[A brief caveat: this first part isn’t in my primary areas of expertise, so the following is even more open to correctives than most of what I write. Also, this commentary is going to roam far and wide – please bear with me….]

India, Pakistan to Revive Joint Business Commission
April 17 (Bloomberg) — India and Pakistan agreed to restart a joint business commission, open more trade routes and resolve disputes, including Kashmir, to boost commerce between the two South Asian nations.

“Both sides agreed to revive the commission that has not met since 1989 to address economic and trade-related issues,” India’s Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said in New Delhi today. India is ready to talk to Pakistani businessmen about their apprehensions on trade barriers, he said, briefing reporters on talks between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf today.

From the standpoint of world peace, this is no doubt encouraging news. Not only is it nice to see countries that have been dangerously close to catastrophic conflict finding positive things to talk about, but it’s also worth noting that if these countries can unite to provide meaningful economic hope to some of the poorest people in the world, it might go a long way toward breeding greater enlightenment and stability throughout the Islamic world. As Thomas Friedman explained in an excellent NY Times editorial in March of 2004:

Indeed, it is worth asking what are the spawning grounds for each. Infosys was spawned in India, a country with few natural resources and a terrible climate. But India has a free market, a flawed but functioning democracy and a culture that prizes education, science and rationality, where women are empowered. The Indian spawning round rewards anyone with a good idea, which is why the richest man in India is a Muslim software innovator, Azim Premji, the thoughtful chairman of Wipro.

Al Qaeda was spawned in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, societies where there was no democracy and where fundamentalists have often suffocated women and intellectuals who crave science, free thinking and rationality. Indeed, all three countries produced strains of Al Qaeda, despite Pakistan’s having received billions in U.S. aid and Saudi Arabia’s having earned billions from oil. But without a context encouraging freedom of thought, women’s empowerment and innovation, neither society can tap and nurture its people’s creative potential – so their biggest emotional export today is anger.

Viewed from this angle, then, Pakistan in particular represents a key front in our war on the destructive blight of religious fundamentalism.

Have a brief look at the map: to the east and south of Pakistan you see India, which is in some ways a model of the progressive side of the Islamic character. On the other side it’s bordered by some of the worst that the Muslim world has to offer – the fundamentalist theocracy of Iran and Afghanistan, which was until recently run by the Taliban, a pack of hatemongers who made the mullahs in Iran look positively moderate by comparison.

If there is a spot on the globe that perfectly symbolizes the battleground for the soul of Islam, Pakistan is perhaps it. We should therefore be hopeful about any developments that would draw Pakistan in the direction of India and away from the reactionary tendencies to the north and west. If the forces of enlightenment and progress can win Pakistan, it potentially becomes a powerful strategic base for democratic reform and prosperity in the region. Fingers crossed.

On the other hand, if a strong India/Pakistani economic alliance emerged, it could pose an even greater threat to American economic interests, as there would now be yet another South Asian nation poised to compete for jobs currently held by Americans. In a vacuum, this development doesn’t seem all that dire, but it sets me to thinking once again about how bad a job we’re doing educating our students in the US, a fact that has obvious implications for our ability to compete economically down the road.

The main driver of “offshoring” jobs so far has been cost – why pay an American a salary that approximates a living wage when you can get a worker in Asia to do the job for a fraction of the going rate in Fort Worth? In this context, those of us who believe that business ought to have a soul can rail from the moral high ground about the ravages of unchecked greed in our nation’s board rooms. But this righteous outrage is going to lose a lot of its punch in the coming years, as those greasy jowled corporate whores are increasingly able to make the case that offshoring isn’t just about cost-cutting – those workers in Bangalore are better than anything that can be hired stateside because they were raised in a culture that made funding education a priority in policy while in the US we were making rhetoric about education a priority.

Mr. Talk, meet Mr. Walk.

We’re already getting our asses kicked in things like science and math education, and it’s about to get worse, because there’s another grave problem in our educational system that most Americans don’t know about yet. The secret is this – our kids can’t write. They have no clue how to organize an argument or construct a sentence (let alone a paragraph), and an analysis in Conservation Biology a few years back noted that the “working vocabulary of the average 14 year-old has declined from some 25,000 words to 10,000 words (Spretnak 1997).” In comparing our students today with students 10, 20, even 30 years ago, drdenny estimates that we’ve lost two full years – that is, an entering college freshman in 2005 is roughly equivalent in ability to a rising high school junior in the ’70s. My take? Denny is a smart man, but he’s also a generous one – in many key areas I’m looking for evidence that the actual regression isn’t more like four years.

I say America doesn’t know it, but is about to. Right. This cohort of high schoolers taking the SAT were the first who had to do an essay, and if they grade those essays honestly and report the results accurately, we’re about to take a boot to the teeth. No doubt the results will lead to a predictable outcry and an even more predictable round of new rhetoric, but whether we’ll see anything like an actual commitment to fixing the problem is up in the air. My bet is no – we’ll probably see calls for more quantitative measurement and “accountability” by teachers, who in addition to everything else will be asked to somehow effectively teach more writing skills with less resources and even larger class loads. And it won’t work because this is pretty much the exact opposite of what you’d need to do it right.

Over the next decade or two, America’s role as the world’s largest exporter of employment is only going to grow. We’re not only going to see our manufacturing, call center and coding jobs offshored, eventually we’re going to see our writing and communication functions shipped to Asia and Europe. It will be interesting to see how the politicians rationalize the situation when we wake up to learn that people for whom English is a second or third language are still better able to use it professionally than are the native speakers graduating from our thoroughly measured and quantified and accredited educational systems in the US.

[THX: daedalnexus for the Friedman link.]