There is a lessons learned from America who is grappling its declining superpower. Newsweek magazine places America as 11th (not 1st) best country in the world. In the wake of financial crisis and 2 unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems America has lost everything. Apart from computer gadget and software, America has faced fierce competition, not only from the established nation like Japan, but now also from new emerging countries such as China and India.
Declining nation likely attributes to its education. The big budget American school reforms result in only meager success. The average students' test scores so this still-underperformed ability whereas the reforms had covered many aspect of education including the great teacher, institution improvement, better principal, better student-teacher ratio . The Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson proposed another cause which is almost unmentionable: students shrinking motivation.
Thomas Friedman spelled out this low-level motivation as the consequence of disappeared threats. In the last century, Americans had a clear and present danger of depression, Nazi and Communism. Now all of them are gone, so Americans has less reason to work hard, develop innovation and sacrifice for the country.
As the threats are gone, so is the spirit.
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From this lessons learned, we come to conclusion that it is imperative for a nation to have a real challenge, a real problem to solve and a single theme to garner resources to achieve one goal. A threat should be renewed in each generation.
In Indonesia we have Bung Karno whom a great leader of our nation coining "Merdeka" (freedom) as the then-aspiration of the nation. It was a great success because different tribes, different languages across Dutch-administration Indonesia marched behind Bung Karno leadership. However Bung Karno failed to elevate to the next step to develop economy and modern institution of government. He cannot relinquish himself from the revolutionary tone even when we don't need it anymore.
To some extent, Pak Harto succeeded to coin "Pembangunan" (development) as a single theme during his long stint. Despite his weakness to control corruption and nepotism, he outperformed any Indonesia's presidents in terms of economy and national pride. Owing to Pak Harto, we inherited stability and cornerstone to develop.
In similar vein, Mahathir Mohammad of Malaysia has one thing describing his entire policy, to enhance Malay's standard of living. Deng Xiaoping struggled for decades to prove the socialism does exist and it is not the same with poverty.
So, a nation should encapsulate its challenges and create a simple theme to address them so that the whole components of nation: teachers, researchers, businessmen, government officers give their best to achieve the clear national goal.
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