WASHINGTON – Maintaining the U.S. ability to compete globally is often taken for granted as a basis for improving American education. One Washington think tank scholar, however, went against the grain Wednesday at a national education summit and dismissed competitiveness as a dangerous and misguided basis for increasing education quality and access.
“The competitiveness idea may seem an innocuous way of motivating us to do what we ought to do anyway,” said Dr. Phil Levy, an economist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
“There is a danger, though,” Levy said. “If the principal threat is presented as competition from abroad, there is always the temptation to stifle that competition rather than addressing the root problems head on.
“I would argue that we need to adopt better policies for their own sake, because they will determine our children’s standard of living, not because we’re looking over our shoulders at foreign competitors who might or might not be gaining on us,” he added.
Levy made his remarks Wednesday at the College Savings Foundation 2010 Summit entitled “The Importance of Education on Global Competitiveness and the US Economy.” The event drew education and economic experts and dozens of people from higher education and college savings and college access advocacy organizations.
While most of the speakers did not take direct aim at competitiveness as a motive or ideal, like Levy, most touted a college education as the means to a better life, both for individuals and society as a whole.
One speaker, Mark McGuire, an instructor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, sounded an increasingly common alarm and said a better educated workforce is vital to America’s national security.
