The Spirit of Sputnik

Zachary Shore
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

Will America Ever Fund Education Again?

Kids are heading back to school, but teachers across America have been walking out. What began in February in West Virginia spread to Kentucky, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, and now Washington state. Teachers are not only demanding higher pay; they are calling for sensible levels of school funding. The shortages are so severe that cash-starved school districts increasingly depend on crowdfunding simply to pay for supplies. It’s hard to remember that America once poured money into education. That was back when everyone shared a sense of the common good. At least, that’s how we like to imagine it. The truth is somewhat less noble.

Sixty years ago this week on September 2, 1958, a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, signed an extraordinary education spending bill into law. The decision was driven partly by fear. The previous year America had been spooked by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. One month later, the Soviets followed up with Sputnik 2, sending the first living creature into space — a dog named Laika. The space race was on, and the Russians were ahead. America was being tested, and We all knew the answer: massive government investment.

Beneath the surface, the National Defense Education Act had as much to do with politics as it did with defense. Seizing on the shock of Sputnik, and desperate to improve their state’s under resourced schools, two Democratic lawmakers, Senator Lister Hill and Congressman Carl Elliott, both from Alabama, pressed for sweeping national legislation to upgrade America’s teaching of science. The savvy Democrats saw the measure as a win-win for Alabama and the nation. Government funding would not just enhance education, it would also create jobs as Alabama built new schools, hired more teachers, and improved the supporting infrastructure. Knowing it could be a hard sell to Republicans who tended to view education as a social issue, the bill shrewedly put the words “national defense” ahead of “education.” But many Republican lawmakers saw the benefits to themselves as well. The NDEA was not just good for American children and American workers; it was a real vote getter — good for the politicians who endorsed it.

The NDEA soon expanded beyond the natural sciences to the point where nearly half its funds covered the humanities and social sciences. The Democrats who controlled Congress pressed the link between a liberal education and national security. They understood that while STEM fields were vital, we needed additional types of knowledge to win the Cold War. We had to train students in critical foreign languages. We had to grow our regional and country experts. Back then enough politicians recognized that knowledge of history, political science, and the full range of international studies mattered in a global competition for economic, military, and political power.

Those federal investments paid off in surprising ways. Anyone who uses a smart phone or GPS benefits daily from the satellites that American scientists developed over the past six decades — in part a result of NDEA investments in science education. The same Act created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the forerunner of DARPA, which helped create the internet. Anyone who attended college since 1958 on a federal student loan owes a debt to the NDEA, which instituted that program. Like the GI bill before it, the NDEA expanded Americans’ access to education, which in turn raised living standards and grew the middle class.

Unfortunately, in the decades since Sputnik’s launch, lawmakers have ignored the lesson that education is a matter of national security. Funding for public universities and schools at all levels has been slashed, particularly since the financial crash of 2008. America’s once dominant lead in STEM and other fields is being overtaken by China and other countries. Their Sputnik moments have crept up stealthily, as their children outperform their American counterparts and their scientists steadily accrue more know-how. Why are those nations succeeding? It starts with money.

In their 2011 book, That Used To Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum lamented America’s failure to invest in education and the other domestic sources of global power. Numerous other authors have also pointed to the causes of America’s decline. The sociologist Robert Putnam finds that widening class divisions have been blocking access to the American dream. The economist Dambisa Moyo points to misallocations of capital, labor, and technology. The journalist Ed Luce spotlights a raft of bureaucratic barriers to vibrant growth. Underlying these and many other jeremiads is a single issue: the failure to invest in the sources of strength. And the greatest source of national strength is an educated populace.

Educated citizens launch new businesses, create new jobs, make medical break-throughs, create inspiring works of art, solve problems of public policy, and learn languages to connect with other cultures and build a peaceful world. Above all, educated citizens elect thoughtful leaders who can guide a nation wisely.

There is a sense that China’s eclipse of America is inevitable — the result of history’s immutable law that great powers rise and fall. But a nation’s fate is not governed by some unseen hand, capriciously allotting wealth and power. It is the result of deliberate decisions made by us all. The arc of history is indeed long, and it bends in whichever direction we bend it. On this anniversary of the National Defense Education Act, we should not just remember that education is what makes a country great; we should mobilize to elect leaders who will act on it.

Zachary Shore is Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and author of A Sense of the Enemy: The High-Stakes History of Reading Your Rival’s Mind. The views above are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the Naval Postgraduate School, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Zachary Shore

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