Patricia Schroeder
Building Partnerships for International Education in the States

November 22, 2002 Washington, D.C. -- Boy, we have a challenge, I think. When I was in college I studied Chinese, heaven only knows why. But I remember getting halfway through it and suddenly thinking, the United States is a bit like the Chinese: we both kind of believe we're the Middle Kingdom. That's a very difficult thing for us to come to terms with because we think we're very cosmopolitan and savvy, but if you really look at us from a 30,000-foot view we look a lot like the Chinese. We do believe that we're the Middle Kingdom.

When I was going to University of Minnesota, they did some wonderful polls showing how essential it is that Americans understand basic things about this world we live in. Now, I'm so old I was going to school during the Korean War and they were running polls on the same people--fascinating!--saying things like, "Should the U.S. cross the Yalu River?" and they would get 90 some percent saying, "YES!" and then a couple weeks later they would ask, "Where is the Yalu River?" and of course no one knew.

Americans don't know where it is, they don't know what the neighborhood looks like. They can't find it on a map. This is really pretty frightening. Now the one huge difference between then and now--I can say because now I'm wearing my book publishing hat--after 9/11 was that Americans invaded the bookstores and bought all the university press books that had been sitting there for years on Islam. I think that's one of those things that you can use in your advocacy. Bookstores were begging for more of these books, so I think all of a sudden Americans did wake up and say, "I think we have a real hole in our education here." We still got it, and we can't survive in this new globalization era, continuing to have people that ignorant in the future. Let's just be that honest about it. (I got into a lot of trouble giving a speech later on, saying the problem in Denver is too many of us think foreign trade is sending Coors beer to Texas. They didn't like that too much.)

But when you really looked at Colorado business, it was incredibly international and most Coloradans didn't know it, even the ones who were working on some of this stuff. We're not going to be able to survive on this globe being that ignorant for very long, so we've got to get people much smarter.

I also found that immigration issues showed the huge difference in American opinion. The people that were screaming at me that I was too liberal on immigration, usually within a year would come to my office and say, "There's this wonderful couple at church that need a little help." And I'd say, "Excuse me, they broke the line." "I know, they have a house and they're really good people." "Well you want to make the line even tighter than it is." "That's for those other people. We don't know them." "Is your message: if you want to come to America, break the rules, get in and get to know some Americans?" That's really a very interesting thing, but I can't tell you how often I found that.

I continually found that most of my constituents thought the rest of the world viewed us as either a 911 number for them or their wallet. It's much harder if you're not in a state that's on the coast. Coastal states have a little more ability to look outward. If you're in the mountains it's a long way away. It's like, "Oh, now what do they want?!"

I find that the world "globalization" is a terrifying word to Americans. They can't even figure out how to get into city hall, and now someone's got to tell them, their going to find that the globe is going to rule. If you can't figure out how to deal with your county government and your city government, how in the world are you going to deal with the globe. Some of that we really have be aware of too. While it is happening, it frightens people. You see it whenever the IMF or the World Bank meet, all sorts of folks show up to petition it, because they don't know who these people are. They're faceless, nameless bureaucrats. In fact, at our next annual meeting we are having the chief judge of the WTO court speak because our guys want to know what do they look like? Who are they? Where do they come from? America doesn't know.

The media has really gone nuts on this. We now have so many members of Congress who get praise because they don't even have a passport. We have a problem. When we have the media attacking any public official who belongs to a foreign affairs group, that that must be a strange thing. It's very interesting, seeing what's happened to foreign affairs groups memberships or international relations memberships. If you're in public office, you may not want that out there, because that gives talk radio… I mean they hang you up on a stick like piñata and hit you on that issue alone all day long.

I just listened to the morning news, it was about the rioting in Nigeria because of the Ms. World contest. There's a big issue. The rest of it is all terrorism. In our house we have been taking the Economist magazine. It's the only place I can find in America that really continues to cover news. We all got driven to it, because you would hear about something and never hear about again. You'd think, whatever happened to the Hutus and the Tutsis? No clue! That was that week's story, that's gone. No understanding of where it came from. No understanding of where it went to. It's just that it made news for a week, because they though it was a cute story. I think it was basically because they liked the names of the two groups. Kind of like the Ms. World thing. Next week, somebody will say, "Did they have that? What happened?" You'll never know.

I'm also here representing textbook publishers, and that is a really tough place to be right now. We would love to do more international education. During the Clinton Administration I remember they came out and said "these are the good math books and these are the bad math books." And I had to say to them, "we produced both, the same publishers produced both the good and the bad." Guess what? The people are buying the bad. You can't make them buy the good. What do we do? And it is the same right now in education, because everyone is so scared about what's going to be in the test and it international education on our global and geographic issues going to be on the test. I brought some of these in [brochures], it kind of shows how long it takes to make a high-quality textbook. ...

Who really is setting what it is our children our going to learn and then how are we going to react; are we going to have the test? Where we're going to be, is a challenge for every single one of us to work on, and I think it's going to be much harder than we think, to be perfectly honest. I want to cheer you up, but I'm not too sure I can, because I've been traveling around and listening to a lot of this, and I'm very concerned. I'm concerned because we're raising our children in a hothouse, and they can't stay in the hothouse. Some day they gotta be in the world, and the rest of the world is passing us by. There is no cabdriver I have ever been in a cab with, anywhere in the world, that doesn't know more about our country than any of us know about theirs. Something's wrong with that picture. We have to be better neighbors. We have to be more informed. They read it as smug. When I was in Congress we used to have foreign groups come through and they'd always say, "We call you the 'Sunshine Boys': you come over and the minute the sun is gone, you're gone." I think that's because we don't feel comfortable. We don't have a comfort zone. We've lived in this huge wonderful country where everyone speaks our language, and we're just totally comfortable. And when you go someplace else and you're not comfortable, you get a little nervous and its easy to run, but we can't run, we can't hide. We're in it, and we're in it for the long shot.

So I wish you all the luck in the world, working with, I would say, newspaper editors, try and get newspapers to sponsor clubs talking about international issues, especially now since we all know so little about the part of the world we are going to be very heavily engaged in. It's really time for a crash course. The way people ran to bookstores, they are going to run to those groups having discussions. We ought to find ways to get those discussions in the schools, and we must find ways of talking to the people who are setting the course content for schools, to say, the next generation should be ready. They shouldn't have to do a catch-up course. They really should at least know geography, for cryin out loud, that's pretty pitiful. And they at least need to have the basic understanding of the different parts of the world that we live in, because like it or not, that's where we live, and we're not going to get out of it (I don't think).

Pat Schroeder is president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers. She is a former U.S. Congresswoman from Colorado.

LINKS

Association of American Publishers

NOTE

The Yalu River is on the boundary between China and North Korea.