Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently told the nation's governors that American high school education is 'obsolete(陈旧的).' He said, 'When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In 2001; India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S. and has six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. America is falling behind.' Gates was describing a global economy in which the chance to move up into a better economic life is slipping overseas, along with jobs that can be performed anywhere-manufacturing in China, technology support in India, online order fulfillment across borders. The Internet brings Bhutan and Bangalore just as close to our offices and living rooms as Boise. Maybe closer. Our children's competitors are not the other schools in the district or the state or even the nation. They are the technologically literate young people in Taiwan, India, Korea, and other developing nations. For today's American students, learning and retraining will be a lifelong experience. In The World is Flat, a recent book analyzing the shift in the global economy, Thomas Friedman points out that the dot. com bubble inspired a massive outlay(花费) of capital to connect the continents. Undersea cable, universal software, high-tech imagery, and Google have erased geography. College graduates in Latin America, Central Asia, India, China, and Russia can do the information work Americans used to count on—in many cases better and in all cases cheaper. We are burning through reliable careers for our young people at high speed as technology relieves us of the tedium of repetitive work. The robots that vacuum our floors today will be filling our teeth tomorrow. Even jobs at Wal-Mart are endangered. Have you seen the self-check-out lanes? No cashiers required. To be competitive now, U.S. students must develop sophisticated critical thinking and analytical skills to manage the conceptual nature of the work they will do. They will need to be able to recognize patterns, create narrative, and imagine solutions to problems we have yet to discover. They will have to see the big picture and ask the big questions. How many high schools do you know that are nurturing minds like that? Are we supplying the conditions in our schools to create a new crop of original thinkers? Are we making sure our curricula and instructional programs are not relegated(降级) for repetitive practice, gathering and organizing information, remediation, and test preparation? Are we requiring all students to use their minds well to construct knowledge, to inquire, to invent, to make meaning and relevance out of their learning? Hardly. Bill Gates believes that the American high schools are 'obsolete' in______.