Friday, December 10, 2010

Sputnik. Or not.

I never thought I'd see the day when the Telegram and Gazette was citing Yong Zhao. Nice one, Clive!
Here's Professor Yong Zhao himself on the same test results:
I don’t know why this is such a big surprise to these well educated and smart people. Why should anyone be stunned? It is no news that the Chinese education system is excellent in preparing outstanding test takers, just like other education systems within the Confucian cultural circle—Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong.
Also here.
For more on waiting for Sputnik, see here.

1 comment:

Jim Gonyea said...

Here's the ultimate problem. Americans insist on making comparisons between the United States and other nations that don't share the same cultural experiences. We are a Western European nation. We are not a Confucian or Buddhist nation. We are not a Central Asian nation. We are not a Sub-Saharan African nation. You can easily compare the United States to England, Germany or France because we share a cultural legacy. You can't easily compare the US to India, China, or Russia.

People are surprised that Russia has an authoritarian and autocratic government. To any student of Russian history it's not a surprise. They have a cultural tradition for authoritarian rule: the Czars and the Soviets. At no point in their culture have they had a democratic experience, except the failure of Boris Yeltsin who sold assets to autocrats.

Americans don't understand other countries and then they try to extrapolate the Western European lifestyle to other traditions. It doesn't work.

Throw in that Obama and Duncan are corporate prostitutes and you get a recipe for misdirection that the vast majority of Americans won't understand. Instead of teaching kids how to use Microsoft Office maybe we should be teaching them Geometry and Logic. Then they would be able to pick apart crappy arguments from crappy politicians.