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Vermiculate. Lobscouse. Desuetude. Macerate.

Just about every American high school student who has planned to attend university has had to learn words such as these in preparation for the SAT exam that is used as part of the college admissions process.

Now, by learning these words, whether for fun or for test preparation, you can also help end hunger. A computer programmer created a Web site, Freerice.com, that throws multiple-choice vocabulary questions at you. For every one you answer correctly, the site donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. The first few questions are relatively easy, but as you answer questions correctly, subsequent ones become progressively more difficult.

Advertising income pays for the donated rice. The site averages close to 200,000 hits daily, and since October 7, 6.9 billion grains have been donated. How munificent.

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A new study published Thursday by the American Institutes for Research shows that U.S. students still lag behind their peers in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan in the critical areas of math and science education. Numerous other reports over the last several years have purported to show the same mediocre quality of the U.S. education system. In 2005, Microsoft founder Bill Gates described the U.S. high schools as "obsolete." President Bush mentioned the need for greater emphasis on math and science achievement in his 2006 State of the Union address. And just last month, an influential group of tech-industry CEOs from such companies as Cisco and Sun Microsystems added their voices to the choir of business leaders demanding changes to the U.S. education system.

But what do these reports, studies, and rankings really tell us? Not a whole lot, according to Vivek Wadhwa, whose recent article in BusinessWeek debunks many of the common misconceptions about U.S. math and science education. Even Singapore's minister of education has downplayed the importance of such rankings, despite Singapore's first-place status:

[The U.S.] is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well--like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."

The World Economic Forum's recent 2007/2008 Global Competitiveness Report supports that conclusion. In it, the United States maintained its position as the world's most innovative economy despite the shoddy performance of its math and science education, which ranked 45th. Singapore, meanwhile, stayed in first place in math and science education but came in at a disappointing 23rd in capacity for innovation and 22nd for the availability of scientists and engineers—10 places below the United States in the same category.

Even if U.S. math and science education is not completely inadequate, there is still one area in which the United States can vastly improve: geography. Miss South Carolina's less-than-shining moment earlier this year was no fluke; National Geographic's 2006 Survey of Geographic Literacy found that 63 percent of young people in the United States could not find Iraq on a map and 50 percent couldn't even locate New York.

Many of Passport's readers are college students who are looking to launch careers in foreign policy. As it's job-huntin' season on campus, here's a timely guest post from Peter W. Singer, a military expert at the Brookings Institution and the author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, on how to become a foreign-policy wonk.

We hope you find it helpful.

Frequently, I get e-mails from young students who want to know how to crack into the world of foreign policy. Below are the most frequent questions and my answers, which FP thought actually might be of use or at least amusement. Please judge their worth by the amount of money that you paid for them.

How did you decide to get into the foreign-policy world?

I've been interested in these issues since as long as I can remember. I was the weird kid in elementary school, who for book reports would choose Soviet Military Power (the Pentagon's somewhat overhyped annual report on the Red menace) rather than Sweet Valley High or The Boxcar Kids. Yes, it was totally nerdy. Guilty as charged. By the time I got to college, I applied to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as my major. If I didn't get in, my backup plan was to go into the history field. Fortunately, I did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. When it came time to figure out a job afterwards, I flirted a bit with the idea of becoming a management consultant. My thinking was that I could feed the beast by getting subscriptions to various political magazines to read in my off time, while I made scads of money merely for using words like "synergy," "leverage," or "optimize." But I soon realized that I didn't know what those words actually meant and I would shoot myself after a few months. So, I went into the foreign-policy business instead.

[If you're reading this from the main page, read on after the break]

Breaking news: 

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited President Bush to speak at an Iranian university if the American leader ever traveled to the Islamic Republic, state-run television reported Friday.

So who's the Lee Bollinger of Iran? 

Aren't MIT students supposed to be smart?

An MIT student wearing what turned out to be a fake bomb was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.

Star Simpson, 19, had a computer circuit board and wiring in plain view over a black hooded sweatshirt she was wearing, said State Police Maj. Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport. [...]

The battery-powered rectangular device had nine flashing lights, and Simpson had Play-Doh in her hands, Pare said.

The phrases "Socket to me" and "Course VI" were written on the back of her sweatshirt, which authorities displayed to the media. Course VI appears to refer to MIT's major of electrical engineering and computer science.

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The Indian district of Satara in the state of Maharashtra just announced a creative new plan to control soaring birth rates: offering to pay for a second honeymoon for couples who delay the birth of their first child by two years. The "honeymoon package" is worth 5,000 rupees ($125), or around 7,500 rupees ($175) if couples wait three years. It will go into effect on August 15th. Authorities expect 4,000 fewer births per year as a result of the plan.

India's population is growing at a rate of 1.7 percent per year, and is set to overtake China's by 2025. So an imaginative solution like Satara's to curb population "explosion" should be welcomed and repeated elsewhere in India, right?

Actually, no—it's incredibly short-sighted. While India's population is still increasing, it is also rapidly aging. In a few short generations, India will face the same demographic pressures—coupled with a far lower per capita income base—as other aging societies around the world. By 2050, the median age in India will be 38.6. The country definitely won't be as old as Japan or even the United States, but its problems will be at least as severe. Roughly 40 percent of Indians drop out of school before the age of 10, a quarter of Indian primary school age children are not in school, and only 11 percent of Indians, who are relatively affluent anyway, have pensions. "Social security" in India has traditionally meant dependence on extended families, particularly children. If these children aren't born, or aren't educated well enough to be able to provide for their aging parents, India's economy will be under immense strain. So to my mind, a much better idea would be to replace the "honeymoon package" with an "education package."

What's your name? Where are you from? Did you vote for Bush?

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That's how one American student studying in Germany describes the start of a typical conversation with a German student. With anti-U.S. sentiment at an all-time high in Germany (as you might be able to tell from the picture at left), many American college students complain that they've become unofficial ambassadors for the United States, forced to justify Washington's every policy move.

To cool tensions down, the German-American Institute at the University of Tübingen launched a program called "Rent an American." American college students visit high schools. They bring photos of their lives back home and talk about the United States. They answer students' tough questions about Bush, war, the death penalty, and climate change. It helps that most American students in Germany seem to oppose Bush—it's not clear how this program would work if red-state Republicans had to answer students' pointed questions.

At the very least, the program shows German teens that a substantial fraction of Americans aren't blind followers of their president. And for the exchange students, it's a rude awakening to what studying abroad is all about.

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In the 2001 electoral campaign, Silvio Berlusconi festooned Italy's walls with gigantic posters announcing the beginning of the Internet age in the country's schools. Forget Latin and ancient Greek; the Internet would breed a new class of modern-day entrepreneurs. Italians liked that message, and Berlusconi won the race (though perhaps his tax cuts were the real reason for his victory). 

But in Italy, the second-favorite national sport—after soccer, of course—is reforming public education. Each time a new government steps in, it rushes to undo what the previous government has put in place.

And so the Internet itself, with its associations with Berlusconi, has become Italy's latest political football. The new guidelines published by the ministry of education speak of "preventing cases of [teen] dependency on drugs, alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, [sports] doping, and the Internet" (my translation). It's an implicit rebuke of the previous administration, whose championing of the World Wide Web presumably created not venture capitalists, but video-game addicts.

What seems to have escaped both the left and the right, though, is that there are still very few computers in Italian schools. In 2001, there was one computer for every 30 kids, and although Italy is catching up, it still has a long way to go. Isn't it a little premature to worry about the dangers of Internet dependency among the little wannabe entrepreneurs?

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It is a generally accepted axiom that the Vietnam War helped make America's baby boom generation one of the most socially aware generations in history. They knew what was going on in the world, even if the majority of them didn't like it. Might the war in Iraq be having the same impact on the current generation of young Americans?

Nope. Not according to a study (pdf) released yesterday by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, at least. Nearly one in three American teenagers, according to the report, pay almost no attention to daily news. Another 32 percent are merely "casually attentive." So, taken together, 60 percent of teens can be considered to be basically uninterested in what's happening in the world.

News flash: Teenagers are apathetic. Tell me something I don't know, right? It's tempting to just dismiss this as normal pubescent behavior. But that might be a mistake; these numbers appear to represent a sea change. "A few decades ago," the report notes, "there were not large differences in the news habits and daily information levels of younger and older Americans."

But surely, you say, "the Internet" must be informing America's youth. Apparently not. Just one in five teenagers say they get exposure to news on the Internet everyday, and two thirds of the teens who say they do get some news from the Internet also say they're not seeking it out, they "just happen to come across it."

I bet that if the military draft came back, though, you'd suddenly find U.S. teens paying rapt attention to what's going on out there.

The first year of graduate-level economics can be a rough experience, a wake-up call after four years of production possibility frontiers and utility curves. And now, stressed-out Ph.D. students have a new reason to tear their hair out: Not only does their first-year performance strongly predict whether they'll complete their Ph.D., but first-year microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics grades are also statistically significant predictors of job placement, according to new research by a team of top economics professors that includes Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame.

The results of the study, published in the latest issue of the American Economic Review, also show that Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores, foreign citizenship, sex, and having a prior master's degree do not predict job placement. Interestingly, though, students who attend a foreign undergraduate institution perform "significantly better" in micro, macro and 'metrics, but on average, this doesn't give them much of a leg up on the job market. That's because the researchers also found, unsurprisingly, that "students who attended elite undergraduate universities and liberal arts colleges are more likely to be placed in top-ranked academic jobs."

This holds even though those students "do not perform significantly differently from other students."

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Readers of the New York Times might have been lucky enough to catch this gem of a story in the Metro section yesterday. In response to the already large and rapidly growing Chinese population of Flushing Queens, non-Asian residents are starting to attend free Mandarin classes being offered by the community. Many longtime residents resent the intrusion of new Asian immigrants. But many are adapting to their changing neighborhood by learning how to communicate better. The current session's class boasts a diverse group of longtime Flushing residents: an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor born in Poland, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, and an African-American woman who grew up in a local housing project.

The 85-year-old, a retired stockbroker named Frank Sygal, already speaks Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Hebrew, English, and Spanish. Chinese would be his eighth language.

His progress has been maddeningly slow; at one point, Mr. Sygal approached "dozens" of Chinese people, he said, in a fruitless attempt to translate the word "ka-ching," a term he had seen in a headline in The New York Post and assumed to be Chinese. He hopes that he will be able to carry on a conversation in Mandarin by the time he is 95.

Nevertheless, Sygal may be his class's most persistent student:

His first question of the night during one recent class, delivered in the accent of his native Poland, was followed rapidly by several dozen follow-ups: "Why do you say two words for 'bladder'? I have one bladder! For one bladder it's two words? What is word for state of Israel? What is word for 'oral surgeon'? If I go to study medicine in China, what do they teach me?”

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For the past five years, India has been the leading country of origin for international students studying in the United States, with over 80,000 Indians enrolled in American institutions in 2004-05. Now, American universities are trying to tap right into the country's education market, so they're heading to India directly.

For two years, presidential delegations from Harvard, Yale and Stanford, to name just a few, have visited India to scope the talent. A number of top schools, including Columbia Business School and the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, collaborate on exchange programs with Ahmedabad's famous Indian Institute of Management, while Carnegie Mellon offers a degree in partnership with the small private Shri Shiv Shankar Nadar College of Engineering in Chennai.

India's regulations in this area are still ambiguous, but that's changing. Proposed new laws would make it easier for foreign universities to set up campuses in the country and offer their own curriculum and degrees. This is sure to appeal to India's growing middle class, which places considerable prestige on foreign education. And in a country where around 40 percent of the population is under 18 and quality domestic higher education is stretched to the limit (only two percent of test-takers for admission to the Indian Institutes of Management and Technology get accepted), foreign involvement may offer a practical, mutually beneficial solution.

Speaking of the Turks, a vocational college in Hamburg, Germany, is offering a new certificate class, "Meat Processing with Döner Kebab Production Specialization."

The course is part of initiatives to encourage young people with immigrant backgrounds to get professional training. "Mainly people with migrant backgrounds and Turkish people work in this business but few have qualifications," said Kazim Abaci, head of Companies Without Borders, a German association designed to promote integration in the workplace. "We want to give those people a better chance and make them re-employable."

Most employees of kebab joints in Germany are of Turkish descent, so the program is clearly aimed at that group rather than at immigrants generally. It's either a transparent attempt to inculcate Turkish-Germans into the Teutonic obsession with cleanliness, or a clever way to reach a population that remains separated from the rest of the country in many ways. Whatever the case, it's good news that German NGOs are thinking of practical ways to integrate the approximately 2.5 million residents of Turkish descent into society, rather than letting the xenophobes set the agenda, as has sometimes happened in other European countries.

Over to you, France.

A public school that aims to teach Arabic language and culture to students in grades 6-12 is set to open this September in New York City. Ideally, half the students will have a background in Arabic language and culture, and half will not.

Given the well-known shortage of people in the U.S. military and intelligence services who are fluent in Arabic, you'd think Americans would be excited by a school that prepares students with language skills and cultural knowledge that are essential in the "war on terrorism." Already, there's been a surge in the number of college students who are learning Arabic, and that hasn't been controversial.

Unfortunately, a quick Google search reveals that some people are already criticizing the school. One conservative blogger asks, "Why should New York tax payers have to foot the bill for children to study Arabic culture?"

Hmmm ... maybe it's because preparing students to be global citizens with successful careers in international affairs, international business, and the military is in the public interest? (The U.S. federal government seems to think so. In August 2002, it set up the National Middle East Language Resource Center, which supports K-12 programs.)