Free The Time of Our Lives by Tom Brokaw Page B

participating in work-study programs.

CHAPTER 5
 
Don’t Know Much
About Geometry
FACT: In China it is mandatory for all junior high students to study biology, chemistry, and physics; in the United States, only 18 percent of high school students take those courses.
QUESTION: Where have the most exciting and beneficial developments in our life come from in the last quarter century? From science, right? From computer mavens and biomedical whizzes, from energy engineers and environmental biologists.
The evidence is all around us, and success is not limited to the rock stars of that world—Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Google boys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
    S itting in a New York University hospital waiting room recently, awaiting a routine checkup, I picked up the NYU medical bulletin and read about Dr. Jan T. Vilcek.
    Dr. Vilcek and his wife escaped to America from Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia in 1965, and he joined the NYU medical faculty. With a colleague he developed the popular anti-inflammatory drug Remicade.
    His royalties were astronomical so he began a program of giving $100 million to NYU for research and medical education, explaining, “We decided to base the scholarships on merit rather than need because my goal is to improve the competitiveness of our medical school and attract the most highly qualified and talented students.”
    THE PAST
    I wonder how Dr. Vilcek’s vision would fit in with Ben Braddock’s future?
    Remember the scene in the celebrated 1967 Mike Nichols film The Graduate , in which Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), a young man caught between the conventions of his fifties-era parents and the zeitgeist of the sixties, gets advice from Mr. McGuire, one of his father’s friends?
    “Plastics” was McGuire’s laugh-out-loud key to the future.
    If Mr. McGuire were confiding in Benjamin in this age of computers, digital phones, and desperately needed new energy sources, the dialogue might go like this:
    McGuire: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.”
    Benjamin: “Yes, sir?”
    McGuire: “Are you listening?”
    Benjamin: “Yes, I am.”
    McGuire: “Science.”
    Science, not plastics, and if Benjamin were to continue, as he does in the film, by asking, “Exactly how do you mean?” I would hope even someone as intellectually constricted as McGuire would say, “Because, Benjamin, math, physics, science of all kinds, have always been important but never more so than now in this technological world. If you doubt me, visit a classroom in Singapore or Shanghai, Seoul or Mumbai.”
    THE PRESENT
    Although exact numbers are difficult to come by, it’s estimated China has at least 12 million students enrolled in core science curricula at institutions of higher learning. That does not include the Chinese students enrolled in America’s best centers of high-tech education, students who will take those skills back home to help their native country move ahead of the nation that educated them.
    During the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, I reported on China’s leading computer science institute. It was run by a Taiwanese national, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, who had been educated in the United States and had become one of America’s leading authorities in computer education. He taught at MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton before the Chinese government recruited him to run Tsinghua University, a prestigious technology academy training the country’s best young minds in computer science.
    Students who qualify arrive from throughout the country, for even in the rural areas the fundamentals of a broad range of sciences are required courses. Yao was thrilled with the quality of students he was attracting from all over China. His only concern was whether they would eventually succumb to the siren song of investment banking and venture capital instead of staying in the pure sciences. (We met just before the great American financial meltdown reached catastrophic proportions, a