【11.04 外交政策】反思中美教育
【中文标题】反思中美教育【原文标题】Think Again: Education
【登载媒体】外交政策
【原文作者】BEN WILDAVSKY
【原文链接】http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/22/think_again_education?page=0,0
美国人别担心，中国的数学天才和印度的工程师并没有抢走我们孩子的美好未来。
“美国孩子已经落后了。”
并非如此。那些寻找美国在21世纪初开始衰退迹象的人，似乎只把目光放在最近一次发布的国家教育测试结果上。在最受关注的国际学生评测项目（PISA）中，美国高中学生的数学成绩在65个国家中排名31位；自然科学成绩排名第23；阅读成绩排名第17。而来自中国上海的学生在所有三类成绩中全部排名第一——这还是他们第一次参加这样的评测。
测试结果在12月份发布之后，教育部长Arne Duncan在接受华盛顿邮报的采访时说：“对我来说，这是一记警钟。我们一直在满足于美国人只取得中等成绩的现状吗？这是我们的理想吗？我们的目标应当是以绝对优势领导世界教育。”就像奥巴马总统在国家联盟中的致辞中所说，美国在面临一个“卫星时刻”。（译者注：“Sputnik(伴侣一号)”是前苏联于1957年10月发射的世界上第一颗人造卫星，在美苏冷站中打赢了重要一仗，给美国带来极大的冲击。美国深觉这个奇耻大辱，成了美国教育、科学及技术创新的导火索。在首都华盛顿国家航天博物馆正门大厅陈列着的Sputnik的复制模型可以说是给后世国民的警示。）
实际上，自从伴侣一号卫星上天之后，美国的教育体系就一直在面临着卫星时刻。1957年苏联的卫星发射震惊了世界，6个月之后，生活杂志的封面文章用“教育危机”警告美国人。文章内容图文并茂，描述了一个16岁的芝加哥男孩耐着性子上完可有可无的课程，跟他的女友约会，还参加游泳队的练习。而他在莫斯科的同龄人——一位有志气的物理学家——每周有六天时间在从事高深的化学和物理试验，还研究英文和俄文文学作品。教训很明显：教育是国际间竞争的核心，失败者会失去真正的优势。对美国孩子已经落后的恐惧心理一直持续着，即使竞争对手已经从莫斯科火箭学家变为上海的后备工程师。
美国这些15岁的孩子们的表现当然并不值得夸耀，但是除非你愿意接受这样的假设——学术成绩是国家间的“零和”竞争，也就是说其它国家的学术成就必然会导致美国的学术损失，否则不需要为此惊慌失措。尽管美国人有竞争的天性，但美国不需要仅仅根据国际排名中的位置来如此刻薄地看待自己。只要美国学龄儿童的数量没有减少，那么国际测试结果排名的重要性就远不及美国为筹备人力资本而改善教与学的重要性。
以此来衡量，美国的教育系统虽然还需要各方面重大的改革，但是似乎并非远远落后于其它国家。2006年举行的上一次国际评测之后，美国学生在自然科学和数学方面的表现实际上是有所提高的。自然科学成绩已经上升到发达国家的平均水平，数学成绩也仅比平均水平略低。阅读能力在发达国家中位于中等水平，与2003年的一次类似测试成绩相比变化不大。期待更大幅度的进步似乎是不现实的，就像国家教育统计中心副主任Stuart Kerachsky所说：“教育领域中的指针不会移动得太快。”
“美国的学校中曾经有世界上最聪明的孩子。”
不，没有。即使在美国的政治经济统治世界的时代，美国学生也远远未达到世界顶级水平。1958年，议会为了应对苏联伴侣一号卫星的发射，通过了国防教育法案，资助大学生学习数学、自然科学和外语，并且着力提高美国学校在这些学科方面的教学水平。但是1967年举行的第一次国际数学测验结果公布之后，我们发现这些努力似乎并未起到什么效果。在12个参赛国家中，日本名列第一，美国几乎垫底。
到70年代初，美国学生在19次工业化国家的学术测验中有7次排名最后，没有一次进入前两名的行列。十年后，全国优秀教育委员会在1983年发表了一份里程碑式的报告“国家处于危机”，其中引用了这些考试的成绩和其它学术失败现象，来佐证其断言：“倘若有敌对外国势力试图将今天存在着的平庸的教育现状强加在美国身上，我们会把这视为宣战。”
每一轮的惊慌和自责都伴随着一批向美国学术窘况兜售解决方案的改革家。例如，Arthur S. Trace Jr在1961年出版的《伊万知道而强尼不知道的事》认为，美国学生之所以落后于苏联学生，是因为他们在词汇和发音方面下的功夫不够。今天同样弥漫着焦虑的情绪，社会各界的教育学究们列举美国教育制度在全球可悲的排名，来支持他们所提倡的观点。国家数学教师委员会的主席J. Michael Shaughnessy认为，最近一次PISA测试“强调了把推理和决策意识融合到数学教学中的重要性”。美国教师联合会主任Randi Weingarten说，这样的成绩“告诉我们……如果不像那些取得好成绩的国家一样明智地投资教师、尊重教师、让他们参与决策，学生们就会付出代价。”
如果美国人假象中的那种全球地位退步情绪可以促使教育学家想出一些创造性的主意，这当然是好事。但是不要指望这些人把美国带回到教育的黄金时代——美国根本没有所谓的黄金时代。
“中国学生在抢美国人的饭碗。”
不完全正确。PISA评测结果的大字标题是夺得第一名的上海学生，美国评论界人士和政策制定者很难拒绝“中国人抢美国人饭碗”的传统念头。今日美国的一篇社论说：“上海人的好成绩让人羡慕，但是美国人平淡无奇的表现也并未让人失望。”
中国的教育实力不是吹嘘出来的，虎妈也不是神话。中国学生极为关注学校作业，他们得到了家庭的强力支持。但是单就成绩来说，并不能成为让美国人自卑的理由。上海其实是一个特例，不能代表整个中国，因为政府在教育方面的大规模投资让这个城市可以吸引全国各地的天才学生。而美国和其它国家的成绩反映的是，来自各地的同年龄层学生的平均水平。中国广阔的内陆地区要比其沿海城市贫穷许多，教育水平也要低很多。如果以一个国家整体来看，中国的成绩不会有这么高。
那些传统上的领跑者，比如芬兰和韩国——他们的学生成绩经常占据榜首的位置——情况如何呢？这些国家的高等教育成就的确值得称赞，在某些领域，比如慎重挑选高水平的教师，他们为美国提供了非常有价值的经验。但是，这些国家都没有大批移民涌入的现象，尤其是拉丁美洲人，他们的孩子与美国学生一起在公立学校中读书。遗憾的是，美国的种族和社会经济现状与芬兰和韩国完全不同，这是造成教育水平巨大差异的重要原因。美国学校中的非西班牙裔白人和亚洲学生的水平和经常取得好成绩的国家中的学生水平相当，比如加拿大和日本。而拉丁美洲学生和黑人学生——数量为美国学生人数的三分之一以上——水平只相当于土耳其和保加利亚学生的水平。
当然，这些解释并不是在找借口。美国有义务向所有公民提供高质量的教育，缩小美国与世界之间的教育差距在道义上是刻不容缓的。但是大惊小怪的人把美国和其它那些内外部情况和我们完全不同的国家做比较，也是没有意义的。美国人不需要过分担心自己的孩子怎样与赫尔辛基的孩子竞争，而应当关注布朗克斯（译者注：纽约市北区的一个行政区）的学生怎样才能赶上温彻斯特郡的学生。
“美国不再是吸引最优秀人才的乐土。”
错。尽管美国人几十年来一直在担忧小学和中学教育水平，但是我们可以放心的一个事实是，我们的大学教育体系在世界上是首屈一指的。但是在今天，美国大学的领导人们在担心其它国家迅猛的发展势头。在诸多方面中，国际学生的市场占有率是重要的一点，美国一直是这个市场的绝对主导。似乎有一些数字可以证明：据最新统计数据，美国高校对国际学生的占有率从2000年的24％降低到2008年的19％。与此同时，像澳大利亚、加拿大和日本等高校的国际学生占有率均持上升趋势，尽管依然远远落后于美国。
国际流动学生分配比例明显在发生变化，显示出全球高等教育市场的竞争日趋激烈。但是，在美国就读的外国学生数量比十年前多了很多，2008年的学生数量比2000年增加了14.9万人，增加幅度是31％。这是因为有更多的学生选择到海外求学。1975年，全球大约有80万学生在国外读书，这个数字在2000年变成200万人，2008年达到330万人。换句话说，美国分到的蛋糕比例小了一点，但是整个蛋糕变大了很多。
尽管占有率在下降，但是美国依然比紧随其后的英国高出9个百分点。在研究生以上的教育中，美国大学绝对具有强大的吸引力，尤其是那些直接影响国家未来经济竞争力的学科：自然科学、技术、工程和数学。在计算机和工程学专业中，超过十分之六的博士生都来自其它国家。
但我们不能以此来高枕无忧。尽管来自世界各地申请美国研究生学院的学生数量已经从911事件的影响中恢复过来，但是，最近在美国大学中获得自然科学和工程学博士学位的外国学生数量是五年来的最低点。美国学校在面临来自其它国家大学的越来越严峻的竞争形势，而且，美国不友好的签证制度更加鼓励海外学生去其它国家读书。这是美国的损失，我们本来可以通过吸引世界上最优秀的人才来让我们的学校、让我们的经济受益。
“美国大学被赶超了。”
没那么快。毫无疑问，新兴国家蓬勃发展的科研活动已经逐渐侵蚀了北美、欧盟和日本长期占据主导的地位。根据联合国教科文组织2010年的报告，亚洲国家占世界科研经费的比例从2002年的27％上升到2007年的32％，其动力主要来自中国、印度和韩国。传统的科研领头国家在此期间发生了下滑。从2002年到2008年，美国在汤姆森路透科学文献索引——权威的科研出版物统计数据库——中的论文比例从30.9％下降到27.7％，比任何国家下降的趋势都要明显。与此同时，中国在这个数据库中出版物的数量增长了超过一倍，同样还有来自巴西的科研文件数量，这个国家的科研机构在20年前根本无人知晓。
知识产业的地理布局变化当然是值得关注的，但是从国际研究市场上来看，美国只不过是在一块更大的蛋糕上分到的比例下降了一点点。全球科研经费在过去十年中急剧增长，从7900亿美元到1.1兆美元，增长了45％。美国科研经费所占比率虽然下降，但是从定值美元的角度来看，依然保持着健康的增长，从2002年的2770亿美元到2007年的373亿美元。美国科研经费占GDP的百分比保持稳定，而且一直处于全球相当高的标准。美国的科研投资金额高于全亚洲国家的总和。
同样，在美国人看来，美国所占世界科学出版物比例缩水的现状或许不甚令人满意。但是，从2002年到2008年，美国在汤姆森路透科学文献索引中的发表物数量增长超过了三分之一。即使在逐渐淡化的全球领导者的背景下，美国的科研人员在2008年发表的科学文章比6年前增加了46000份。实际上，科研成果并不会被限制在某个国家的边境线以内，知识是公共财产，与国家地理范围关系不大，一个国家科研机构的研究成果可以被世界上任何一个地方的创业者资本化。国家不应当对其科研成果漠不关心，因为这些成果可以引起经济和学术界的连锁反应，但是也不用担心其它国家出现越来越多的尖端发明成果。
“世界即将超越美国。”
或许是的，但是别以为这很快会发生，也别认为这有什么大不了的。全球学术市场毫无疑问比以前更加富有竞争性，中国、韩国和沙特阿拉伯等国家都把建立世界级大学作为首要工作，他们试图让曾经辉煌的学术机构重新散发光芒。他们也的确投入了大笔的金钱：中国投入数十亿美元用于高校扩张和改善核心研究机构设施，沙特国王阿卜杜拉为新建的阿卜杜拉国王科技大学注资100亿美元。
但是美国有的不仅仅是几所精英学校，就像那些表面上的竞争对手们，它有的是一系列具备深厚学术背景的研究机构。2008年兰德公司的报告显示，将近三分之二被引用频率最高的科技文章是来自美国；七成诺贝尔奖得主在美国大学中任教。美国把GDP的2.9％投入高等教育产业，大约是中国、欧盟和日本在2006年总和的两倍。
但是，尽管以美国为中心的精英研究机构不大可能被整体颠覆，但在下一个十年中会逐渐被撼动。尤其是亚洲国家，他们的进步显著，最迟在下一个五十年中，必定会产生一些极为优秀的大学。以中国为例，北京的清华大学和北京大学、上海的复旦大学和上海交通大学，都会在世界舞台上获取真正的知名度。
但是从长远来看，国家在高校排名中的具体位置越来越无关紧要，因为美国人对什么是“我们”、什么是“他们”的理解在逐渐发生变化。史无前例的学生和教师流动已经成为全球高等教育的最显著的特点，跨国科研合作在过去二十年中增加了一倍，标志就是署名来自不同国家的科研发表物的共同作者越来越多。像新加坡和沙特阿拉伯这样的国家在大学中建立起学术卓越的文化环境，它们与西方精英研究机构合作，比如杜克大学、麻省理工学院、斯坦福大学和耶鲁大学。
而且，有关一所大学究竟在多大程度上需要依附于一个具体的地址的问题，也在被重新考虑。从得克萨斯A&M大学到巴黎大学的西方高校，在亚洲和中东地区开设了160多所分校，大部分都是在过去十年中发生的，这种得失兼备的做法引起了广泛的关注。纽约大学在近期迈出了更大的一步，它在阿布扎比开设了一所功能齐全的文科学院，这是纽约大学董事长John Sexton“全球网络大学”设想的一部分。就像沃里克大学副教授Nigel Thrift所说，有那么一天，我们或许可以看到两所研究机构合并——甚至大学最终会像跨国公司一样。
在即将到来的教育全球化时代，根本没有必要出现冷战时期的卫星警报、今天的上海慌乱和迫在眉睫的危机感。国际化教育的成功者是那些勇于开拓知识网络，为美国和其它所有国家提供应对21世纪挑战的能力的人——至于这些人是谁，我们不用过于惊慌。
原文：
Relax, America. Chinese math whizzes and Indian engineers aren't stealing your kids' future.
"American Kids Are Falling Behind."
Not really. Anybody seeking signs of American decline in the early 21st century need look no further, it would seem, than the latest international educational testing results. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) -- the most-watched international measure in the field -- found that American high school students ranked 31st out of 65 economic regions in mathematics, 23rd in science, and 17th in reading. Students from the Chinese city of Shanghai, meanwhile, shot to the top of the ranking in all three categories -- and this was the first time they had taken the test.
"For me, it's a massive wake-up call," Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Washington Post when the results were released in December. "Have we ever been satisfied as Americans being average in anything? Is that our aspiration? Our goal should be absolutely to lead the world in education." The findings drove home the sense that the United States faced, as President Barack Obama put it in his State of the Union address, a "Sputnik moment."
In fact, the U.S. education system has been having this sort of Sputnik moment since -- well, Sputnik. Six months after the 1957 Soviet satellite launch that shook the world, a Life magazine cover story warned Americans of a "crisis in education." An accompanying photo essay showed a 16-year-old boy in Chicago sitting through undemanding classes, hanging out with his girlfriend, and attending swim-team practices, while his Moscow counterpart -- an aspiring physicist -- spent six days a week conducting advanced chemistry and physics experiments and studying English and Russian literature. The lesson was clear: Education was an international competition and one in which losing carried real consequences. The fear that American kids are falling behind the competition has persisted even as the competitors have changed, the budding Muscovite rocket scientist replaced with a would-be engineer in Shanghai.
This latest showing of American 15-year-olds certainly isn't anything to brag about. But American students' performance is only cause for outright panic if you buy into the assumption that scholastic achievement is a zero-sum competition between nations, an intellectual arms race in which other countries' gain is necessarily the United States' loss. American competitive instincts notwithstanding, there is no reason for the United States to judge itself so harshly based purely on its position in the global pecking order. So long as American schoolchildren are not moving backward in absolute terms, America's relative place in global testing tables is less important than whether the country is improving teaching and learning enough to build the human capital it needs.
And by this measure, the U.S. education system, while certainly in need of significant progress, doesn't look to be failing so spectacularly. The performance of American students in science and math has actually improved modestly since the last round of this international test in 2006, rising to the developed-country average in science while remaining only slightly below average in math. U.S. reading scores, in the middle of the pack for developed countries, are more or less unchanged since the most recent comparable tests in 2003. It would probably be unrealistic to expect much speedier progress. As Stuart Kerachsky, deputy commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, put it, "The needle doesn't move very far very fast in education."
"The United States Used to Have the World's Smartest Schoolchildren."
No, it didn't. Even at the height of U.S. geopolitical dominance and economic strength, American students were never anywhere near the head of the class. In 1958, Congress responded to the Sputnik launch by passing the National Defense Education Act, which provided financial support for college students to study math, science, and foreign languages, and was accompanied by intense attention to raising standards in those subjects in American schools. But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.
By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
Each new cycle of panic and self-flagellation has brought with it a fresh crop of reformers touting a new solution to U.S. scholastic woes. A 1961 book by Arthur S. Trace Jr. called What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't, for instance, suggested that American students were falling behind their Soviet peers because they weren't learning enough phonics and vocabulary. Today's anxieties are no different, with education wonks from across the policy spectrum enlisting the U.S. education system's sorry global ranking to make the case for their pet ideas. J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, argues that the latest PISA test "underscores the need for integrating reasoning and sense making in our teaching of mathematics." Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, claims that the same results "tell us … that if you don't make smart investments in teachers, respect them, or involve them in decision-making, as the top-performing countries do, students pay a price."
If Americans' ahistorical sense of their global decline prompts educators to come up with innovative new ideas, that's all to the good. But don't expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age -- there wasn't one.
"Chinese Students Are Eating America's Lunch."
Only partly true. The biggest headline from the recent PISA results concerned the first-place performance of students from Shanghai, and the inevitable "the Chinese are eating our lunch" meme was hard for American commentators and policymakers to resist. "While Shanghai's appearance at the top might have been a stunner, America's mediocre showing was no surprise," declared a USA Today editorial.
China's educational prowess is real. Tiger moms are no myth -- Chinese students focus intensely on their schoolwork, with strong family support -- but these particular results don't necessarily provide compelling evidence of U.S. inferiority. Shanghai is a special case and hardly representative of China as a whole; it's a talent magnet that draws from all over China and benefits from extensive government investment in education. Scores for the United States and other countries, by contrast, reflect the performance of a geographic cross-section of teenagers. China -- a vast country whose hinterlands are poorer and less-educated than its coastal cities -- would likely see its numbers drop if it attempted a similar assessment.
What about perennial front-runners like Finland and South Korea, whose students were again top scorers? These countries undoubtedly deserve credit for high educational accomplishment. In some areas -- the importance of carefully selected, high-quality teachers, for example -- they might well provide useful lessons for the United States. But they have nothing like the steady influx of immigrants, mostly Latinos, whose children attend American public schools. And unfortunately, the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic demographics of the United States -- none of which have analogues in Finland or South Korea -- correlate closely with yawning achievement gaps in education. Non-Hispanic white and Asian pupils in the United States do about as well on these international tests as students from high-scoring countries like Canada and Japan, while Latino and black teens -- collectively more than a third of the American students tested -- score only about as well as those from Turkey and Bulgaria, respectively.
To explain is not to excuse, of course. The United States has an obligation to give all its citizens a high-quality education; tackling the U.S. achievement gap should be a moral imperative. But alarmist comparisons with other countries whose challenges are quite different from those of the United States don't help. Americans should be less worried about how their own kids compare with kids in Helsinki than how students in the Bronx measure up to their peers in Westchester County.
"The U.S. No Longer Attracts the Best and Brightest."
Wrong. While Americans have worried about their elementary and high school performance for decades, they could reliably comfort themselves with the knowledge that at least their college education system was second to none. But today, American university leaders fret that other countries are catching up in, among other things, the market for international students, for whom the United States has long been the world's largest magnet. The numbers seem to bear this out. According to the most recent statistics, the U.S. share of foreign students fell from 24 percent in 2000 to just below 19 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, countries like Australia, Canada, and Japan saw increased market shares from their 2000 levels, though they are still far below the American numbers.
The international distribution of mobile students is clearly changing, reflecting an ever more competitive global higher-education market. But there are many more foreign students in the United States than there were a decade ago -- 149,000 more in 2008 than in 2000, a 31 percent increase. What has happened is that there are simply many more of them overall studying outside their home countries. Some 800,000 students ventured abroad in 1975; that number reached 2 million in 2000 and ballooned to 3.3 million in 2008. In other words, the United States has a smaller piece of the pie, but the pie has gotten much, much larger.
And even with its declining share, the United States still commands 9 percentage points more of the market than its nearest competitor, Britain. For international graduate study, American universities are a particularly powerful draw in fields that may directly affect the future competitiveness of a country's economy: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In disciplines such as computer science and engineering, more than six in 10 doctoral students in American programs come from foreign countries.
But that doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about. Although applications from international students to American graduate schools have recovered from their steep post-9/11 decline, the number of foreigners earning science and engineering doctorates at U.S. universities recently dropped for the first time in five years. American schools face mounting competition from universities in other countries, and the United States' less-than-welcoming visa policies may give students from overseas more incentive to go elsewhere. That's a loss for the United States, given the benefits to both its universities and its economy of attracting the best and brightest from around the world.
"American Universities Are Being Overtaken."
Not so fast. There's no question that the growing research aspirations of emerging countries have eroded the long-standing dominance of North America, the European Union, and Japan. Asia's share of the world's research and development spending grew from 27 to 32 percent from 2002 to 2007, led mostly by China, India, and South Korea, according to a 2010 UNESCO report. The traditional research leaders saw decreases during the same period. From 2002 to 2008, the U.S. proportion of articles in the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index, the authoritative database of research publications, fell further than any other country's, from 30.9 to 27.7 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese publications recorded in the same index more than doubled, as did the volume of scientific papers from Brazil, a country whose research institutions wouldn't have been on anyone's radar 20 years ago.
This shift in the geography of knowledge production is certainly noteworthy, but as with the international study market, the United States simply represents a proportionally smaller piece of a greatly expanded pie. R&D spending worldwide massively surged in the last decade, from $790 billion to $1.1 trillion, up 45 percent. And the declining U.S. share of global research spending still represented a healthy increase in constant dollars, from $277 billion in 2002 to $373 billion in 2007. U.S. research spending as a percentage of GDP over the same period was consistent and very high by global standards. The country's R&D investments still totaled more than all Asian countries' combined.
Similarly, a declining U.S. share of the world's scientific publications may sound bad from an American point of view. But the total number of publications listed in the Thomson Reuters index surged by more than a third from 2002 to 2008. Even with a shrinking global lead, U.S. researchers published 46,000 more scientific articles in 2008 than they did six years earlier. And in any case, research discoveries don't remain within the borders of the countries where they occur -- knowledge is a public good, with little regard for national boundaries. Discoveries in one country's research institutions can be capitalized on by innovators elsewhere. Countries shouldn't be indifferent to the rise in their share of the research -- big breakthroughs can have positive economic and academic spillover effects -- but they also shouldn't fear the increase of cutting-edge discoveries elsewhere.
"The World Will Catch Up."
Maybe, but don't count on it anytime soon. And don't count on it mattering. The global academic marketplace is without doubt growing more competitive than ever. Countries from China and South Korea to Saudi Arabia have made an urgent priority of creating world-class universities or restoring the lost luster of once great institutions. And they're putting serious money into it: China is spending billions on expanding enrollment and improving its elite research institutions, while Saudi King Abdullah has funneled $10 billion into the brand-new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
But the United States doesn't have just a few elite schools, like most of its ostensible competitors; it has a deep bench of outstanding institutions. A 2008 Rand Corp. report found that nearly two-thirds of the most highly cited articles in science and technology come from the United States, and seven in 10 Nobel Prize winners are employed by American universities. And the United States spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent by China, the European Union, and Japan in 2006.
But while the old U.S.-centric order of elite institutions is unlikely to be wholly overturned, it will gradually be shaken up in the coming decades. Asian countries in particular are making significant progress and may well produce some great universities within the next half-century, if not sooner. In China, for instance, institutions such as Tsinghua and Peking universities in Beijing and Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities in Shanghai could achieve real prominence on the world stage.
But over the long term, exactly where countries sit in the university hierarchy will be less and less relevant, as Americans' understanding of who is "us" and who is "them" gradually changes. Already, a historically unprecedented level of student and faculty mobility has become a defining characteristic of global higher education. Cross-border scientific collaboration, as measured by the volume of publications by co-authors from different countries, has more than doubled in two decades. Countries like Singapore and Saudi Arabia are jump-starting a culture of academic excellence at their universities by forging partnerships with elite Western institutions such as Duke, MIT, Stanford, and Yale.
The notion of just how much a university really has to be connected to a particular location is being rethought, too. Western universities, from Texas A&M to the Sorbonne, have garnered much attention by creating, admittedly with mixed results, some 160 branch campuses in Asia and the Middle East, many launched in the last decade. New York University recently went one step further by opening a full-fledged liberal arts campus in Abu Dhabi, part of what NYU President John Sexton envisions as a "global network university." One day, as University of Warwick Vice Chancellor Nigel Thrift suggests, we may see outright mergers between institutions -- and perhaps ultimately the university equivalent of multinational corporations.
In this coming era of globalized education, there is little place for the Sputnik alarms of the Cold War, the Shanghai panic of today, and the inevitable sequels lurking on the horizon. The international education race worth winning is the one to develop the intellectual capacity the United States and everyone else needs to meet the formidable challenges of the 21st century -- and who gets there first won't matter as much as we once feared. 这篇文章如果出现在中国
作者应该被称5毛
一大群阴茎高声齐呼 这篇文章如果出现在中国
作者应该被称为“共党走狗”
一大群中国人高呼自由民主人权----尽管中国人并不懂自由民主人权是什么。 这是最好的打脸帖子。以后遇上抱怨中国教育的孩子，就贴出这个 楼主辛苦了。 主要是因为中国的竞争太激烈了，老美躺床上都能上大学，素质当然低了 好文章要顶！ 中国一样需要反思
中国的高等教育在我看来确实失败 中国的孩子有点丑 连长不是个女娃子家家么？ 连长不是个女娃子家家么？ “政府在教育方面的大规模投资让这个城市可以吸引全国各地的天才学生”
就冲这句话，就说明这个老外对中国国情真的不了解。 “政府在教育方面的大规模投资让这个城市可以吸引全国各地的天才学生”
就冲这句话，就说明这个老外对中国 ...
河北申宏涛 发表于 2011-4-16 15:37 http://bbs.m4.cn/images/common/back.gif
没错，如果找个内地省份的学校学生参赛，比如湖南，美国人会输的更惨。 美国强是因为吸收了大量国际人才，特别是战后德国人才，并不是因为美国人聪明，是因为去美国的人聪明！ 硕鼠硕鼠，无食我黍，逝将去汝，适彼乐土--美利坚
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