Bob Compton, a Memphis venture capitalist, has produced a film documentary called “Two Million Minutes.” It's an hour-long comparison of high school students in America, China and India.

Compton made the film as part of his investigation into why foreign students seem to do so much better than American students in the core academic disciplines.

He took his little movie to be reviewed by the experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education - and was nearly booed out of the room. If guys with PhDs from Harvard would actually stoop to booing.

One of the PhDs said flatly, “We have nothing to learn from Third World education ...”

Educators in China might argue the Third World designation, but the simple fact is that our educational establishment - advanced degrees and all - can't argue with results. And the results are that students in most nations that have an organized school system - Third World or not - have higher test scores than their U.S. counterparts.

And it's not just in math and science. In the making of his documentary, Compton discovered that young people in India generally know more U.S. history than people their age in this country.

In the Harvard confrontation, Compton also was told China's educational outcome should not be compared to America's because there's no free speech in China. Compton correctly asked, what does a nation's politics have to do with how well its children are taught in school?

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Even if the eggheads at Harvard don't see a problem in the learning gap between U.S. students and those in other countries, our business leaders certainly do. A CEO of a national high-tech company said if U.S. students don't pick up the learning pace, the United States will be far behind much of the rest of the world with regard to technical expertise and know-how, and the horizon is only a few years out.

The film title, “Two Million Minutes,” is a reference to the amount of time a kid spends in high school. All the film maker is really trying to say is we need to find better ways to make those minutes count.

June 20, 2008