As I read this piece, I was wondering what kind of background it would take to write it. This professor, Alfred McCoy, sounds like he is eminently qualified:
He is also the convener of the “Empires in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings at Madison, Sydney, and Manila were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State and the findings from their latest conference will appear next year as “Endless Empire: Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Ascent, and the Decline of U.S. Global Power.” I would like to comment based on what I see in my field, which is education. I teach at a university. In addition, I have also taken technical classes toward web certifications over the past decade.
What I see first hand as a university professor is that I have one Chinese student in a class of 24 Americans. This student is here for the year in some sort of exchange program that my university has worked out with China. Even though the class is advertising, I often lace my discussions with my class with references to Shakespeare or the Renaissance. Who is the only student in the class to understand and respond to these references? You guessed it: the Chinese student.
If this student is any example, they're better educated about Western culture than we are.
Second, when I was doing my technical certification class work, many of my fellow students were from India. What set them apart from the rest of we Americans in the classes was their tenacity in understanding, for example, how servers worked. If they didn't understand it, they kept asking for explanations until they got one that worked. They would stay after class and work until they were satisfied that they understood.
In fact in one situation, it took them two classes to understand it. When they still didn't understand it to their own satisfaction, they complained and the instructor was replaced.
The Americans had a different pattern:
--one said she would use an easier software
--another said he didn't care about the technical aspect; he was going into sales, anyway
--there are more stories, but to sum it up, not one American cared enough to stick round and learn. And thus this project (although for the sciences), from the article:
Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation. Cher