I am using “ignorance” here not in any pejorative sense but in the sense of the bumper sticker:

If you think education is expensive try ignorance.

The Phrase Finder defines “double whammy” as a double blow or setback. I first saw the term in the Li’l Abner comic strip.

I followed “Li’l Abner” regularly as a child.  The strip was populated by a gaggle of colorful characters from the “uncertain hamlet”  of Dogpatch USA. Evil Eye Fleegle was a minor figure in Dogpatch, but he had an awesome power: the whammy. The single whammy, unleashed by looking in a particular way with only one of his evil eyes, could, to paraphrase his words, “putrefy citizens to the spot.” According to the official record, a quadruple whammy could “melt a battleship.”

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Many of the students about whom I have been writing have double whammies in their futures. Whammy one: because of poor education they will be at the bottom of the economic heap. Whammy two: because of globalization the general living standard of the United States  economy will be declining significantly, leaving the least educated even worse off.

Whammy One

As part of my responsibility to inform my students about the world outside Chelsea I put together a presentation I made to both my math and physics students. The handout contains several charts, obtained largely from Census data, that show a strong direct relationship between education level and expected lifetime earnings. Furthermore, since the mid-1980s this income spread as a function of education has been widening. Several charts also suggest that stress-producing factors, such as unemployment and the absence of medical and pension benefits, decrease as education increases. As the bumper sticker says, ignorance is expensive.

Whammy Two

As a regular viewer of Charlie Rose I learned about a National Academies report commissioned by the President called Rising Above the Gathering Storm. The executive summary has some startling findings on pages 3 and 4, which I summarize here.

1. No matter how one makes his or her livelihood, one’s economic welfare varies directly with our economy’s general standard of living, which varies directly with the economy’s ability to compete successfully as a trading partner in high-value goods.
   

2. This competitive strength in high-value trade is directly related to our economy’s technological strength, which is directly related to the amount of science and engineering talent at work in our economy.
   

3. The number of science and engineering graduates we are creating (and importing) is decreasing, whereas among our Asian trading partners, this number is increasing strongly.
   

4. Furthermore, these technology workers in our Asian trading partners are available at a fraction of the cost of American workers of comparable ability, leading multinational businesses to locate new technology jobs in (and to move existing technology jobs to) the low-cost areas.
   

The consequences of these facts are partly with us now and are being recognized in our political dialog. I believe that these consequences will be much more with us in the future. The way the impact of these consequences will become fully obvious will be analogous to sitting in a rowboat near the point where a whale breaches the surface of the ocean: one minute the sea is tranquil; then suddenly all hell breaks loose.

The Economist magazine publishes annually a useful little book called Pocket World in Figures; subscribers often can get it as a freebie. On page 130 of the 2008 edition I learned that the per-capita purchasing power (one measure of living standard) of China is one-sixth that of the United States. On page 156 I learned that the per-capita purchasing power of India is one-twelfth that of the United States.

In another Charlie Rose interview Andy Grove, the former chairman of Intel, noted that economists understand that between tightly coupled high-volume trading partners such as the United States with China and, increasingly, the United States with India, their respective living standards will tend to equalize. That is, our living standards will decrease while the living standards of China and India will increase. This will take time, but the signs are there to see. Some among my readers might already know a manufacturing worker who has lost a job to China or a computer programmer who has lost a job to India and, as a consequence, has had to take a lower-paying job. Okay, now read this paragraph and the one before it again.

The National Academies report made a series of detailed recommendations, many of which are related to upgrading the science and math parts of our education system. The President addressed this matter in the 2006 State-of-the-Union speech. He proposed training 70,000 high school teachers to lead Advanced Placement courses in math and science, and bringing 30,000 math and science professionals into the schools to teach. With the exception of the usual talk about No Child Left Behind, since that time I have seen no public dialog about the future of public education.

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I worry about my students’ futures. It appears that the grownups are going to do very little for them. The only hope I see is that the students themselves will catch on to what is ahead and take responsibility for their own futures. There is a lot working against them in this regard, in particular the often-futureless stance of their adolescence and their chaotic socio-economic conditions. This is the tragedy of public education today.

© Copyright 2008 Mel Conway PhD