So with all due respect to Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, and President Obama: Science, technology, engineering, and math are not the future. Or more precisely, they’re not enough. Workers at every level benefit from an education that emphasizes creative thinking, communication, and teamwork—the very kind of excellence already offered at top American colleges. Once in the workforce, the U.S. should take a leaf from the Indians, and steadily train and update practical and technical skills. Indian workers, meanwhile, could stand to take a few lessons from the U.S. “The irony is that in India it takes engineers two to three years to recover from the damage of the education system,” says Wadhwa, who believes that engineers require real-world experience and training before they can excel at complex work such as R&D. “They’re used to rote memorization.”
Our education system has plenty of critics; I’ve been one of them. But when facing the mercurial demands of today’s job market, it seems there’s still a profound need for the social, discursive, American liberal-arts model at its best. Which may explain why 100,000 Indians are currently studying in the U.S. One of them is Murthy’s elder son, who just started his freshman year at UC Berkeley.

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