K-12 and the board game Go
A quick digression: Does K-12 affect everything that comes after?
The example could be anything—but let’s use Go.
What if generations of K–12 students grew up aware of the ancient board game Go, with some becoming as familiar with it as with checkers or chess?
Go is a nonviolent strategy game in which a simple cup of tiny stones has shaped Chinese culture for thousands of years.
So, does K-12 affect everything else?
The Go objective is elegant and ruthless: surround your opponent’s stones with your own, gradually blocking and controlling their assets—without firing a shot.
Now consider the real world.
We regularly hear about China acquiring strategic land and mineral resources in the United States and abroad—particularly parcels containing rare earth elements. The pattern looks remarkably familiar to anyone who has studied Go: quiet positioning, patient expansion, and long-term territorial control.
And in many cases, it has been easy.
In the United States, few national leaders grew up learning Go-style strategic thinking built around patience, positioning, and long-horizon advantage. Perhaps it is time to recall the iconic beep! beep! of Road Runner flattening Wile E. Coyote.
In the examples that follow the asset need not be physical territory.
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Executive Branch
The President, the National Economic Council, the U.S. Trade Representative, and—less formally but as a powerful adjunct through strengthening the nation’s human capital—the U.S. Department of Education bear primary responsibility for shaping overall U.S. economic strategy.
In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy took a relentlessly bold stance, urging Congress to confront the failure of the states in K–12 student performance. Kennedy was not seeking federal control of K–12 education, nor did the U.S. Department of Education exist. That agency would not be created until nearly 17 years after his assassination—but its creation proved to be a boondoggle (click this U.S. Department of Education link).
Kennedy’s vehement concern was that well-educated K–12 graduates formed the foundation of U.S. national strength—yet much of K–12 was being allowed to languish. There is no indication that Kennedy ever invoked or played the ancient game Go. Yet, logically, if he and Congress had possessed a Go-style strategic background, his message would have been understood instantly as a call to build a stronger, more inclusive nation.
Indeed, could the absence of Go-style thinking—long-range and anticipatory—be a precursor to major U.S. policy failures, not just in K–12 education?
From the 1970s onward, successive U.S. administrations emphasized trade liberalization and offshoring, benefiting China’s strategic position in the global economy—as new generations of Go-aware Chinese seven- and eight-year-olds intuitively inherited a non-violent encirclement mindset toward their opponents.
Congress
Nearly two decades after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Congress established the U.S. Department of Education (hereinafter, the DOE). Yet the founding legislation rendered the agency largely ineffective at transforming nationwide K–12 performance from bad to excellent.
The legislation provided no mechanism to dramatically raise student outcomes—a total absence of any “Go”-like logic to drive a winning K–12 strategy in every school in every state, with outcomes measured in hard numbers.
Beyond K–12, and regardless of which party might be in power, Congress failed to craft a coherent industrial or manufacturing policy—again, as if unaware of Go-style strategic thinking.
Department of Commerce (DOC)
The U.S. Department of Commerce—through its International Trade Administration and Bureau of Industry and Security—is charged with protecting critical industries and supply chains. Yet for decades, it prioritized trade expansion over industrial resilience.
An incredible victory for China, U.S. leadership sacrificed self-sufficiency for short-term efficiency. Beep! Beep!
Busted. It took the shock of COVID-19 to publicly expose this strategic blunder, as semiconductor shortages revealed America’s dangerous dependence on fragile global supply chains.
Department of War (DOW)
For decades, the Pentagon relied on global markets—especially Chinese suppliers—under the mistaken belief that critical materials would remain perpetually available within global supply chains.
Busted. This strategic error received glaring public exposure recently when bipartisan pressure pushed the DOW to invest in domestic rare-earth mining and refining through the Defense Production Act.
Military recruitment is a DOW responsibility, although each branch of service has its own recruiting command.
Busted. Although current post-draft applicant numbers meet official objectives, another vital metric is subset selectivity—a genuine Go issue that demands broad population engagement and an educated, trainable post K-12 applicant pool several times larger than exists today, a pool size indispensable in containing uniquely capable subsets, such as for operating and maintaining advanced warfare systems.
Busted. That said, the Department of War failed to recognize its interconnected role within the national Go strategy, neglecting its responsibility to confront chronic failings in the K–12 system as exposed by NAEP results–rather, half or more of the nation’s K-12 graduates cannot read, write, or do math at minimum NAEP proficiency. This systemic weakness undercuts key attributes of both military and industrial workforce pipelines—a challenge similarly overlooked by the Department of Labor, whose mission is fundamentally dependent on competent, responsible K–12 outcomes.
Department of Labor (DOL)
Cross-agency collaboration is essential. As in Go, the whole is dependent on the coordination of its parts–in this case, the other agencies.
The Department of Labor’s (DOL) success, for instance, is fundamentally linked to the quality and quantity of the nation’s homegrown workforce, which is directly determined by nationwide K-12 student performance. High workforce readiness depends on strong K-12 outcomes, as measured in part by assessments such as the NAEP. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the DOL to continually confront the Department of Education (DOE) and Congress regarding K-12 deficiencies, and to advocate for radical reform in nationwide student performance.
Busted. The DOL’s failure to aggressively influence the success of the K-12 pipeline undermines the DOL homegrown workforce mission. (The DOL, like any other federal agency, has the opportunity to fulfill its due diligence as it considers sponsorship of the HSe4Metrics platform.)
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Busted. For pharmaceuticals, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration indirectly fueled national crisis conditions—not merely by allowing, but by effectively encouraging—foreign manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). (Would a Go strategy have allowed this?)
Today, the United States depends on imports for 70–80% of key drug ingredients. This shift was not driven by corruption, but by regulatory cost pressures and the absence of a Go-aware national industrial strategy—again, beep! beep!
Where was the fostering of domestic capacity?
Where was the alignment of regulations and incentives with long-term national interests?
Department of Education (DOE)
Busted. The U.S. Department of Education’s founding legislation, enacted by Congress, did not focus on hard-numbers or on a hard-number rewrite of nationwide K-12 student performance. (Click the U.S. Department of Education link.)
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