From Consumer To Creator

Originally published in The Washington Post, January 21, 2002

The next hurdle for Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream

Forty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently expressed a dream he shared with millions of Americans — that all our children would be free to advance and achieve to the full extent of their abilities. As we celebrate King’s life and honor his legacy this weekend, much attention rightly will be paid to the positive steps America has taken in the years since. 

There is no question how important that dream is for America’s continued success. Equal opportunity is another way of saying we reward talent and ability wherever we find them — regardless of race, sex, ethnicity or any other criteria. In today’s competitive business world, the team that possesses the highest skills wins. Self-interest alone should lead businesses to hire and promote the most qualified people. Competitiveness is the landscape of every nation and every community, and smart people know that discrimination is not only morally unacceptable, it’s a sure-fire loser in the marketplace.

Equal attention should be paid to the challenges we still face. Jobs that today require low to moderate skills — and pay low to moderate wages — are in decline, while demand soars for highly skilled applicants who command higher pay. In fact, the technology sector has become a beacon of opportunity to millions of young people from every background, in this country and around the world. The key to success is possessing the requisite science and technology skills to capitalize.

The irony is that most of our young people today, including African Americans, are not equipped to take advantage of this opportunity. At a time when information technology companies scour the earth in search of technical skills, African American enrollment in highly marketable fields such as engineering is down by 10 percent compared with a decade ago, and only 5 percent of the nation’s engineers are African American.

What accounts for this? Part of the answer is an across-the-board lack of emphasis in the middle and high school grades on math and science education, which leaves our kids — all our kids — at a deficit compared with their counterparts in the rest of the developed world. A sad byproduct of that trend is a near-total lack of any real incentive to launch any minority child into the math or science studies that might eventually lead to engineering careers.

Beyond that, we need to focus on the informal cues youngsters learn as they make career choices. Much has rightfully been made of the “digital divide” that separates America’s information haves and have-nots, and the need to make computers and the Internet accessible to every youngster. I agree that information technology can be a powerful tool to close this divide.

But let’s make sure we’re clear about the real issue. The divide we must address is between the educated and the uneducated — and increasingly, that divide is between youngsters who are encouraged to take advanced science and math in the middle and upper grades and those who are not.

Every young person needs to understand the connection between math and science and the technology revolution that is changing how we live, learn and earn. How do we do that? One part of the answer lies in creating a culture in our communities that makes science and technology as “cool” as the music and entertainment that are the byproducts of this technology. Parents, clergymen and business leaders need to join with teachers to help kids understand how such things as CDs, DVDs and video games work — and how math and science are the pathway to this “cool stuff.”

Our kids are already avid consumers of these technological wonders. Our responsibility as parents, business people and teachers is to show them how they can participate in this revolution — how they can become creators of these technologies, not just buyers and users. That’s the kind of opportunity Dr. King foresaw for all our children.