If I was as smart as Albert Einstein, I don't think I'd be making too many pronouncements about the relative growths of the American and Chinese economies. I certainly wouldn't (and don't) assume that China's economic growth is per se dangerous to us, or detrimental to our own economic growth. On the latter point, I'd probably say the opposite. But then again, if I was as smart as Albert Einstein, I probably wouldn't be wasting my time on a political blog. And I probably wouldn't be devoting my life to whittling geopolitical concepts down below the point of usefulness on the op-ed page of the New York Times:
"If Einstein were alive today and learned science the boring way it is taught in so many U.S. schools, wouldn’t he have ended up at a Wall Street hedge fund rather than developing theories of relativity for a Nobel Prize?" asks Thomas Friedman. Well my answer is "That's a weird question! I don't know!" But, as Einstein taught himself math and science as a boy and then failed his entrance exam to a university where they taught science "the boring way", and then managed to make it through a boring science program anyhow only to work on science brilliantly as a lowly patent clerk, presumably Einstein really wanted to be a scientist. And so, today, would probably also have been a scientist.
It gets weirder.
In the meantime, we should heed another of Mr. Isaacson’s insights about Einstein: he found sheer beauty and creative joy in science and equations. If only we could convey that in the way we teach science and math, maybe we could nurture another Einstein — male or female — and not have to worry that so many engineers and scientists in our graduate schools are from China that the classes could be taught in Chinese.
I agree that the way we teach science in secondary schools in America is bad. But that's probably because the way we teach everything in secondary schools in America is bad. I suppose if more American high-school graduates wanted to be engineers, we could enlarge our engineering schools or restrict student visas or something. The net effect on the American economy in that case would no doubt be positive. But the net effect on the Chinese economy would also likely be positive. The same would be true, of course, if China expanded their own university system.
But leave aside for now the question of why, if the way we teach science and math is so bad, we attract all of these worrisome Chinese people to our universities. And forget as well the bigger question of why they should worry us in the first place. I have a sillier gripe. I don't understand at all why the success of an occasional extraordinary genius should be seen as a reflection of any education system. Einstein was a fluke. A self-nurtured one at that. He developed the theories of special relativity and the quantum theory of light (photoelectric effect) in Switzerland, alone. Like a rebel. He developed his much more extraordinary theory of general relativity (for the most part) in Germany many years later. And though he did that research while working at a conventional technical university it was also done during the days of the German Empire, World War I, and the Weimar Republic, a place and time where you might imagine geniuses didn't flourish. But you'd be wrong. Moreover, that innovation, while perhaps the greatest scientific achievement of all time, had likely zero impact on the economy of any country.
Obviously these two issues--having a strong educational/economic system and having a handful of extraordinary geniuses around--have generally very little to do with each other. Having "an Einstein" around would tell us nothing about the effectiveness of our educational-economic matrix. Edward Witten--perhaps the greatest physicist alive, a man with an Einstein-like intellect--does fascinating, obscure work that has no visible impact on the economy. And yet he was educated at American schools that, for all their fame and prestige, teach science very conventionally.
Friedman goes on:
A society that restricts imagination is unlikely to produce many Einsteins — no matter how many educated people it has. But a society that does not stimulate imagination when it comes to science and math won’t either — no matter how much freedom it has.
I'd add a third iteration to that theme, and then expand it a little: No society is ever likely to produce many Einsteins.
Additionally, the few Einsteins it does produce are likely not to do anything to radically advance the economy. And at the same time, all societies should strive to have the best lower- and higher-education systems that they can possibly have, and to not worry when people from other societies benefit from those successes.
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