Costa Rica Construction - 24 hours per day.

There's only one construction site that I know of in Costa Rica that's working 24 hours

per day, seven days per week come rain - and it does rain here - or shine...

On more than a few occasions, I have discussed education with my girlfriend's 15 year old

son and the competition that he will face when he eventually starts looking for a job 'if'

Milan decides not to take him on as a professional soccer player.

Needless to say, he knows nothing about work and certainly hasn't got a clue how hard

it is to make a living now never mind how much harder it will be for him in the future

Maybe it's my imagination but I seem to remember some ancient requirement in school

called 'homework' and, what is now an obviously outdated concept which used to be

known as 'reading a book.'

I mean why read a book when you've got YouTube, eh?

Construction in San Jose - The new stadium at midnight ...

But this young man seems strangely proud of the fact that he's only read three books

this year... Jeez! I'm not in school and read more than that every ten days.

Two Million Minutes (2) is the name of a Robert A. Compton documentary and the amount

of time a student leaves eighth grade until high school graduation. The amount of

education gathered within these 2 million minutes by 3 different super powers of 21st

century is the subject of the documentary.

"What Compton learned in making the film was that high-school students from India and

China surpassed U.S. students on every academic level -- which puts the economic

well-being of the U.S. at grave risk in a global economy."

"In addition, few Americans realize that India and China -- which have a combined

population of 2.3 billion people -- will have an enormous educated workforce in the years

to come... The two countries have more than 400 million students in K-12 education

compared to the 53 million in the U.S."

Are any of our educators paying attention to these numbers?

In Bill Gate's 2009 Annual Letter (2) he spoke of: "The federal No Child Left Behind Act

isn't perfect, but it has forced us to look at each school's results and realize how poorly

we are doing overall. It surprises me that more parents are not upset about the

education their own kids are receiving."

Compton had film crews record high school seniors in the U.S., India and China in 2005

and 2006. "What we saw and what the film portrays is that our culture has a highly

developed athletic and extracurricular system but a deteriorating core academic system,"

said Compton. "In 25 years, America has gone simply from being 'A Nation at Risk' to a

nation way behind its largest future economic competitors -- India and China."

I'm guessing that as long as we are fascinated with talentless "celebrities" like Bruteney

Spores and her "extracurricular" activities and we're reading the latest gossip about

"highly developed" athletes like David Beckham then I guess that's all we can expect

from our children.

So apart from the fact that our educational systems are failing, the US has an external debt

per capita (3) of US$44,358 which is 95.09% of GDP. The UK has an external debt per

capita of US$153,616 which is a staggering 336% of GDP and China's external debt as a

percentage of GDP is a mere 20%.

So not only are Chinese children becoming better educated than ours which will help them

to easily compete against our own, they're better money managers and not saddled with

an outrageous amount of debt and yes! Coming back to that one construction site in

Costa Rica that's working 24 hours per day, seven days per week?

Yup! You guessed it, they're all Chinese building the new stadium in the capital city San

Jose.

Written by Scott Oliver, author of How To Buy Costa Rica Real Estate Without Losing Your Camisa and Costa Rica's Guide To Making Money Offshore and the Director of Costa Rica Living & Retirement - Secrets To Happiness, a new DVD which reveals all with 14 in depth interviews..