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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently told the nation’s governors that America high school education is “obsolete”. He said, “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In 2001, India graduate almost a million more students from college than the Unites States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the US and has six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. America is falling behind.”
Gates was describing a global economy in which the chance to move up into a better economic life is slipping overseas, along with jobs that can be performed anywhere----manufacturing in China, technology support in India, online order fulfillment across borders. The Internet brings Bhutan and Bangalore just as close to our offices and living rooms as Boise. Maybe closer.
Our children’s competitors are not the other schools in the district or the state or even the nation. They are the technologically literate young people in Taiwan, India, Korea, and other developing nations. For today’s American students , learning and retraining will be a lifelong experience.
In The World Is Flat, a recent book analyzing the shift in the global economy, Thomas Friedman points out that the dot. com bubble inspired a massive outlay (花費) of capital to connect the continents. Undersea cable, universal software, high-tech imagery, and Google have erased geography. College graduates in Latin America, Central Asia, India, China, and Russia can do the information work Americans used to count on---in many cases better and in all cases cheaper.
We are burning through reliable careers for our young people at high speed as technology relieves us of the tedium of repetitive work. The robots that vacuum our floors today will be filling out teeth tomorrow. Even jobs at Wal-Mart are endangered. Have you seen the self-check-out lanes? No cashiers required.
To be competitive now, US students must develop sophisticated critical thinking and analytical skills to manage the conceptual nature of work they will do. They will need to be able to recognize patterns, create narrative, and imagine solutions to problems we have yet to discover. They will have to see the big picture and ask the big questions. How many high schools do you know that are nurturing minds like that?
Are we supplying the conditions in our schools to create a new crop of original thinkers? Are we making sure of our curricula and instructional programs are not relegated (降級) for repetitive practice, gathering and organizing information, remediation, and test preparation? Are we requiring all students to use their minds well to construct knowledge , to inquire, to invent, to make meaning and relevance out of their learning? Hardly.
57. Bill Gates believes that the American high schools are obsolete in than schools in many other countries
58. According to the author, the challenge on American schools comes from the progression of
59. By saying that “ Undersea cable, universal software, high-tech imagery, and Google have erased geography.” ( Line3-4, Para. 4), the author means that has enabled many jobs to be done anywhere.
60. In order to compete with overseas students, American children will probably have to strengthen .
61. The last paragraph calls readers’ attention to confronting the current American education system.
