Zhao suggests giving up forks

I'm beginning to think we're going to need to subtitle this blog with the fallacy"Post hoc ergo propter hoc*."

If you read Friedman on Sunday, please read Zhao today:

To be globally competitive, we should all begin to use chopsticks because chopsticks produce better education outcomes as measured by the international gold standard of education the OECD’s PISA, which tests 15 year olds in math, reading, and sciences, and TIMSS, which assess 9-10 and 13-14 year olds math and science abilities. The top five performers in the 2009 PISA math (Shanghai, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan) all use chopsticks, so do the top five in TIMSS math in 2007 (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong), in 2003, and 1999. And PISA and TIMSS scores are what drive nations’ economic growth and back their global competitiveness.

Such is the logic of the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and OCED’s PISA group, exemplified by Friedman’s March 11^th, 2012 column Pass the Book, Hold the Oil. Citing a correlational analysis between PISA math scores and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of GDP, Friedman attempts to prove a point that does not need to be proven: education matters.

*"this therefore that" also known as "correlation does not (necessarily) equal causation."