Tim Ryan: “Think of the ripple effect. Throughout our society, from wages to new inventions, new patents, the whole 9 yards, the…”

“Think of the ripple effect. Throughout our society, from wages to new inventions, new patents, the whole 9 yards, the ripple effect throughout the community. We have a business incubator in one of our towns, in Youngstown that is, whether it is computers or science or whatever, creating jobs in our urban centers; and you begin to put together a program where you have research, you have engineering graduates, you have business incubators, you have the arts. One of the things that I want to add to that, when I was in China, I went for 2 weeks in August. The two things that the Chinese were saying that American engineers have that those 600,000 do not have, they really do not have the skills that we have. We are more creative and we work in teams better, and they were saying that they just cannot teach the Chinese how to do these things, no matter how hard they try. One party system, Communist system, everything is very narrow. You always look to the hierarchy. It is just very narrow thinking. It occurred to me that the very two things, in addition to not creating enough engineers, but the very two things that give us our competitive advantage around the globe are the first two things that we usually cut in our schools, the arts programs and the team programs, the pay-to-play, where kids get boxed out. It is basketball season now for high schools, 12 varsity kids, 12 junior varsity kids and a freshman team, and that is it. No one else gets to play.…”