; (4) setting in place good rules for capital formation; and (5) allocating high levels of government funding for research in science and technology.

In bringing his speech to a conclusion, I was delighted to hear Thomas Friedman highlight the singular need to invest in the type of education that brings about transformative change - developing creativity, building international understanding, encouraging innovation and insisting on excellence.  He suggested that we should recruit teachers from countries with good track records of high educational achievement so they can help fast-track the improvement in the learning culture that is needed in American schools.  He suggested improving the mechanisms to separate weak teachers, help them improve, and enable them to learn from exemplar mentors.  He highlighted the need to esteem the value and significance of our teachers as the key shapers of the country’s future.  He emphasized the importance of developing school cultures where students know they are coming each day to learn, not just to do tests.  And he highlighted the need for schools to work in partnership with their parents and neighbors to build a coherent approach to implementing best practice in schools.

I seriously thought he was describing Awty!