In Search of a Sputnik Moment

Mrs. Davenport, my fourth-grade teacher at Fall Creek School in Ithaca, N.Y., planted her straight-backed chair in front of her desk and proceeded to lead a serious discussion, starting with a review of the news and the physics of rockets and satellites. Already, Tsinghua has two-thirds of the annual patent activity of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on a campus as impressive in its libraries, classrooms and laboratories as the great research universities of the United States.