Microsoft Needs to Reinvent Itself

Microsoft’s decision to withdraw its offer to acquire Yahoo! was a sensible one. Throughout, the dialogue was shrill, the intention bad and the move desperate. Even if Microsoft succeeded, it would have been a pyrrhic victory. As long as the company continues to think of “Search” as the holy grail of computing, a game that Google plays to perfection, Microsoft will be playing catch up and fall further behind its nemesis.

It is critical for Microsoft to reinvent itself if it wants to regain some of its former glory. It is possible but it will require Steve Ballmer to set his priorities right. Forget trying to compete online with Google through acquisitions, even if the acquisition brings you Facebook. Not much will change. Instead, focus on the creativity of your company’s most brilliant minds to chart a new direction that will make “Search” only one of the Web's crown jewel, as opposed to its most lustrous and overpowering one.

As one with a flair for mathematics, Ballmer should know that while the brute force method can be used to solve a particularly complex equation, a powerful and intuitive solution awaits discovery by gifted mathematicians inspired to think along new and original lines.

Get off the beaten track. Forge a new trail. The revenue will follow if you can capture the imagination of young geeks as Bill Gates did at the dawn of personal computing three decades ago.

Tiger's Need for Humility

In the firmament of golf, no star shines brighter than that of Tiger Woods. He is not only one of the greatest golfers ever, it is likely that he will be regarded as the greatest to have played the game, a cut above even Jack Nicklaus. In terms of brilliance, concentration and the sheer will to win, Woods is nonpareil.

Which is why, as a fan, I flinch everytime he predicts that he will win this or that tournament. Given his recent string of wins, Woods predicted the Grand Slam in 2008 as within his reach. Surely he is the favorite everytime he plays but as a fan I wish Woods wouldn't make such predictions. Why tempt fate? There is a difference between quiet confidence and arrogance, between the resolve to do one's best and implying that others are footnotes to a foregone conclusion.

That Woods wasn't able to win the Masters this year in no way undermines his status as the preeminent golfer of his time. As a fan, however, I feel that Woods makes it hard on himself unnecessarily by predicting victory when he would be better off not speculating about the outcome. There are far too many variables in golf - a change in wind direction, a drop in temperature, a mysterious 'x' factor that prevents one from clicking - to predict victory even by the best. I hope Woods will display more humility in the future. If a reporter asks him whether he can win the Masters or the U.S. Open or even the Grand Slam, he should say something like this: "All I can tell you is that I will give each game my best. The rest? We'll see."

The Creator and the Created: the 2008 Templeton Prize

Michael Heller, a Polish theologian, cosmologist and philosopher, was awarded the 2008 Templeton Prize “For Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.”

In accepting the prize, professor Heller said, “Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence. The paradox is that these two great values seem often to be in conflict. I am frequently asked how I could reconcile them with each other. When such a question is posed by a scientist or a philosopher, I invariably wonder how educated people could be so blind not to see that science does nothing but explore God’s creation.”

Heller was only 4-years old in 1940 when Joseph Stalin banished 1 million Poles, including Heller, his four siblings and his parents, to Siberia. This was after the Germans had invaded Poland in 1939 and Heller’s family had to flee from Tarnow, Poland, to what is now Ukraine. The suffering he experienced and witnessed in Siberia became for him a life-defining experience. Even at that tender age he sensed that many people survived the brutal Siberian extremities through the power of prayer. Heller resolved that if he survived the ordeal, he would take on one of life’s greatest challenges. “I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion,” he recalled.

Heller wrote 30 books, almost all of them dedicated to the creative dialogue between science, theology, and philosophy. His seminal contribution was to see in these seemingly distinct realms of human understanding a profound synergy, and he used his considerable intellect and insight in clarifying the nature of this synergy for us.

Attention to Heller’s work comes at a critical time. Scientists such as Richard Dawkins and atheists/secularists such as Christopher Hitchens have declared a war on religion. Their books are best-sellers. Many religionists have responded in kind, polarizing the religion-science issue further. What we seem to overlook is that inflexible ideologies, both secular and religious, drive away common sense, a loss for all. It is this loss that Heller is determined to stem, by engaging our collective common sense and without minimizing the complexity involved in reconciling the knowable scientific world with the mysterious, and ultimately unknowable, nature of God. Through a rare combination of scientific acumen and theological insight, Heller addresses fundamental questions of knowledge and meaning in a holistic context that go far beyond the parochial arguments of the secularists and the religionists. In doing so, he also rejects a “God of the gaps” theory that uses God to explain what science cannot.

In a chapter titled “Cosmological Singularity and the Creation of the Universefrom his book “Creative Tension,” for instance, Heller writes how difficult it would be to find a book or an article on cosmology in which the author is silent on the Big Bang and the creation of the universe. But, Heller notes, it would be even harder to find a book or an article in which this problem is dealt with responsibly from the point of view of both science and theology. This is what Heller boldly sets out to do. By tracing the evolution of singularity as it relates to the origin of the universe, from Newton and Friedman to Einstein and Hawkins and others, Heller writes that “God knows the outcomes of laws and chance not by calculating from the initial conditions, but in the same direct way as God knows everything. What for us is a chance, for God is a detail of the picture that is simply present.” Even though such a viewpoint disturbs some theologians who speak of God’s immanence over God’s transcendence, Heller shows that this is nitpicking, that a transcendent God is also an immanent God. A reader may have difficulty following Heller’s carefully constructed arguments, but no one can accuse him of lacking rigor in his thinking, moving fluently between the scientific and the theological world as only one deeply versed in both can.

In the chapter called “Generalizations: From Quantum Mechanics to God” in the same book, Heller raises the metaphysical question, so persistently asked by the 17th-century German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Heller suggests that we read old religious masters from the perspective of the most recent scientific theories such as quantum mechanics. We should not repeat their doctrines blindly, he writes, but look at them with an eye sharpened by the enlargements of imagination prompted by the achievements of modern science. He writes: “Today we ask such questions as: How old is the Universe? Did it initiate in a “Big Bang”? Will the future theory of quantum gravity remove the initial singularity appearing in the standard cosmological model? Is the fundamental level of the world atemporal and nonlocal? There are many similar queries. All these questions are purely scientific, and we hope that, with the continuous progress in developing our theoretical and empirical tools, we will sooner or later find answers to some of them. I do believe that this will greatly contribute to our better posing of philosophical and theological questions, and more cautiously formulating tentative answers to them. The main lesson we should learn from science in this respect is that we must always be open to broader and broader horizons.”

Finally, in the chapter titled “Chaos, Probability, and the Comprehensibility of the World," Heller writes: “Modern developments in science have discovered two kinds of elements (in the Greek sense of this word) shaping the structure of the Universe—the cosmic elements (integrability, analycity, calculability, predictability) and the chaotic elements (probability, randomness, unpredictability, and various stochastic properties). I think I have convincingly argued in this chapter for a thesis that the chaotic elements are in fact as “mathematical” as the cosmic ones, and if the cosmic elements provoke the question of why the world is mathematical, the same is true as far as the chaotic elements are concerned. On this view, cosmos and chaos are not antagonistic forces but rather two components of the same Logos immanent in the structure of the Universe.” This is why Heller believes that religious objection to teaching evolution “is one of the greatest misunderstandings” because it “introduces a contradiction or opposition between God and chance.”

When evolutionists and intelligent design proponents clashed in 2005 over the origin of life, spawning legal fights over high school biology curricula in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Ohio and other states, I wrote in an article that “There are many theologians from different faiths who find in the theory of evolution evidence of God’s glorious self-disclosure, and many scientists whose research leads them to ask the deeper questions of life – why are we here, why do we suffer, what makes our life meaningful - that lie outside the realm of science.” I also wrote, “The unexplored region between religion and science beckons people with open minds seeking spiritual and scientific truths. Is it not possible that wildflowers of insight will bloom on it if nurtured with humor and humility?” I did not know then that the ideal I had in my mind when I wrote those sentences were theologian-scientists like Michael Heller.

Heller’s concluding statement after winning the Templeton Prize for 2008 should become a basis for public discourse on religion and science in America and elsewhere: “When thinking about science as deciphering the Mind of God, we should not forget that science is also a collective product of human brains, and the human brain is itself the most complex and sophisticated product of the universe. It is in the human brain that the world's structure has reached its focal point – the ability to reflect upon itself. Science is but a collective effort of the Human Mind to read the Mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made. To place ourselves in this double entanglement is to experience that we are a part of the Great Mystery. Another name for this Mystery is the Humble Approach to reality … The true humility does not consist in pretending that we are feeble and insignificant, but in the audacious acknowledgement that we are an essential part of the Greatest Mystery of all – of the entanglement of the Human Mind with the Mind of God.”

Barack Obama's Challenging Race Speech

Barack Obama's speech today on race and religion was among the most powerful and poignant speeches ever. The words were stirring, evocative, and served as a call to action on the race front in America.

We often forget that it took the United States many years after the civil war to rid itself of the evil of slavery. “And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part -- through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk -- to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."

He addressed those who thought that he was where he was not by dint of his merit but as a result of affirmative action. At the same time, he rejected Reverend Wright’s racist remarks, repudiating his racism while harboring no hatred for the man. “On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, that rightly offend white and black alike …

“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country -- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen -- is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope -- the audacity to hope -- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

He was blunt about the effects of racism in our society. “Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.”

Obama is, however, not one to give in to despair and cynicism. “But I have asserted a firm conviction -- a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people -- that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances -- for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs -- to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives -- by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”

With this speech, I believe Barack Obama has convinced a majority of undecided Americans that he is the best candidate to be the next president of the United States. His words of hope, change, action, accountability and responsibility struck a deep chord with people from all walks of life and will prove to be decisive in the November election.

Also today, the Wall Street Journal carried an article by Shelby Steele called "The Obama Bargain" in which he suggests that Obama has used his race as a "bargain." As a bargainer, Obama makes "the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain - and feel affection for the bargainer - because it gives them innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity (in italics) for whites to experience racial innocence."

This is a conspiracy theory of the most subtle kind. Mr. Steele should read Obama's speech in full (… we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap …) and recognize that his thesis is not merely untenable, it is downright disingenuous.

Barack Obama is not bargaining for anything. His sight is set on a higher plane. He is telling us that together, we are more than the sum of our creed and color. He is calling for a reconciliation grounded in our common hopes and aspirations. It is the surest way to end racism in our country as we march toward a “more perfect union.”

The Finnish Frame of Mind

The Finnish public education system is the envy of the world. In the triennial PISA tests administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Finnish students regularly place at or near the top in science, math and reading. In contrast, American teens usually finish near the middle (grade C) among students from 57 countries.

What can explain this in a country about the size of Montana and with a population of less than 6 million? Perhaps Finns start school early to get a head-start on their peers from around the world. Maybe they are “homeworkaholics” whose ideas of fun are to dissect frogs, master long division and study the classics for clues to character building. Or perhaps parents relentlessly drive their children to succeed in school, because failure would make them pariahs for life.

Actually the opposite is true, as several reports, including this recent one in the Wall Street Journal (link may require subscription), reveal. Finns don’t start school until age 7, a year later than most U.S. first-graders. Homework is light, rarely more than a half-hour a night, far less than what the average kid in the U.S. has to contend with. Finnish parents hardly get excited about how their kids are doing in school. They rely on the system to do its job, and if a student is falling behind, why then, it is the school that has to step up to the plate, not them.

Finnish students are certainly not lacking in the fun department. As Ellen Gamerman reports in the WSJ, the youth dye their hair, waste hours online, surf Google for answers and listen to rap and heavy metal. They are as passionate about extracting maximum excitement from after-school hours as their U.S. counterparts.

But surely something has to account for why, by the ninth grade, Finns are way ahead in math, science and reading, on track to becoming “among the world’s most productive workers.”

The reasons are as prosaic as they come. Finns place premium value on teacher training. Would-be teachers must hold masters' degrees and have to compete hard for the privilege of teaching. Over 40 candidates may compete for a single position. Teachers are rewarded more with freedom to pursue their creative ideas than with higher salaries.

Once in the system, teachers can rely on mentors to hone their craft. Gamerman quotes an OECD educator in defining the traits of Finnish teachers: “In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs.”

Finnish educators also believe in ensuring that all students have a solid grasp of the basics before moving on to higher grades. There are rigorous programs in place for helping lagging kids to catch up and they almost always work. The emphasis is more on preventing students from falling through the cracks than on special programs for the gifted. A school principal observed, "We don't have oil or other riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have.” And they make the most of it.

There are lots of no’s in the Finnish education system: No fancy pedagogical theories, no honor societies, no off-beat classes with exotic names, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and little or no standardized testing. However, there are plenty of hands-on science and a lot of questioning, critical thinking and extra playtime.

It is probably unfair to compare Finland with the U.S. After all, Finnish educators work with a near-homogeneous, relatively small student population. Failures can be quickly detected and corrective actions urgently applied. American teens, on the other hand, are far more diverse in aptitude and ethnicity and pose formidable challenges to attaining a minimum level of proficiency. More important, American teachers, on the average, are nowhere near as well-trained as their Scandinavian counterparts and do not enjoy comparable status in society.

There is also the negative effect of politics in many American schools that causes many gifted educators to give up on the teaching profession.

The Finnish educational system has its flaws. The demands of a global economy and the need for innovation are causing some educators to question whether what has succeeded so far can continue to hold in their country. Opinions are being increasingly heard that “Finland needs to fast-track its brightest students the way the U.S. does, with gifted programs aimed at producing more go-getters.” A principal complains that “parents also are getting pushier about special attention for their children.”

The occasional serpent in paradise sometimes rears its head too: an 18-year-old shot eight people inside his high school in southern Finland last November before turning the gun on himself.

Still, the Finnish back-to-basics approach to high school education, with a no-frills curriculum, a love of reading and a culture that promotes self-reliance early, constitute a timeless prescription for success. Educational fads will come and go but these old-fashioned ideas and values will endure.

P.S. Here is an excellent source of information about the Finnish School System.

I thank Tom Hanson, Editor of OpenEducation.Net, for making me aware of his organization and the good work it is doing.

For more postings on the state of education in our schools and colleges, please visit my prototype Website http://www.beyondgpa.com/ and login with Username "myguest" and Password "welcome". I am looking to transform the prototype into a one-of-a-kind educational and social networking Website for our kids with the help of some top-notch (and idealistic) Web 2.0 programmers. The content is all ready to go. Anyone interested out there willing to advance a good cause?

Unstoppable Obama

With eight straight primary victories against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama has caught the wind on his sail for good. There is no stopping him now as he surges ahead of his rival in what started out as a keenly-contested race.

Analysts are attributing many factors to Obama’s success – more money, more grassroots support, more sophisticated use of the Web, more this, more that.

They are, however, missing the most important factor: Obama has captured the imagination of Americans like no presidential aspirants in recent memory. Neither Ronald Reagan nor Bill Clinton comes close. The only apt comparison is with John F. Kennedy and his mythical, magical evocation of a new frontier.

It is now beyond Hillary Clinton to overcome Obama’s x-factor advantage. Hillary Clinton represents variations on the theme of "what is" but Obama represents a bold and new version of "what is possible." And as the poet Robert Frost may have said, that has made all the difference.

Hillary's Stunner in New Hampshire

How did Hillary Clinton pull the stunner in New Hampshire last night? Even though pundits and pollsters were busy eating crow, they took turns to "explain" Clinton's victory. Two words summed up their analysis: "race" and "gender."

Nonsense. Race, gender (and ethnicity) played no role in this primary.

There are four reasons why Hillary won.

First, it is in the American character to root for the underdog. With polls predicting a thumping victory for Obama, voters felt inclined to vote for Hillary. If Hillary swept the senator from Illinois in Ohio and polls were predicting a repeat for her in New Hampshire, it is most likely that Obama would have won in the Granite State.

Second, for the first time since she began her campaign, Hillary came across as a vulnerable human being instead of a micro-managed robot. Count on seeing the video in which she tears up many more times before this race is over. People like that. Yes, they admire guts and determination and straight talk, but they admire genuine emotions even more.

Third, Hillary spoke more substance on issues that mattered to voters in New Hampshire than Obama. There was no block voting; more women flocked to her because she addressed their concerns.

Finally, voters were fed up with the certainty of pompous pundits and pollsters. Let's teach these buffoons a lesson or two, many of them said to themselves as they stepped into the booth to register their feelings.

A hard-fought campaign is the fire through which presidential mettle is forged. No one can predict at this point who will win the democratic nomination but one thing is certain: the democratic nominee will be the next president of the United States.

Don’t Let a Teddy Bear Mask the Horrors of Darfur

So the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir has “pardoned” Gillian Gibbons after meeting with two Muslim members of the British House of Lords. Hold the applause, please.

Gibbons was the British teacher jailed in Sudan for allowing her 6- and 7-year-old students in Khartoum’s Unity High School to name a teddy bear “Muhammad”, a name chosen by the young learners themselves. While in custody for eight days, cruel clerics and assorted Sudanese “defenders of the faith” chanted for Gibbons’s execution.

That they were doing so under the patronage of a government desperate to deflect the world’s attention away from Darfur was plain for all to see.

But we must not allow Darfur to be eclipsed by the zany tale of a teddy bear.

The Janjaweed Arab militia, armed and recruited by the Sudanese government, has massacred over 200,000 tribal people in the Darfur region, and 2.5 million were forced to flee their homes, in four years of fighting.

Conspiracy theories cannot be admitted here: it is a case of Muslims killing mostly Muslims.

No private citizen has been more vocal, daring and persistent in opening our eyes to the genocide in Darfur than the actress Mia Farrow.

Farrow put the Gibbons episode in perspective: “One white woman in peril with a teddy bear has captured more media attention than the past three years of our brothers and sisters in the Darfur region. I look back at what we were doing during the Rwanda situation and in America we were watching the O. J. Simpson trial.”

A goodwill ambassador for UNICEF who visited Darfur seven times since 2004 and witnessed the effects of the carnage firsthand, Farrow launched a fund for the region and said: “This is the first genocide of the 21st century and the one genocide that is ongoing as we speak. We have a regime that launched a military campaign on an unarmed population for no other reason than that they are not Arab.”

Actors George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon have also worked tirelessly to raise our awareness of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Their Not On Our Watch project seeks to "focus international attention on the continuing carnage in Darfur, encouraging governments and international organizations to take meaningful action to protect the vulnerable, marginalized, and displaced. Where governments have remained silent, we are committed to working to render otherwise invisible atrocities, visible."

Zealotry and illiteracy can be a potent mix. Spectacles like the Sudanese clerics making a mountain out of nothing, not even a molehill, can both enrage and demoralize Muslims.

Consider: In the six years since 9/11, public opinion in America has shifted significantly against Muslims. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 35 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Muslims, up from 29 percent in 2002. Whereas 27 percent of Americans in 2002 thought that Islam was more likely to encourage violence than any other religion, the figure in 2007 stands at a whopping 45 percent.

For Muslims fighting bigotry and distrust and striving to earn their rightful place in Western societies, incidents like the one in Khartoum can sap the energy and make us wonder if we will ever make any progress.

Yet, as grim as the situation looks, we must not forget Darfur. If we are to remain true to our faith, we must join hands with people of conscience around the world in forcing the Sudanese government to stop the genocide.

A group of retired statesmen, including South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former president Jimmy Carter, have issued a report this week for the Sudanese government to honor past peace treaties, for rebel groups to participate in peace talks and for the international community to support a peacekeeping force with money and manpower.

Muslims can be a catalyst for such efforts, at least at the grassroots level. We can be the largest donors to Farrow’s Darfur fund. And we can demand that our imams and leaders address the Darfur situation forthrightly and unsparingly in their sermons and lectures.

In the four years since the Darfur genocide began, I did not hear a single sermon on it in the mosques that I attended in the San Francisco Bay Area, nor come across a single conference organized around the atrocities of the Sudanese regime.

It may be that as a minority, we feel overwhelmed by a few hate-mongers in the media. It may be that we are frustrated by our inability to reach out to many of our fellow-Americans despite the open houses and the interfaith dialogues. It may be that some of us experience discrimination at work because of our faith. And it is a fact that more than any other group, we are singled out for scrutiny at airports.

But none of these indignities can ever justify our silence when Muslims kill and commit injustice. We must speak out unequivocally against the world’s current “heart of darkness” in Darfur.

Wanted: Teachers Who Can Make a Difference

Educational reports vary widely in the steps they recommend to improve or overhaul a nation’s school system. One common thread that runs through them, however, is the need for quality teachers in classrooms. While everyone recognizes the central role of teachers in raising the level of K-12 education in America, how to train, attract and retain teachers who can teach, motivate and inspire remain elusive.

A recent report by McKinsey & Co offers evidence that simply by increasing teacher salary and reducing class sizes will not improve student performance. Yet in the United States, Britain and several other Western countries, these are often the only “remedies” applied, with predictably depressing results year after year.

The McKinsey report was based on a study of twenty-five of the world’s school systems, including ten of the top performers. The data came from Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) directed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an organization of thirty countries that accept the principles of representative democracy and free market economy.

“We examined what these high-performing school systems have in common and what tools they use to improve student outcome,” states the report. “The experience of the top schools suggests that three things matter most: 1) getting the right people to become teachers, 2) developing them into effective instructors and, 3) ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.”

These are not exactly breakthrough insights but where the report turns conventional wisdom on its head is the “how” part. How do you get the best teachers? How do you get the best out of teachers? And how do you take corrective actions when students fall behind?

As the Economist pointed out in a commentary on the report, you get the best teachers by hiring the best. In Finland (one of the top performing countries), teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, and Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30% (also top performing countries). Do they do it with more money? No, these countries do not pay teachers more than average salaries. What’s the secret, then? Toughen the selection process for teacher training and only hire numbers to match vacancies. Once employed, as in Singapore and Finland where teaching is regarded as a high-status profession, teachers are more or less guaranteed a job for life if they continue to perform well.

Teaching is a high-status profession in these countries because it is competitive and training is well-funded because there are relatively few qualified candidates. In Singapore, new teachers get 100 hours of training a year. Seniors teachers monitor their progress and help them with their professional development. In Finland and Japan, groups of teachers visit each others’ classrooms to offer constructive criticism and plan lessons together. Every week, Finnish teachers get an afternoon off for this purpose.

The result is that there is a continuity of best practices and enlightened, self-correcting teaching methodologies that nourish the school systems in countries like Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. As one educator put it, “when a brilliant American teacher retires, almost all of the lesson plans and practices that she has developed also retire. When a Japanese teacher retires, she leaves a legacy.”

Yet all the best practices and institutional support cannot guarantee that things will not go wrong. Inevitably they do, and this is again where top performers differentiate themselves from the bottom dwellers. When students and schools show symptoms of failing (defined not by results of standardized tests but deeper and more meaningful educational needs and aspirations), these countries intervene early and often. They have more special-education teachers per student than in lagging countries. In any given year in Finland, for instance, 30% of students get one-on-one remedial lessons. In Singapore, there are extra classes for the bottom 20% of students and teachers are expected to stay after hours to help them come up to speed and excel.

“The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers,” states the McKinsey report. Educators and concerned Americans have echoed the sentiment again and again. Educational spending in America, by way of school funding, school administration, teacher salary, standardized testing, federal policies such as the No Child Left Behind, and an endless array of other panaceas, has almost doubled since 1980. Class sizes have never been smaller. Everything has been tried and retried, yet the only constant in the equation, as the Economist wryly notes, is the poor outcome.

That is not to say there aren’t success stories. Some private organizations in the United States are flourishing and point the way toward progress. One such is Teach for America (TFA). Founded in 1990, TFA has stringent requirements for recruiting young teachers (the rejection rate of applicants is over 80 percent!) from the nation’s top schools to teach in inner-city schools and low income areas. Applicants are driven by a fierce sense of service and a desire to end the nation’s educational inequity. It is telling that for rejected TFA applicants, second career choices include top law and business schools and high-paying Wall Street jobs. Currently TFA has over 4,400 teachers working with almost 400,000 students. By any definition, TFA’s success continues to be astounding.

Another is the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Brainchild of two TFA alumni, KIPP began in 1994 and now has about 60 charter schools nationwide serving 14,000 kids. More than 80% of KIPP students are low income and 95% are black or Latino, yet they regularly outperform their public school counterparts in math and reading tests. Like TFA, KIPP selects its teachers carefully and trains them rigorously before allowing them to practice their profession.

Both TFA and KIPP are transforming not just students but entire communities by promoting the values of hard work, good behavior, discipline, transparency and accountability. The McKinsey report states that “Across the globe – whether it is Canada in North America, Finland in Europe or Japan and Korea in Asia – some education systems demonstrate that excellence in education is an attainable goal and at reasonable cost. They also show that the challenge of achieving a high and socially equitable distribution of learning outcomes can be successfully addressed and that excellence can be achieved throughout the education systems, with very few students and schools left behind.”

If TFA and KIPP can achieve the kind of excellence that the report lauds, there is no reason why such schools cannot be replicated on a mass scale and why America’s public school system cannot also be among the top-performing school systems in the world.

Reviving Science in Muslim Countries

I have been an admirer of Dr. Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy’s writings on bringing about a scientific renaissance among modern-day Muslims. His 1991 book, Islam and Science – Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, was an eye-opener for me. The Quran is a book of moral guidance and not a book of science, he wrote. In one clear sentence, he exposed the inadequacy of Muslims who would do away with the scientific method and install revelation (as they understood it) as the source of scientific progress and discovery. His subsequent writings on the topic only deepened my admiration.

Which was why, in an otherwise incisive article in Physics Today, I was disappointed by a solution he proposed for Muslim renaissance in science. Dr. Hoodbhoy recommends behavioral changes among Muslims to excel in a ruthlessly global marketplace dominated by science and technology. Such changes would allow Muslims to develop intense “social work habits” that “are not easily reconcilable with religious demands made on a fully observant Muslim’s time, energy, and mental concentrations. The faithful must participate in five daily congregational prayers, endure a month of fasting that taxes the body, recite daily from the Quran, and more. Although such duties orient believers admirably well toward success in the life hereafter, they make worldly success less likely. A more balanced approach will be needed.”

Is Dr. Hoodbhoy suggesting that daily prayers, recitation of the Quran and month-long Ramadan fasting are hindrances to a Muslim’s attaining scientific excellence, since they disrupt sustained concentration? Although he does not spell out the details of “a more balanced approach,” the implication is clear: Do away with these religious demands, or, at the very least, reduce their frequency.

I am surprised by the obvious errors Dr. Hoodbhoy has made in his argument. While it is commendable for Muslims to offer the five daily prayers in congregations, it is not a must. The prayers (with the exception of the Friday noon prayer) can be offered in private, taking no more than a few minutes and very little space. In fact, that is how most observant Muslims meet the requirements of their faith during workdays in their professional lives. If, for some reason, they cannot offer the daily prayers on time, they can make them up later.

His use of the word “endure” for the month of fasting is also perplexing. Most Muslims do not “endure” fasting but look forward to it as a time of physical cleansing and heightened spirituality.

The major flaw in Dr. Hoodbhoy’s suggestion is that religious practices prevent observant Muslims from focusing and maintaining the continuity of their thoughts, particularly in science. In fact, the opposite is true. Properly practiced (a challenge for many Muslims for whom religious observances have become rituals without meaning), prayers and fasting instill discipline, a prerequisite for concentration. His mentor, Nobel physicist Abdus Salam, was an obvious example. Salam was one of the great theoretical physicists of the twentieth century but he was also a devout Muslim, punctilious about the demands of his faith. In numerous essays and articles, Salam explained how his faith inspired his science and vice-versa. While most Muslim scientists of our times can hardly match Salam’s achievement, the science of many of them is also informed by the awe and wonder inspired by their faith.

So why are Muslim nations so far behind in science compared to the West? Why does the observation of Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis that “if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice” ring so true? Why is creationist literature unleashed by a Turkish clergy named Harun Yahya sweeping the Muslim world?

One reason is the lack of separation of mosque and state, and consequently, separation of mosque and science, in many Muslim countries. Science thrives on unfettered inquiry. If the clergy can impose religious limits on free inquiry and threaten dire consequences if the limits are transgressed, science can never advance.

Another related reason is the lack of quality education. Take the case of Dr. Hoodbhoy’s own country, Pakistan. As William Dalrymple observed (The 'poor neighbor, The Guardian UK, August 14, 2007) on the occasion of Pakistan’s 60th independence anniversary, only 1.8% of Pakistan's GDP is spent on government schools. 15% of these government schools are without a proper building; 52% without a boundary wall; 71% without electricity. Many of the barely functioning schools cram children of all grades into a single room, often sitting on the floor because of lack of desks. While 65% of India’s population is literate and rising, the figure for Pakistan is 49% and falling. Out of a population of 162 million, 83 million adults of 15 years and above are illiterate. It is worse for women: 65% of all female adults are illiterate. The absence of quality government schooling has compelled the poorest Pakistanis to place their vulnerable children in the madrasa system. Madrasas offer free education but can turn their young wards into ideologues under the tutelage of fiery preachers, as the recent red mosque showdown in Islamabad demonstrated.

When one adds to this grim status quo the general lack of accountability and respect for law by the leaders of many Muslim countries, it is easy to see why engaging in genuine scientific research can become hazardous to one’s health.

Yet there is hope. Even diehard conservative Muslims are becoming aware of the central role of science in defining the destiny of modern nations. Slowly but surely, they are beginning to see that science does not undermine religion but enriches it. The wind of change is blowing and it can be stopped or reversed.

Dark and Mighty Hearts

The recent release of the movie, “A Mighty Heart,” based on the book of the same name by Mariane Pearl, widow of journalist Daniel Pearl who was slain in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002, has revived memories of this harrowing event and its implications in a post-9/11 world that seems to be spinning out of control.

Pearl was the Mumbai-based India correspondent of The Wall Street Journal who arrived in Karachi in January, 2002 with his five-month pregnant wife to pursue the investigation of “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and his possible al-Qaida links in Pakistan.

Trusting, curious and driven by a passion for truth, Pearl agreed to meet a mysterious, elusive imam named Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani whose followers, it was believed, included Reid. A man named Muhammad Bashir arranged the meeting.

It was a trap, and on January 23, 2002, Daniel Pearl walked straight into it.

A frantic search begins when Mariane suspects that her husband has been kidnapped. Pakistan’s intelligence agency (inter-services intelligence, the ISI), US consulate in Karachi and the FBI pool their resources to rescue Pearl.

The movie is faithful to these well-known facts but what is remarkable is the skill with which director Michael Winterbottom conveys them. Although we know at the outset what happens to Pearl, the movie plays like a thriller. Ordinary scenes pulsate with foreboding. Here is Pearl waving goodbye to Mariane as he is driven away in a yellow taxi for his rendezvous with Gilani from the Karachi villa rented by the writer Asra Nomani. Later in the evening, an anxious Pearl riding a different car asks the driver how much longer it will take to reach his destination, and the driver remains silent. Meanwhile, Mariane fights fear, fatigue, bureaucracy and pains of pregnancy to cling to her sanity as the clock ticks away and her husband fails to return.

After five weeks of false leads and midnight raids into the dens of terror suspects in the labyrinthine alleys of Karachi, an FBI agent posing as a journalist receives a grisly video in a hotel lobby. In graphic detail, it shows Pearl being beheaded by his captors weeks earlier, after he is coerced into confessing his “Jewishness.”

Angelina Jolie is brilliant as Mariane Pearl, at once restrained and explosive, worldly and transcendent. When informed that her husband has been murdered, Jolie retreats to her room in a trance and collapses into what has to be among the most heartrending wail in movie history.

Also impressive is an officer whom Mariane calls “Captain.” Played by Irrfan Khan, whom many Americans recently saw as the father in 'Namesake', the "Captain" is the head of Pakistan’s counter-terrorism unit. He vows to Marianne that “I will bring your Danny home” and afterwards, that he will bring Pearl’s killers to justice “even if it is going to take a lifetime, my lifetime.” He speaks softly, but there is no mistaking the steel beneath the velvet.

It was the "Captain" who found that “Bashir,” who lured Daniel into the fatal trap, was in reality Omar Saeed Sheikh, the London School of Economics dropout arrested in 1994 in New Delhi for kidnapping American and British tourists. He was released by the Indian government in exchange for the hostages of an Indian airliner hijacked to Afghanistan in December 1999.

Omar Saeed Sheikh was sentenced to death in July 2002 by a Pakistani court for the murder of Daniel Pearl but with several appeals pending, he remains in jail.

In the tangled world of terror, however, the truth behind the killing of Daniel Pearl remains as elusive as ever.

On March 15, 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks who was captured in Rawalpindi in March 2003, told a U.S. military tribunal that he personally beheaded Daniel Pearl. “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”

Mohammed claimed that he was tortured while in CIA custody, but told the judge at his hearing that he was speaking freely and was telling the truth.

How will Mohammed’s confession affect the fate of Omar Saeed Sheikh? No one seems to know, a source of anger and frustration for Mariane and all those who wish to see justice done.

Mariane, whose mother is Cuban and father Dutch, gave birth to Daniel’s posthumous son, Adam D. Pearl, on May 26, 2002 in Paris. (We learn from the book that as she is getting ready to give birth in the delivery room, she is wearing a long white shirt she and Danny bought in Dhaka, Bangladesh.) Through Adam, she hopes to continue the legacy of her husband.

What is this legacy? As Mariane explains, it is to remain true to your purpose in life and to never let hate consume you. It is to reject a Manichean worldview where subjective versions of good vs. evil is locked in an eternal battle, a world without hope, a world where violence is the only solution.

“Part of my ‘revenge’ (against the fanatics) was that my purpose wouldn’t change – not how I live, the work that I do or my approach to the world,” she recently said in TIME magazine. In response to “Has your view of Islam changed?”, Mariane replied, “No, it hasn’t changed at all. I grew up with Muslim people, so I was very acquainted with Islam. So it is not like the people who killed Danny taught me what Islam was about. They are hijackers of their own faith.”

And when asked, “You have a great love for the Pakistani people. Has that love changed?”, Mariane said, “Not at all … For me the nationality and the religion is really a secondary matter. For me, it is all a matter of human behavior … The people who I truly love in Pakistan are the most noble, powerful and deep people that I have ever met in my life. At times like that you encounter the worst human behavior possible, so you are also going to be very sensitive to the best human behavior possible ...”

In the context of the war on terror waged by the U.S. government since 9/11, in which the certitude of zealots is matched by the certitude of the movers and shakers in Washington, Mariane Pearl is a beacon.

While she is more eager than anyone to see the killers of her husband, and the killers of innocent people anywhere, brought to justice, she has achieved the ultimate victory against the extremists by remaining true to her goal, and her husband’s, of bridging races, religions and cultures through compassion and understanding. She has done this without in any way compromising with the fanatics and their nihilistic ideologies.

Like her husband, Mariane gives substance to Hemingway’s observation about the fearless fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

Against the mighty hearts of the likes of the Captain and the Pearls, the heart of darkness symbolized by the likes of Omar Saeed Sheikh and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad stand no chance. There is a lesson here: Never succumb to despair, and never allow fear to overcome courage and hope.

Inventing Suicidal Jihadists

I turned on the radio the other day and Michael Savage, the right-wing radio host, was thundering about the "Trojan Horse" of Islamic radicalism in America. We are fast approaching the tipping point by allowing Muslim hordes to immigrate to this country, he said. Before you know it, homegrown jihadists will run us over and Islam will become America’s state religion.

What triggered Savage’s outburst was a poll released on May 22 by the Pew Research Center. Any objective reader would be heartened by the findings: a majority of American Muslims are assimilated into the larger society, are law-abiding and moderate in their views, value hard work and love America. This, despite the fact that since the 9/11 attacks, many Muslims (54%) feel that life in America has become more difficult for them and that they are singled out by the government for extra scrutiny.

But the poll also found that 15% young Muslims, between the ages of 18 and 29, consider suicide bombing justified “often” (2%) or “sometimes” (13%). If you add the young Muslims who “rarely” (11%) approve (but approve nonetheless) such bombings, that would be about one-in-four Muslim youth who think that blowing oneself up to kill others can in some ways be rationalized.

It is this single cherry-picked statistic from the 108-page Pew document titled “Muslim Americans, Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream” (PDF) that has caused the hate-mongers to hyperventilate about the supposedly existential threat Muslims pose to America.

Will right-wing zealots like Michelle Malkin, Robert Spencer and Michael Savage, who have made careers out of the Muslim bogeyman, ever change their thinking?

For perspective, I talked with Tahir Anwar, Imam of the South Bay Islamic Center of San Jose.

“No, I don’t think we Muslims can do anything to change their minds,” said Tahir. “They have an agenda and they are sticking with it. They see us as fanatics out to destroy America. We should be happy that the Pew poll has affirmed that we are normal people, with dreams and aspirations like other Americans. I hope most of our fellow Americans will understand that and not be swayed by such people.”

“What about one-in-four Muslim youth voicing varying degrees of support for suicide bombings?" I asked. "How do you explain that?”

“I am not sure how so many young people can be so misguided, if the poll, in fact, reflects reality," he said. "It may have something to do with our Middle East policy, the cruel war in Iraq, the plight of the Palestinians. It may be that they were harassed and intimidated in schools and workplaces. But nothing can justify this mindset. We have an obligation to find the root cause of such thinking and do something about it. I would be concerned if even a single Muslim in America, or, for that matter, anywhere else, thought that suicide bombing could be justified in any way. It is wrong, period.”

“What will you personally do about it?” I asked.

“My next few Friday sermons will be on this topic. I will make it clear to my congregation – and I hope they will spread the message – that suicide bombing has no sanctity whatsoever in Islam. I will also engage the youth of our community in frank discussions.”

Poll results become more meaningful in context. One finding that also got publicity was that while 49% Muslim Americans believed in the separation of mosque and state, 43% believed that mosques should express their views on social and political questions. Yet a Pew survey in 2006 found that while 43% Christians believed in the separation of church and state, a majority of Christians (54%) felt that church and other houses of worship should be open and forceful about their political and social views.

Likewise, while 80% American Muslims oppose attacks on civilians according to the Pew poll, 13% said some circumstances may justify such attacks. Yet, in a poll conducted by the University of Maryland in December 2006, 24% of Americans thought that such attacks were justified “often” or “sometimes,” while another 27% thought they were justified in rare cases.

While many online media commentators focused on the predominantly positive aspects of the Pew poll, virulent talking heads continue to fan the flames of anti-Muslim hysteria. Listening to them uncritically can suggest that young Muslims are lurking on the street corners of America to kill themselves and passers-by with crude contraptions.

For edification, I made a final enquiry. Without informing him of the Pew poll, I asked my 18-year old son about possible justifications for suicide bombings.

“No way,” he said. “Those who do it are brainwashed. I hate what our country is doing in Iraq but I will never support suicide bombing. Never.”

Faith, Reason and the Templeton Prize

The 2007 Templeton Prize “For Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities” was recently awarded to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor for his insights into the nature of the secular and the sacred and how one without the other can be perilous for mankind. “The divorce of natural science and religion has been damaging to both,” he said, “but it is equally true that the culture of the humanities and social sciences has often been surprisingly blind and deaf to the spiritual.” The 75-year old McGill University emeritus professor has called for new insights into the human propensity for violence, one that also takes “full account of the human striving for meaning and spiritual direction, of which the appeals to violence are a perversion.”

The American philanthropist John Templeton created the annual prize in 1973 to recognize research in spirituality and its possible confluence with science. He made it the most lucrative prize in the world – at more than $1.5 million, it is larger than the Nobel Prize – to emphasize that we are shaped more by our spiritual longings than by any other factor, and therefore advances in the understanding of spirituality should also begat more attention and recognition. (Given the 72 years headstart the Nobel had over the Templeton, this may take a while!)

Of late, religion, spirituality and God have been under assault by militant secularists whose ranks include prominent scientists. Leading the charge is Richard Dawkins, professor of public understanding of science at Oxford University. His book, The God Delusion, has been on the best-seller list for several months now. Dawkins suffers from no shades of gray. God is unnecessary, he says, because science - evolution, randomness, physical laws and such - can explain everything. If anything does lie beyond the scope of science, it has no meaning and is therefore irrelevant. His fellow-travelers include the neuroscientist Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason) and Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) among others.

For every atheist or agnostic scientist or philosopher, however, there are at least a hundred who are passionate about their faith or at least open to the possibility of a Supreme Being. One such is the geneticist Francis Collins who led the successful effort to complete the Human Genome Project, a multidisciplinary enterprise to map and sequence the human DNA. Collins refutes Dawkins by asserting that God lies beyond the reach of science, beyond space and time, and so cannot be explained by science. God used His creative power to bring all creation into being. If we keep an open mind, we can detect God’s handiwork in the signs He has strewn about us, from the large-scale drama of the universe to the intricate world of sub-atomic particles. Author of The Language of God, he bemoans the fact that many of the current battles between atheists and fundamentalists have really been started by the scientific community, which he feels is an enormous tragedy.

Collins summarizes the beliefs of many scientists such as that of the astronomer Owen Gingerich who makes the point in God’s Universe of the existence of a Creator. The Muslim astrophysicist Bruno Guiderdoni draws inspiration from his faith in his research on galaxy formation. The fundamental mystery that animates physics and cosmology, he believes, is that the world is intelligible. The Nobel physicist Abdus Salam (1979) found in his faith the inspiration to delve into the mysteries and symmetries of fundamental particles. A list of recent Templeton Prize winners also illustrates the point: physicist Freeman Dyson (2000), chemist Arthur Peacocke (2001), mathematical physicist John Polkinghorne (2002), applied mathematician George Ellis (2004), Nobel physicist Charles Townes (2005) and mathematician John Barrow (2006). They were cited not for their scientific or mathematical discoveries but for their efforts to show in their distinctive ways that science and religion are two windows looking out on the same universe.

If scientists can be inspired by their faiths, can theologians and religious leaders be inspired by science? Certainly, and one example will suffice. In his book The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, the Dalai Lama writes eloquently about his fascination with science from an early age “It was not very long before the colossal significance of science for humanity dawned on me - especially after I came into exile in 1959. There is almost no area of human life today that is not touched by the effects of science and technology.” Yet he warns of the danger of trying to find within a purely scientific context answers to questions such as the meaning of life or good and evil. “The problem is not with the empirical data of science but with the contention that these data alone constitute the legitimate ground for developing a comprehensive worldview or an adequate means for responding to the world’s problems … By the same token, spirituality must be tempered by the insights and discoveries of science. If as spiritual practitioners we ignore the discoveries of science, our practice is also impoverished, as this mindset can lead to fundamentalism.”

The Templeton prize celebrates those who seek to reconcile the ancient adversaries of science and religion by confronting difficult questions head-on, such as those raised by Darwinian atheists and religious fundamentalists. It celebrates the middle ground between the dispassionate observer and the devout believer, suggesting that the two can be fused into one for a full and creative life.