East Meets West on Northwest

I was in an airplane yesterday (Northwest--don't fly them, they charge you $15 for every bag you check), coming back from Madison and I got into an interesting conversation with a guy from India about the cultural differences he noticed between the U.S. and India. It gave me space to think about the things that I love and am concerned about for our country...all on the fourth of July holiday weekend.

His overall thoughts on American culture were positive. He noted, however, that Americans did not have as strong an emphasis on family bonds.

He also suggested that Americans did not have the value on education that Indians did. His take on the rapid rise to the world stage for India had to do with several generations of extremely well educated people. As companies were looking for places to expand, India had a groundswell of well-educated, hard-working people ready to hire...and for cheap, too.

Here again he noted the emphasis on the individual over the collective or family. In India, you study, no matter what your interests are. In America, if you're an artist, maybe you have more freedom to pursue that apart from classical formal education.

He felt that there was room here in his own family to try to bring together the best of both worlds--education and individual "empowerment."

I agreed with him that American individualism is both our strength and our downfall. My faith tradition sprang up from a culture that more highly emphasized the collective over the individual. As such, we often mis-read our own sacred texts, assuming that the "you" is the individual rather than the community. Our cultural lens throws us off.

I wondered about the educational piece. My experiences with Chinese and other eastern students is that the family and collective pressures often have a high toll on the students souls. If education and achievement becomes everything, then we forfeit our souls.

If our white temptation is to make ourselves gods, I wonder if the temptation in the east is to make the collective/the family god.

And lastly, the American education system has never been the best in the world and yet we've had vastly disproportionate economic impact around the globe.

That's because education does not always equal innovation. Our economic system has always had multiple on-ramps into it, and innovation and ideas and invention have always been a strong value, no matter who or what the source.

It is innovation that has driven our country's economic engine. The people at the top of the Dean's list often get there because they follow the rules. Innovators don't always follow the rules. Often, they're the C+ student who's brilliant but selectively interested.

I wonder if in an increasingly technological society, the need for education will increase and if we will finally pay for our inability to propel that "average middle" into a stronger academic track.

But at the end of a very engaging conversation on July 5th, I was glad to be a part of this messy, wonderful, obnoxious, turned around, innovative, upside-down country of ours.