Posted on 12/08/2010 9:53:15 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Also the African students in England are the cream of African IQ and abilities.
In Japan the moms purchase a set of their children’s books and manuals to assist their children in their studies.
Remember Robin Williams playing a Japanese telling “stupid American” jokes?
You can’t compare socialized education with socialized medicine.
No matter how poor or how bad an educational system is it provides opportunity. A motivated student will be able to learn.
Socialized medicine, on the other hand, caters to the income producers and rations the elderly and the disabled.
You have a chance with our educational system if you’re willing to work at it. You have no chance with socialized medicine.
Oh, come on. Socialized medicine gives some people an “opportunity” to get well. Not everyone who enters Britain’s NHS, for example, dies or fails to be helped. It is just that it is hideously expensive, in general does a bad job, and is often used for political ends. Each of these things is true with government education. In fact, the political use of the system is worse than in medical government monopolies.
Any government monopoly will produce an inferior product at a high price. This is theoretically understood and empirically well confirmed. Government education is a disaster. It is also child abuse.
It is the same in the US. I would know, since my tertiary education in the US. The average grades for the African students were not only significantly higher than those for African-Americans, but also higher than those for American Whites.
Let's just say when you come from a place where getting a place in a secondary school, a university, and thereafter a job, is not granted, and where for every position you have a myriad competitors; then you end up having to be quite competitive. I personally graduated summa cum laude, and my only real competition was from immigrants from the former Eastern Bloc countries (the Asians were good, but lagged in areas requiring less rote learning and more creativity and application of adaptive intelligence and intuitiveness. I would say the average Asian immigrant was more like a muscle car - great speed due to huge engine and raw conversion of octane to power; while, say, the Eastern Europeans were more like Italian sportscars, with greater finesse).
Another secret - if you know an African student in the US (I left to make my fortune, which worked), as them what an 'akata' is. Hint: It is a very derogatory term (normally people are told it means an African who left Africa, since the usage of the word kind of spilled over and questions started getting asked, but the real meaning is not as good). A quick way to insult an African student is referring to him as an African American.
As for this study: Personally I think there is IMMENSE 'survivor bias' when it comes to the Chinese scores. I am certain the Chinese students stemmed from an above average sample, while the American kids were a more average sample. Growing up in Kenya we had what was called 'streaming,' where all the intelligent kids are put in one class, then the next tier the next class, a third tier, and finally a fourth tier. Basically rising from the adage 'iron sharpens iron,' and the result was that the intelligent kids in the first stream would not only be smarter in aggregate, but also receive the very best education. Add to this holiday tuition, and the end result is a crop of very smart kids (the problem is that the lowest stream doesn't do so well). Now, if I took kids from the first stream (like me), and entered them in this international competition, you can be sure they would score very high in reading, writing, arithmetic, science, you name it. I think that is what happened with the Chinese students - they also do streaming there (as does India), and matching the top-tier students against an average sample of American kids will obviously lead to the results shown here.
I am sure if you took an average Chinese student (or Indian, or Kenyan) and matched them against an average American student, the results would either be more even or even inversed. Looking at myself - I thank God I am bright, but then I had the very best opportunities, had absolute financial backing, went to the best schools in Kenya and afterwards globally, and had every advantage. There are many like me in Kenya, but the vast majority are not like that. A few days ago a local paper reported about the huge divergence in scores between 'rich' schools and 'poor' schools (e.g. in 1985, when I was in standard one, the school I went to started teaching us computers and simple computer programming ...that iS, by far, NOT the norm in Kenya). I am certain the schools these Chinese kids in Shanghai came from are similar top-tier/elite schools, that are 100% analogous to the very best schools in the US.
Obviously the kids will do well.
Now, you match those kids against an average sample, and the results should not be unexpected.
Compare those same Chinese students with the very best the US has to offer, and I can bet you the results would be more pleasing for a US observer.
Anyways, my points are that one should never confuse an African student or immigrant to that of an African-American (I am sorry if that sounds arrogant ...it is not meant to be - it is just that the backgrounds are very different. When I was in the US, I did not go there to have fun, but to basically garner as much advantage and skill as I could, and go back home to make as much money as I could), and secondly that the core samples (China vs US) were TOTALLY skewed.
A comparative analogy: Say there is a gymnastics competition, and the average American is chosen (say a dude who is mid-30s, a tire of blubber around his waist, works IT in some MidWest company, loves his Taco Hell ...I mean Taco Bell). Then you see the 'representative' Chinese gymnast ...19 years old, slim yet very muscular with a great upper body strength to wait ratio, and he comes into the arena doing flips and aerial twists! Obviously the results will be highly skewed, but then again the Chinese contestant was not representative of the 'average,' which would be a short stout person who has mainly fed on a rice diet with some pork thrown in during festivals of one sort or another.
That is what happened here. To make it fair you either need to get a representative Chinese sample, or else compare with the best America can offer.
Upper body strength to wait ratio = upper body strength to weight ratio (was still thinking about Taco Bell LOL)
Oh yes, socialized medicine gives ‘some’ people the opportunity to get well as long as the benefit outweighs the cost.
If you are young it can be expected you will earn money and pay taxes for many years so the benefit of healing you outweighs the cost.
If you are old you are considered less productive relative to the cost of caring for you. The elderly get rationed first then those individuals for whom the ‘benefit’ is less.
Benefit calculations are based on expected productivity, e.g. income, so a 40 year old male provides more benefit than a 40 year old female. Males make more money and die young whereas females earn less but hang around in a non-productive state for decades.
Guess who is going to be rationed first! No wonder they want to ration mammograms and at the same time provide unlimited viagra.
A very good post. Thanks for taking the time.
The data in the Bell Curve come from the results of testing participants with the military entrance exam. They were all Americans, obviously, with all sorts of ethnic backgrounds.
I like your point about more categories. My guess is it wasnt done because at the time of the study (years ago) the country was not as diverse and the cost of getting adequate numbers of each category may have been prohibitive.
Most welcome. I felt I had to delve into certain misconceptions about Africans in the United States. Lumping a group that came from nations that require a LOT of hard work (and the occassional smile from Lady Luck) to make it, with a group of people who have had it easy (in that the Government can take care of the bare necessities at least ...you cannot compare poor in the US with poor in most to all African nations) is neither accurate nor fair. The same comes to education ...more lumping, even though African immigrants to the US have the highest educational level of ANY immigrant group in the US (yes, higher than that of Asians, Indians and Eastern European immigrants). Yet in many cases they (we) get lumped together with African-Americans, which is one of the main reasons why there is (sometimes covert, sometimes overt ...at times sheer unabated dislike) tension between African immigrants and African-American immigrants. Again, the word Akata ...the traditional West African meaning means a cat that has left the home, but over time it has come to mean (since it is used by Africans in the US that stemmed from all parts of Africa ...for instance I am from East Africa) something more derogatory (a heritage African-Americans share). Add to that divergent income levels (e.g. my first job after graduation was at this banking institution where I hedged mortgages ...I started as a clerical worker, literally stapling mortgage origination forms together ...literally. Three weeks into the job I felt in my heart I need to do a paper discussing the various ways the company could enhance its core competencies and achieve competitive dominance, and I sent it to 3 VPs in the company. 2 of them fought over me, and the one who got me literally carried my stuff from the desk I was to near where he sat, and I was doing real analytics. Why this story? Because my best friend at the time, a really nice African-American lady who also worked at the bank, had complained for almost 2 years how the institution was racist and she wasn't moving up. Yet here I was, having my stuff moved by a VP. Interesting huh?) Thus, certain comparisons can elicit a brusque reaction.
As for some of the other things people bring up ....like the Bell Curve ...I'd say hogwash. It is cultural factors. For instance, I am certain if I had kids and raised them from age 0 in the US, and they went to public schools in predominantly minority areas, that their academic performance would be smack equal to that of their peers in those shabby schools. However, if I am blessed with kids, and I raise them for their first formative years in the best Kenyan schools, then I put them into a Swiss International Baccalaureate program, and then I send them for tertiary education at an ivy league school in the US ...their performance will be superlative! Thus it is not genetic! It is cultural influence ....I know for a fact if I was born in a Chicago ghetto my chances in life would have been very low (in the same way as if I had been born in an African slum). It is a case of nurture over nature. Nature can only take you so far ....imagine if Bill Gates had been born in the Calliope projects in New Orleans. Even with his IQ level, I doubt he would have started a Microsoft. Maybe he would have become a really successful dealer. In the same way, take the top-level drug kingpings in Calliope (or for that matter, some of those Mexican druglords) and go back in time to when the chap was a zygote ...and then implant him in an upper-crust Jewish family where the father is a doctor and the mother a HedgeFund principal, living in a tony area of Connecticut and having a net combined takehome of $1.1m (and both parents being Ivy league legacies) ....hmmm, I wonder how THAT kid would turn out? Instead of turning $200,000 worth of heroin into $25,000,000, maybe he would have gone into genetics and come up with a cure for cancer!
Nurture plays an important role.
Anyways, in areas where there is a lot of interaction between African immigrants and African-American immigrants, there is quite a spot of tension. I remember when I was coming to the US I was given a list of 10 things I need to do (e.g. how to get my SSN, etc) ...I clearly remember line number 6, which was a single sentence with a stern instruction that Senator Byrd in his earlier days may have agreed with.
Great post.
The United States used to do ability streaming, which was the main reason that the boomers did so well as mostly immigrant children and grandchildren. The lower streams did well for the hands-on crafts kids too. It recognized their skills and poured them into lucrative craft careers.
We are now too politically corrrect to stream kids although some school systems have an informal stream for aware parents.
Christian medical cost programs are excepted from Obamacare, as I understand it, and counts as coverage.
Given where the cost of healthcare is going and its politicization, flying to Costa Rica for healthcare is probably going to be the choice for many.
How do the Chinese compare to our homeschoolers?
I’m not sure if our homeschoolers participated in the International Standardized Tests.
Do you realize that our highly trained education professionals “suggest” to students expected to do poorly that they not show up on test days? Moreover, dropping the bottom 1/3, more or less, of the performance distribution as a result of students dropping out has a huge effect on pushing averages up. Now, consider how badly we did even with that wind at our backs.
I don’t know where people get this idea that we try to educate everybody, but the Finns and Germans, for example, don’t. The psychometricians who design these tests are subject to peer review, and the gross statistical design errors that people allege to try to excuse the failure of our government education system simply do not exist.
I do agree that the Shanghai results are ridiculous. The Chinese government is clearly trying to gain face relative to Hong Kong, Taiwan, S. Korea, and Japan (we aren’t any competition). All of the other participants, however, have been in the testing program for a long time, their societies are open so that procedures, etc. can be checked, and we are losing badly. The reasons we do badly have little if anything to do with “diversity”. These threads often display an embarrassing lack of information about other countries, which allows people to allege that we somehow have problems that others don’t.
The true source of our decline is the leftists who have controlled the schools and the schools of education for generations now, and, of course, our willingness to offer our children up as living sacrifices to the abomination known as “public education” .
I am a recovering government school graduate from a family of government school teachers and nurses.
I do not know if I totally agree with you.
Birth adooption studies find that people of all races lead lives that are more similar to their birthparents than to their adoptive parents. Your obviously intelligent child would climb to the top of whatever place he was placed, ghetto or tony neighborhood
What would Byrd, what was number 6?
RE: if you know an African student in the US (I left to make my fortune, which worked), as them what an ‘akata’ is
Firstly, thanks for your very informative response.
I have LOTS of African friends ( a lot from Nigeria and Ghana ).
I thought the term -— Akata was Yoruba language means ‘fox’.... At least that’s what my friends tell me. They use it in Nigeria for instance to describe a cat that doesn’t live at home like a wild non domesticated cat.
But yes, I learned some time back how the term was not only used to describe African-Americans but (horrors) even Africans who have lived in America for a considerable length of time !!
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