楊照：感謝佛里曼，但我們沒有理由自滿…
佛里曼（Thomas Friedman）在他極具影響力的「紐約時報」專欄上，公開表示，全世界除了美國之外，他最喜歡台灣。這樣的評價，當然令台灣人感到高興。不過仔細將佛里曼的文章讀下去，會發現他稱讚台灣最主要的理由，是台灣在沒有天然資源的惡劣情況下，創造了傲人的經濟成就。他拿台灣來對照對比那些有天然資源卻相對經濟不振的國家，進而凸顯人才素質的重要性。
My comments: Click the link, and you can read Thomas Friedman's article in the New York Times, "Pass the Books. Hold the Oil," which I'd like to copy and paste near the end of this blog entry, followed by an article in the UDN to which Mr. Yang's article responds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/friedman-pass-the-books-hold-the-oil.html
和阿拉伯產油國家相比，台灣的人才素質是超出許多。然而以佛里曼文中提到的ＰＩＳＡ，「國際學生能力評量計畫」顯示的成績來看，台灣的表現，在亞洲國家之間，並不出色。
最近一期的ＰＩＳＡ測驗結果，台灣學生「閱讀素養」項目的平均成績，從二○○六年的第十六名滑落到第廿三名，輸給第一名的上海、第二名的韓國、第四名的香港、第五名的新加坡、第八名的日本。「數學素養」項目上，台灣學生的平均成績從二○○六年的第一名滑落到第五名，輸給第一名的上海、第二名的新加坡、第三名的香港和第四名的韓國。在「科學素養」方面，台灣學生平均成績從二○○六年的第四名滑落到第十二名，在亞洲輸給第一名的上海、第三名的香港、第四名的新加坡、第五名的日本和第六名的韓國。
這是二○○九測驗的結果，ＰＩＳＡ每三年測驗一次，今年正在進行的測驗，要到明年才會公布結果，然而以台灣當前教育的方式與趨勢來看，我們有理由相信明年公布的結果會比較好嗎？
至少我沒有這樣的信心。這幾年，正是台灣教育最缺乏理念，教育政策最是慌亂沒有方向的時刻。「教改」失敗了，無人不知，「教改」之後孩子反而陷入更誇張更荒唐的考試壓力下，然而主政者卻滿腦子只有考試，試圖以不斷變化考試方式來解決考試帶來的問題，怎麼可能成功？中小學教育考試至上，真正的教學不重要；高等教育則是以要求教授寫論文、發表論文為重點，完全不顧教學教育品質。表面上看，教育在這個社會很重要，但實質上，我們卻以教育之名，在行謀殺抹煞教育之實。
My comments: I love teaching. I want my students to enjoy learning.
如此扭曲的教育狀況，明顯反映在像ＰＩＳＡ這樣的能力評比結果上。我們感謝佛里曼的友誼與好意，但恕我直言，佛里曼的稱讚，犯了一個嚴重的推論錯誤。他看到的，是台灣現在的成就，也就是過去人才素質產生的效應，然而，他拿來證明台灣成就的，卻是台灣當前教育產生的結果。過去的人才素質，創造了台灣耀眼的經濟成就，但那一套訓練培養的機制，今天已經差不多消失了。佛里曼看到今天的台灣成就，誤以為過去的那套人才機制還在台灣發揮作用，可以繼續有效提升台灣的人才素質。
但尷尬啊，佛里曼看重的ＰＩＳＡ數據，顯示的不是佛里曼以為的台灣傑出表現，相反地，正是台灣教育的危機，以及將來整體發展上的危機！
（作者為新新聞副社長兼總主筆）
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March 10, 2012
Pass the Books. Hold the Oil.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?”
I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.
Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?”
That, at least, was my gut instinct. But now we have proof.
A team from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., has just come out with a fascinating little study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries — and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig?
The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix. (See the data map at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/49881940.pdf.)
As the Bible notes, added Schleicher, “Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert — just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has one of the most innovative economies, and its population enjoys a standard of living most of the oil-rich countries in the region are not able to offer.”
So hold the oil, and pass the books. According to Schleicher, in the latest PISA results, students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores and few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the highest oil rents and the lowest PISA scores. (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria stood out the same way in a similar 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or Timss, test, while, interestingly, students from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey — also Middle East states with few natural resources — scored better.) Also lagging in recent PISA scores, though, were students in many of the resource-rich countries of Latin America, like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Africa was not tested. Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part, argues Schleicher, because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them.
Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,” says Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”
Economists have long known about “Dutch disease,” which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills.
By, contrast, says Schleicher, “in countries with little in the way of natural resources — Finland, Singapore or Japan — education has strong outcomes and a high status, at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. ... Every parent and child in these countries knows that skills will decide the life chances of the child and nothing else is going to rescue them, so they build a whole culture and education system around it.”
Or as my Indian-American friend K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”
That’s why the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore — none of which can live off natural resources.
But there is an important message for the industrialized world in this study, too. In these difficult economic times, it is tempting to buttress our own standards of living today by incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. To be sure, there is a role for stimulus in a prolonged recession, but “the only sustainable way is to grow our way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,” argues Schleicher.
In sum, says Schleicher, “knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. “The thing that will keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the table yourself.”
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http://udn.com/NEWS/NATIONAL/NAT5/6957984.shtml
以「世界是平的」一書享譽國際的專欄作家佛里曼（Thomas Friedman）十日在紐約時報撰文指出，除了自己的國家美國之外，他最喜歡的國家就是台灣，因為台灣人在自然資源匱乏的情況下，發展出一套砥礪自我的習慣和文化，造就了世界上最珍貴且日新又新的資源。
天然資源有限 熱情、天賦無限
常常有人問：「除了美國，你最喜歡哪一個國家？」
我總是給相同的答案：「台灣」。
為什麼？很簡單，因為台灣位在颱風頻仍海域，土地貧瘠，沒有自然資源，甚至必須從中國大陸進口砂石做建材，卻擁有全球第四高的外匯存底；因為台灣不去挖掘地底下的一切，而是汲取兩千三百萬人的天賦、熱情與智能。
我總告訴我的台灣友人：「你們是世界上最幸運的人。你們沒有石油、鐵砂、森林、鑽石、黃金，只有少許煤和天然氣，但由於你們發展出一套砥礪自我的習慣和文化，結果造就了如今世界上最珍貴且日新又新的資源。」
這番想法，原本僅是我簡單的直覺，但現在有了證據。
經濟合作暨發展組織（OECD）的一個團隊完成一項小型研究，勾勒兩個數值間的關聯性，其一是六十五個國家的十五歲學生在數學、科學及閱讀上的理解能力（「國際學生能力評量計畫」，簡稱PISA），其二是各國自然資源上總收益占其國內生產總值的比率。
負責PISA測驗的史萊克說：「各國從自然資源賺的錢，與其高中生的知識技能明顯呈反比。」
石油不能傳家 詩書卻能繼世
史萊克引述聖經故事說：「摩西帶著希伯來人飄零沙漠四十年，最後選擇在中東唯一未產油的國家定居，如今看來，這種作法可能是對的，以色列已是中東最具創新力的經濟體，其生活水準也令中東許多產油國望塵莫及。」
因此，石油不傳家，詩書能繼世。史萊克說，新加坡、芬蘭、南韓、香港和日本幾無自然資源，但其學生卻在PISA中取得高分；卡達和哈薩克斯坦擁有最高的石油收入，但是學生PISA分數最低。
史萊克說：「今日在校的學習成果，是各國未來富強的重要指標。」PISA研究團隊透露的是：上了自然資源癮的國家似乎會培養出一群家長和年輕人，他們失去某些做功課和磨練技能的本能、習慣和動機。在幾無自然資源的國家，每個家長和學生都知道，知識與技能決定了生存機會。
知識加上技能 本世紀的貨幣
這也就是為何在美國那斯達克上市的外國公司，多半來自以色列、中國大陸／香港、台灣、印度、南韓及新加坡的原因，這些國家皆不靠自然資源維生。
但這項研究也對工業化國家傳達了一項重要訊息：在當前經濟困頓之時，不要為了提高當下的生活水準，而造成未來更大的財務負擔。史萊克說：「永續的唯一途徑是讓更多人擁有知識和技能，可與人競爭、協作及連結。」
簡言之，史萊克說：「知識與技能已成為廿一世紀的全球貨幣，但沒有任何中央銀行在印製這種貨幣，人人必須自己決定要印多少。」石油、天然氣和鑽石的確能買來許多職缺，但長期下來，自然資源只會削弱社會，除非這個國家具備興學的風氣及終身學習的文化。
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