Last week representatives from Drexel University were able to join ASEE for a brown bag luncheon seminar in which they discussed their outreach efforts to K-12 students and the global engineering community. When discussing their ENGR 280: Introduction to Global Engineering they mentioned briefly a film they show students in the class. The film, 2 Million Minuets is a documentary that follows 6 high school students, two in the United States, two in China and two in India through the two million minutes they spend in high school. The main intention of the film is to show how students in each society use this time to prepare themselves for the future. The resulting documentary depicts the American education system as “broken” and shows top American high school students as slackers in comparison to their global peers.

However, the portrayal of students in this film is stereotypical. The American honor student is a pretty blond who wants to join a sorority in college, while the Chinese student wears an over sized sweater and is shown diligently practicing violin. The students are not representative of all American, Chinese and Indian students in the world but rather examples carefully picked to make a point. Yet, even if the film had fewer extremes the message is clear, the American education system lets students off easy and as a result they are not as well prepared to compete with in a global society.

The video above is only a trailer (and as much as I dislike over-dramatized trailers) I could not find the whole length film online. The film is out on video and a DVD can be ordered on the 2 Million Minutes website.