GlennReynolds.com - Glenn Reynolds - MSNBC.com

This is one reason I'm going the private school route for the kids next year...GlennReynolds.com - Glenn Reynolds - MSNBC.com: "In my last post about the Spelling Bee documentary, Spellbound, I noted that smart kids often feel isolated, and that even though it's cooler to be a geek than it used to be, smartness and hard work aren't especially valued in middle school and high school. You can certainly see that in Spellbound. You might also notice that many of the spelling finalists are from immigrant families. Two, in fact, are from India, where smartness and hard work are very highly valued indeed. (Perhaps too highly, or at least too harshly -- one contestant's father remarks that you don't get second chances in India.)

But I couldn't help thinking about that as I read Dan Pink's cover story in this month's Wired about outsourcing. The Wired cover features an Indian woman as 'the new face of the silicon age,' and the piece makes clear that Americans need to be focusing more on valuing smartness and hard work. As a sidebar piece by Chris Anderson puts it, India represents a 'practically infinite pool of smart, educated, English-speaking people eager to work.' And behind India, there's China."