I have a friend who has had a stellar career in education. He has led schools and school systems that have invariably been standouts. Throughout, he has remained modest about his achievements and in his observations. No end zone celebrations or chest thumping. In recent years, he has been running schools in India. Never given to overstatement, he recently told me that “within 20 years India will hand the United States its ass.” He bases this unhappy assessment, at least for us, on the Indian commitment to educating and developing talent and the commitment of a young generation and their parents to study and hard work. None of this ignores or discounts the enormous challenges posed by Indian poverty, environmental degradation, ethnic tensions and other problems.
The conversation started me thinking about “talent.” When the mainland-born Commissioner of Education was run out of the Virgin Islands two years ago, one of the justifying themes was that we (Virgin Islanders) have enough talent without importing it from the outside. This is a recurring theme in the Virgin Islands, in my recollection, going back at least 30 years.
It is also totally wrong. It is wrong for several reasons. The most basic one is that nobody, anywhere at any time has enough talent. In my experience, there is only one function or activity for which there is a surplus of talent: musicians. I do not understand it, but the amount of musical talent in the world is truly amazing, the New York City Subway system being my primary source of evidence. For everything else, there is a shortage of talent. I have never seen an organization of any kind, except a band or orchestra that has enough talent. Therefore, when a Virgin Islander says that we have enough local talent, he or she is talking total foolishness.
When we dig a little deeper, the picture gets uglier, and this is where it becomes a Virgin Islands rather than an everywhere problem. There are basically only two ways to acquire needed talent: develop it or recruit it. Unless you first acknowledge the need for talent, neither path is likely to appeal to you. The Virgin Islands educational system does not perform well, so it is not an effective vehicle for developing talent. UVI-CELL does some of this work, and the Governor’s new Jobs for American Graduates initiative is a positive step. But the big picture is a bleak one.
The logic would then be to import talent and try to develop some kind of multiplier effect. But no, we don’t want to do that because it would be threatening to local interests and deny positions to Virgin Islanders. Better to keep them out or thwart them if they get in.
So if you don’t develop talent, and you can’t import it, what happens? Answer: bad things. Two of these bad things stand out and are linked to one another. The first is that potential talent does not get developed because the vehicles and will to develop it aren’t there. And the second is that people gets used to low standards.
The result is that young people don’t have the experiences that would maximize their talent, and they are also exposed to sub-standard ways of doing things that make them less competitive and less successful. When someone sets a high standard, the response is often that too much is being demanded of us, rather than that we expect to little of ourselves.
The talent question is another one of those areas in which the Virgin Islands is out-of-sync with the mainland United States. On the mainland, we don’t need to develop talent because everybody knows that we are #1. Our place at the top is guaranteed because we are the best. End of story.
But – a big but – is that, with the exception of hard-core racists and nativists, there is a willingness to import talent. And, once here, talent has an opportunity to flourish. Every so often, a newspaper will publish the names and pictures of the winners of some science or math scholarship. The pictures are almost exclusively of the children of immigrant parents.
But, in the end, unless we change other things, importation won’t be enough, especially as the United States disinvests in public higher education. As in many things, California may be the leading edge in this story. Forty years ago, California’s public elementary and secondary schools were the best in the United States. Today, grounded in policies based in the belief that taxes are evil, that doing more with less is a policy and “optimism,” California’s schoos are among the worst. Right down there with Mississippi and Alabama. Higher education in California is now going to follow this same path, as the state’s budget crisis devastates the best higher education system in the world. But don’t worry. We’ll always be on top. Anybody who tells you differently is just a pessimist.
In the Virgin Islands, true pessimism and defensiveness, rather than arrogance and delusions driven by false optimism, prevent the development or acquisition of talent. You don’t really need talent if you don’t believe that things can get better or be different. And especially if that talent might get something that I want or already have.
As is often the case, the starting point in finding a solution is to acknowledge that you have a problem. Once we acknowledge the talent deficit, it is possible to start planning to close it, either by developing homegrown talent or going out and finding it elsewhere. The reality is that the shortage is so severe that the places that are successful are the ones that develop talent and go out and get it. This will be tough sell. To paraphrase Pogo, “We have met the problem, and it is us.” On the mainland, it will mean seeing the world as it is today, rather than as ideologues and snake-oil salesmen tell us it should be or once was in the tax free market driven golden age. In the Virgin Islands, it means taking some risks and shaking people and organizations out of an acceptance of standards that deprive the next generation of the opportunity to fully develop its talents. Tough sell, but an easy call.
Frank Schneiger
