“For a country as wealthy as we are, it is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness.” This quote hit the nail on the head. We need to meet this challenge head on as we did during the Cold War era. We need to pursue what Freidman calls “compassionate flatism.” We need a leader that realizes what Kennedy realized, “I believe we have all the resources and talent necessary, but the fact of the matter is we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership.” Like we did then we must now create and accept “a firm commitment to a new course of action.” We need to prepare are selves for the new pressures of global competition and that is what compassionate flatism stands for. Freidman suggests five action areas:
Leadership: Americans do not understand what is happening in the flat world because our leaders do not. In China and India leaders are engineers and scientist so they understand what is happening in the flat world. Freidman actually suggests that Americans leaders are going out of their way to make us stupid! As quoted in the book, “No institutions will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.” We are in deep trouble! The successful leader needs to educate us about our trouble and enable us to guide ourselves out of it.
Muscle Building: We need to lose the fat of lifetime employment and build the muscles of lifetime employability. The government and companies need to provide us with the tools to make ourselves lifetime employable! Freidman suggest these tools are portable benefits and opportunities for lifelong learning. He also promotes access to stock options. If you have these factors you are free to move to new industries created by the flat world and you are more personally invested in your job.
Cushioning: This idea explains that while we do need to lose fat some fat is necessary. Specifically, wage insurance is one fat that we need. This would compensate you for you lose of pay due to your loss of specific skills. When workers meet the three qualifications they would receive payment for two years covering half the drop in their income. I just wonder where the $8 billion in funding is supposed to come from.
Parenting: “There comes a time when you’ve got put away the Game Boys, turn off the television, shut off the iPod, and get your kids down to work.” I am glad someone said it. I think the main reason the kids in other countries are excelling over ours has a lot to do with the way we parent our children. We do not teach them anything, we don not make them do anything so they do not grow up to be anything. As Freidman suggest we need to encourage our kids to work hard! That is the bottom line. One final thing that struck a cord with me were his comments on the remarks made by Bill Cosby at the Rainbow Coalition. I agreed with every word he said and believed that he pointed out the reality of our situation. What caught me off guard is that people were offended by it. It seems we are working so hard to protect our feeling instead of focusing on building skills and character in our children.
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This is another chapter that deals a lot with Bush and his goon's, but I am not gonna go there because I already talked about it in your last post. This is also going into more depth about his dirty little secrets, but anywho. Friedman calls to Americans to respond to the challenge. That we need better leadership, and we do. Better Muscle building, look at social security. Better parenting, he's right on some degree. Every generation is different, and we always think the one below us is horrible. But they live in a different world. Our norms are not their norms. As we talked about younger people having less people skills, maybe it won't be a big issue in the future, who knows.
That quote caught my attention as well! And, I agree that our leaders need to be on top of things in order to inform our country about what really is going on. I never realized the danger (or importance) of them not knowing (or knowing).
As far as parenting goes, I believe that's the main reason we have such lazy and un-respectful children these days. Parents don't realize what they are teaching their children or what they are taking away from their future. I especially noticed the changes in today's children when I was student teaching last year ... they are different from my old classmates and especially different from my parents old classmates. I know they're in a separate generation, but the majority of their behaviors, activities, and ways of interaction with others make it scary to think of them as our future!
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