we are the man of sun.

The one experience that I hope you have in either high school or college is to have some belief that you profoundly (and) deeply hold proved to be wrong. Because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have. And as a scientist, to me, it’s the most exciting experience I could ever have.

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I think that a sixteen-year-old who has had comprehensive sex education and who’s been taught to have a healthy perspective on the emotional and physical responsibilities that come with sex is a lot more prepared for a sexual relationship than a twenty-one-year-old who has known only shame-based abstinence-only education and virginity pledges.

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There is now a systematic global comparison of scholastic performance of fifteen-year-olds carried out every three years as part of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), currently covering sixty-five countries. The 2009 results are chastening. On the one hand, the United States ranked only fifteenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and thirty-first in mathematics. On the other hand, Shanghai, China, ranked number one in all three categories, and the fast-rising developing economies of Asia (including South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong) all ranked in the top ten, dramatically outperforming the United States. This is perhaps the starkest wake-up call in recent memory about our lagging educational performance and its implications for the future, yet it made hardly a blip in the U.S. media.

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