Lesson of Global Competition: The World is Flat

Using the Wall Street Journal in your classes can introduce the topic of global competition for your students. This is very important because the world has become flat - another important reason to integrate the Journal into your classes.

With daily current-events discussions, international themes constantly emerge in our class discussions. I tell my students that they are not just competing with the student sitting next to them, or worse yet, the student that has already dropped the course! Competition for jobs is cropping up all round the world. Fortunately I don't have to lecture my students about the career challenges facing them - they read about foreign impact on domestic industries and jobs in the Journal everyday.

Reading "The World is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman confirmed my views and efforts on this topic. He is actually pretty rough on parents in their upbringing of our college students. Friedman criticizes the sense of entitlement parents have encouraged, which hampers our young people in adapting to a flat world.

On page 305, he states "Our children will increasingly be competing head-to-head with Chinese, Indian, and Asian kids, whose parents have a lot more... character-building approach than their own American parents. I am not suggesting that we militarize education, but I am suggesting that we do more to push our young people to go beyond their comfort zones, to do things right, and to be ready to suffer some short-run pain for longer gain."

But we cannot control the parents of our students - we take them as we get them! So what can we share with them? Friedman writes on page 264, "One cannot stress enough: Young Chinese, Indians, and Poles are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. They do not want to work for us; they don't even want to be us. They want to dominate us - in the sense that they want to be creating the companies of the future that people all over the world will admire and clamor to work for."

I try to help them see the importance of lifetime learning and career flexibility, the value of critical thinking, and adding value to an organization. Our students, more than any generation before them, must be ready to change jobs or career paths as the need arises. Only then will they be the Americans who benefits from globalization, rather than suffer from it.

The Journal has been an important tool for these discussions, with articles serving as real-life verification of the challenges they will. It's our job to educate them, but also to prepare them for the future - instructing them in both knowledge of business information, as well as the realities of this new world economy.