Featured: Dr. Suarez Visits China
November 2004
In November 2004, I traveled to Tianjin, China, to lecture to a group of Chinese executives enrolled in a University of Maryland MBA program. When I mentioned to friends and colleagues that I was lecturing in China, almost without exception they asked me if I spoke Chinese or Mandarin. Would there be interpreters? Would they be wearing headsets while I lectured? How much would probably be lost in translation? Some simply assumed that the language barrier would make both the attendees and myself miserable. “For how long will you lecture?” they asked. “Two days.” A quiet groan. It will seem like forever, they cautioned, but they wished me luck.
I was one of a number of faculty members traveling to China as part of a corporate executive program being offered for the first time to a company that manufactures a hardware product that is and will continue to be in enormous demand throughout China. This company has no serious competition. The executives just want to be better at what they do and believe that education is the way to accomplish that.
There were no briefings on the composition of the group, and only sketchy descriptions of their interests, backgrounds, and level of English comprehension. I spent most of the 14-hour plane trip imagining how cultural considerations—not the least of which was language—could impact my lecture. I was going to be talking about Western management concepts, such as participatory management, the breaking down of organizational barriers, removing fear from the workplace, democracy in the workplace, ideas that by themselves might come across as critical of China’s hierarchical system. I had just left the White House after an 11-year tour where I served two Presidents as Director for Presidential Quality Management. Would my White House experience be a liability? If interpreters were to be used, would they understand idiomatic English? Would they know, for example, what we mean in business when we talk about “fighting fires”? I was on foreign ground in more ways than one.
I arrived in the city of Tianjin, one of the biggest industrial and port cities in China, which has a population in excess of ten million. Tianjin is one of China’s cultural jewels, its architecture a blending of the ancient and modern.
We arrived at nine that night and went immediately to our rooms to crash. The next day, the entire class and the University of Maryland staff were invited to a reception dinner at the oldest hotel in Tianjin, a magnificent edifice where heads of state and other dignitaries traditionally stay. At the dinner, I was seated at the head table with the rest of the faculty members and the president of the company. Although the CEO took me to each table to meet all of the students, there was little chance for interaction. The CEO then toasted me and the success of my lecture. The pressure was on.
The class began the next day at the company headquarters, in a conference room gleaming with high tech equipment. There were 27 students in the class, men outnumbering women by a small number. Everyone was in business attire or what we call business casual. Still, there was no chance to talk to them before I was to begin. I would have to carry on just as I would in the U.S., where everything about the audience was a known quantity.
To my great surprise, the Chinese were immediately engaged. They took copious notes—in English I later learned—and they even laughed at my jokes! After about 30 minutes, the first hand went up. The questioner spoke in perfect English. More questions and comments followed, and during the first break a few came over and asked me if they could practice their Spanish with me! Spanish?
As my lecture progressed, it became obvious that I was facing a fundamentally different kind of mindset. Their curiosity was vibrant, their questions sophisticated and probing. They were not interested in the what, the when, or the how of what I was saying, but rather the why. They had made a broad intellectual leap in comprehension and were focusing now on understanding long-term implications and consequences of embracing the ideas I presented. They had no interest in quick fixes to their problems.
For some weeks after these lectures I worked with the participants online as part of the accreditation requirements. As their interest continued to evolve, their level of inquiry increased in depth and insightfulness. By the end of the course, we had established a sincere rapport, and I believed that the relevancy of the subject matter was solidly ingrained.
As I was assessing their final work, I wondered if this level of excellence would be true of other executive teams in China. If so, here in the U.S. it would not take long before we would find ourselves in serious trouble economically. Quality Digest’s publisher Scott Paton believes that has already happened. He warns us that “the Chinese are coming,” and implores corporate America to wake up before it’s too late “and smell the green tea!” He reminds readers of how the Japanese and Korean economic revolutions eroded our manufacturing base over the past 30 years and how ill-prepared we were to challenge them. He sees it happening again, this time by China.
Contrary to popular belief that jobs lost to China are for the low-tech manufacturing of cheap toys, clothes, and souvenirs, China is becoming a world-class exporter of auto parts, electronics, medical equipment, home appliances, furniture and much more. The first Chinese car will debut in the United States in 2007 with projected sales of 250,000 vehicles in its first year (Paton, February 2005).
China has 1.3 billion people, 3.7 million square miles of territory and a $1.4 trillion economy (Cody, February 2005). China will undoubtedly emerge as a superpower, with a ferocious appetite to remain so.
Lu Quanqiu, China’s fifth-richest man according to Forbes magazine, and Chairman of Wanxiang, China’s biggest privately owned maker of auto parts, is penetrating the U.S. market by buying domestic manufacturers. This year the company is set to spend $70 million overseas to snatch sales from competitors such as Troy, Michigan-based Delphi Corp, the world’s biggest auto-parts maker (Bloomberg, 12/23/2004).
Similarly, in Central and South America, the Chinese are aggressively tapping into the region’s natural resources and are establishing long-term partnerships in what used to be a U.S. domain. In just the first 11 months of 2004, China invested $889 million in Latin America and there are many indicators to assume that these figures are likely to increase (Cody, 2005).
Washington Post’s Edward Cody writes about China’s “quiet rise.” The Chinese may be coming with force, but they are flying under the radar, maintaining a stealthy approach to their economic progress. Cody writes that “China’s foreign relations establishment has long adhered to an adage offered by the late Deng Ziaoping: ‘Never be a leader.’ In deference to that concern, Foreign Ministry officials recoil when the word leadership is used to describe what they are doing. Nonetheless, as the country’s economic strength has grown, so has the confidence of its foreign policy and a recognition that the United States is no longer the only country on which others in Asia rely for leadership.”
Cody goes on to quote the head of the People’s University Center for American Studies in Beijing, Shi Yinghong, who says that China senses “an emerging transition of power in East Asia between China and the United States.”
What does this mean for us? Is our leadership position in the global marketplace declining? There are many factors affecting our standing in the world, but one concerns me the most now because of my China experience: Education. I think back to that earlier question to me about headsets, and I want to use it here as a symbol of the cultural and economic disadvantages we face in our future interactions with China and other nations. We will be the ones wearing the headsets, not the Chinese, not the Koreans, not the Japanese, and not the Europeans.
We continue to work against our own best interests. While we are diluting our language requirements for high school graduation and promulgating “English only” in our schools, the Chinese are focusing on developing a multilingual, cross-disciplinary curriculum, designed to prepare their youth for participating in an economy that is truly global in reach. If the level of sophistication of those listening to my lectures is any indication, China is in the throes of an education revolution that is working.
As a nation, we are just beginning to realize that a citizenry that lacks language skills will affect our nation’s economy as well as its security. The Defense Department announced in March of this year that it is underwriting an initiative to develop foreign language experts among the uniformed and civilian workforce through the establishment of a Defense Language Office in the Pentagon. “We simply must develop a greater capacity for languages that reflect the demands of this century,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (McGlinchey, April 1, 2005).
Language deficiency is not the only problem. As a nation we are facing an education crisis of epic proportions, but Congress is only addressing the end result through a nationwide system of standardized testing. Ironically, if a school “fails” two years in a row, tutors are brought in and paid as much as $1,997 per child, and yet there is no regulation or oversight of these tutoring services. Potential fraud is a major issue. The No Child Left Behind law requires teachers to be highly qualified, but the same standards don’t apply to tutors (Saulny, April 4, 2005).
Washington Post’s Dan Balz reports on a national education summit held in February 2005, sponsored by the National Governors Association and chaired by Virginia’s then-Governor Mark R. Warner (D). Warner told the audience that “We are united in our conviction that high schools must be targeted for comprehensive reform and sustained change, and we believe that work begins today.”
The statistical trends that support the argument that the nation’s education system is obsolete and our students’ future at risk are alarming. Currently the United States ranks 16th among 20 developed nations in the percentage of students who complete high school, and 14th among the top 20 in college graduation rates. The nation slipped from first to fifth internationally in the percentage of young people who hold a college degree. In math and science, American students are finding themselves ranked near the bottom of all students from industrialized nations by the time they reach the 12th grade. That said, will we have enough scientists and mathematicians to meet our future needs? New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman tells us in The World Is Flat (2005) that many of the jobs we’re already exporting to other nations are very high-end research jobs, “because not only is the talent abroad cheaper, but a lot of it is as educated as American workers—or even more so.”
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, whose foundation has committed $1.2 billion to improve our schools, also addressed the audience. He told the nation’s governors that our high schools need radical restructuring if we want to prepare our students to face the growing competition in the global economy. “By obsolete, I don’t just mean . . . broken, flawed and underfunded…. I mean that our high schools—even if they’re working exactly as designed—cannot teach our kids what they need to know today” (Balz, pg. A.10).
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has probably done more for reform than any other institution in this country. On its web site, the foundation describes its vision for high schools in the new millennium. Size matters. Smaller school size—generally no more than 400 students—makes it possible to focus on the consumer, in this case, the high school student. “The foundation is committed to the concept that students should be able to choose from several small, innovative public high schools that offer a highly personalized, rigorous education and prepare every student for college, work, and citizenship.” Ultimately, what the foundation is doing is building a “portfolio of great schools” that other school systems can emulate.
Another powerful resource is the web site SchoolMatters.com, designed for many users—parents, educators, school administrators, and policymakers. The web site is a collaborative project, created to transform the way education information is made available and used. It includes an analytical service. For example, policymakers can use it to compare school districts side-by-side across a range of academic and financial performance factors, with key demographic context. It is designed to help individual states build a more sophisticated technology system. It also helps policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels to make informed policy decisions based on proven effective practices.
These resources will prove invaluable to policymakers and others as we work toward reform, but what else should we be doing? Perhaps we should start with the students, the “customers.” Where do we want them to be at the end of the day? How do we hope they will function as adults in the new millennium? Perhaps we should start there, and begin, if you will, with an image of them without crib notes, without headsets, nothing to aid them but their own intelligence and imagination. They’ve been taught how to think critically, they know how to connect disparate pieces of information because they’ve been trained to think in ways that cross over traditional disciplinary lines. They know how to question and know how to seek answers. They can speak in many tongues.
What can get them there? I’m a teacher, so I’ll speak from that point of view. First, we need to shift from teaching to learning. Teaching can be an obstruction to learning. Winston Churchill explained it: “Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.” The academic environment in this century requires a shift away from good teaching, in the sense of good instruction, toward good learning, which is learning that is relevant, current, vibrant, and enduring in terms of values, principles, and depth (Suarez, 2004).
Second, we must stop asking questions for which there is only one answer. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the way we got through school and college, by providing the answers that were expected. One problem with this approach is that these answers do not go beyond what is already known. The questions we ask should be those that encourage answers we don’t expect, questions that
stimulate creativity, innovation, independent thinking (Ackoff & Rovin, 2003).
The role of educators should be to inspire, motivate, persuade, stimulate. Learning should be directed at helping students understand the why, not merely to recognize the what, when, where, and how. We can encourage this kind of thinking by designing curricula that cross over subject boundaries. In our typical high school, we separate English from history from math from music from chemistry, and why? Is there no connection that we can make among these various disciplines?
We teach the Constitution in history class, but it’s far more than a document of historic interest. It tells us a lot about the economics of the times, about human values and the aspirations of those who wrote it, about the law as they envisioned it. The language by itself is extraordinary. It could easily be taught in English class, philosophy, government, sociology, economics. But why not look at it from all those perspectives at the same time? Why not, for example, bring in all the subject matter experts and have them explain what it is and how it worked then and now? Or better yet, have the students draft a Constitution based on what they know at this point in their lives. How close will they come to the real thing? What will the differences say about life then and life now? And why?
I teach adults, so I understand something about adult learning. For my students, it’s a lifelong pursuit or they wouldn’t be there. We know this to be self-evident, and still we design schools as if they were something apart from the rest of living: We have K through 12, then we have college or we have technical training. Then we work and we raise families. Who is to say that education is not a lifelong activity? It sounds old-fashioned, but if we learn how to study, how to think critically, learning should never stop.
One reason why we tend to think of education as an activity apart from other aspects of life is because our institutions have made it so, for their own convenience. In Redesigning Society, Russell Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin (2003) point out that the problems of education do not exist in a vacuum—they are intimately tied to social and environmental problems—and thus cannot be remedied in isolation. Only a systems approach will lead to real improvement.
They also look critically at current school practices, where students are trained to be “passive receivers rather than active learners.” They then look at schools where innovations are at play and found them inspiring─students teaching students, research cells and practicums, studios, labs, and experiential learning, curricula that embrace multidisciplines, learning that connects education to work and play (Ackoff & Rovin, p. 84).
Quality Digest’s Scott Paton reminds us that we responded well to Japan’s economic invasion of the 1980’s. We met the challenge by focusing on quality, which ultimately increased productivity in the 1990’s beyond anyone’s dreams. Today, China’s stealth capitalism is quietly reordering the world economic balance. Compiling more statistics about the slippage of the United States and the steady growth, expansion, and development of China will not help us improve. We need to move beyond hand-wringing and establish a national policy that addresses the educational crisis we are facing. National standardized testing, as noble as the original intention, is not going to save us. Limiting the number of jobs outsourced to Asia is not going to save us. What will save us, what will make the difference, is radical educational redesign that will prepare our children to function smartly in a global economy.
About the Author
Dr. Suarez is an Executive Education Senior Fellow at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland.
References
Ackoff, Russell, & Rovin, Sheldon. (2003). Redesigning society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 83-84, 109.
Balz, Dan. (2005, February 27). Microsoft’s Gates urges governors to restructure U.S. high schools. The Washington Post, p. A.10.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation web site. (2005). High schools for the new millennium. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/nr/downloads/ed/edwhitepaper.pdf.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation web site. (2005). SchoolMatters Backgrounder. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Education/TransformingHighSchools/Schools/SchoolMatters_Backgrounder.htm.
Bloomberg: China yuan's gain would mean 'Big Bonus' for Lenovo, Sinochem. (12/23/2004). China Economic Net (ce.cn). http://en.ce.cn/Markets/Currencies/200412/23/t20041223_2652348.shtml.
Cody, Edward. (2005, February 26). China’s quiet rise casts wide shadow; East Asian nations cash in on growth. The Washington Post, pp. A.01, A.12.
Friedman, Thomas. (2005). The World Is Flat. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 265.
McGlinchey, David. (April 1, 2005). Pentagon launches push for better language skills. Government Executive (GOVEXEC.COM). http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=30901.
Paton, Scott M. (February 2005). The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!: Wake up and smell the green tea, corporate America. Quality Digest, 25(4), 72.
Saulny, Susan. (April 4, 2005). Education law spawns growing tutoring industry, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (reprinted from The New York Times); http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/218688_tutor04.html.
Suarez, Gerald. (August 2004). Master’s business project: A primer for faculty & students. Cape Cod, MA: The National Graduate School, p. 8.