American Education for America

For years, we’ve been mulling over the fact that American students rank lower than expected in math and science. What we often ignore, however, is a harder, murkier question: how do students fare on less test-friendly subjects such as creativity and problem solving?

I spent the last year working in the education sector in Bangalore, a city often called “India’s Silicon Valley.” One striking difference I observed between Bangalore and the Bay Area is that Bangalore generally lacks a culture of innovative entrepreneurship. India is home to some of the most successful information technology service companies like Infosys and Wipro, but the country hasn’t yet produced a Google or a Facebook, the type of company that fundamentally changes the way we communicate, advertise, share knowledge, and construct our world. The envelope-pushers start in America.

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Book Review: David Loyn - In Afghanistan

In a new reoccurring feature, The Inductive will review relevant policy books.

David Loyn's In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation tells the story of history forgotten and repeated.  Afghanistan has never been important in and of itself, but it touches so many important things, geographically, strategically, politically and religiously, that the great powers sought to possess it and had to pay again and again to learn that it will not be ruled.  Peppered with references to current battles in its descriptions of the violence of antiquity and as it reaches the modern day the locations reveal the permanent violence that we continue.  I felt overwhelmed by the sense that our current war there was not even the culmination of history, but its pathetic continuation as a lesson forever unlearned.  

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Bombay: One Year Later

A landmark burns.It has been almost a year since "India's 9/11", the terrorist murders in Bombay – a fitting description considering the similarities.  Both attacks were perpetrated by low-level foot soldiers of larger extremist Muslim conspiracies, spreading out in small teams to maximize the carnage inflicted on the population to achieving the goal of massive destruction and loss of life and paralyze the respective countries with fear.  

The level of technological sophistication employed in organizing and carrying out the attacks was striking.  The terrorists used modern gadgets to coordinate their violence.  Blackberries, anonymous email accounts, GPS tracking systems, and satellite phones all contributed to the methodical precision with which the attacks were executed. A few months after the attack, the Indian government released the transcripts of cell phone conversations between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan.  These conversations raise tough questions about the ease with which these attackers were able to enter the country undetected, aided only by common technology and the chilling instructions of their handler.  How difficult is it really to carry out a terrorist attack like the one in Mumbai?

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