Posted on 03/24/2015 10:00:53 PM PDT by Cronos
..New York has nine specialised high schools, of which eight admit students using the city’s Specialist High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). The education they offer rivals that of private schools that charge $40,000 a year. The high schools are free. The most popular, Stuyvesant, sends roughly 25% of its graduates to the Ivy League or other top colleges. The school’s unofficial mantra is “Sleep, study, socialise: pick two.” It admits 4% of test-takers, pickier than Harvard.
New York’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio thinks the SHSAT favours parents who can afford tutors. He wants to “broaden” (ie, relax) the admissions criteria, to help poorer black and Hispanic families.
The SHSAT also faces a legal challenge. The NAACP, the country’s biggest civil-rights legal defence fund, joined others in 2012 to file a suit demanding changes in admissions procedures. New York City’s public schools, the suit claims, are among the most racially segregated in the country
... Asians make up more than 70% of pupils at Stuyvesant; blacks and Hispanics combined make up 3%, and falling. White pupils took 80% of places in 1970; now it is less than 25%.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
According to you the chinese are the smartest people in the world. Why wouldn't you want to go study there? They obviously have the best schools, if they are the smartest people on earth.
Yes, there are foreign standards. What’s required of a schoolkid to get into one of these schools in terms of scores and grades creeps ever upward... Because foreign parents are willing to sacrifice their kids’ childhoods so they can beat out your kid for that slot. So drill, study, no play, no baseball — that is a FOREIGN culture.
These kids aren’t more deserving of those schools , any more than an athlete who takes steroids deserves the prize more than the one who doesn’t.
Steroids are gaming the system. Chinese study camps for children are gaming the system. Foreign cultures have suckered us into thinking their way is the “fair” way for one reason — to ensure that the kids in their tribe win. They get their way. And American taxpayers who won’t put their kids through that brutal system to gain admittance have to shut up and take it.
Steam power had nothing to do with the "American education system", which did not exist as such, when the steam engine was invented (in England). These people were self-taught. In fact, a lot of the major inventors at any time are self-taught. No teacher or education system can produce a genius. Like great athletes, geniuses are born, not made. In effect, they wrote the textbooks on their specialties before such textbooks existed. The education system exists to place people into worker bee slots in small and big businesses. The exceptional people march to the tune of their own drummers. Steve Jobs was a misfit who dropped out. Of Reed College. Bill Gates wasn't the smartest guy at Harvard, and he learned very little from the place. He is probably wealthier than his entire class year put together, though.
The US space program relied on German scientists on loan from Hitler, Wernher von Braun being the most notable among them. Von Braun got a good bit of his inspiration from Robert H Goddard, the renowned American rocket scientist. Here's an account of Goddard's background:
Does this account suggest that anyone taught Goddard anything? The guy was a super-nerd who read everything he could lay his hands on, and taught his professors rather than the other way around.The young Goddard was a thin and frail boy, almost always in fragile health. He suffered from stomach problems, pleurisy, colds and bronchitis, and fell two years behind his classmates. He became a voracious reader, regularly visiting the local public library to borrow books on the physical sciences.[13]:16,19
Aerodynamics and motion
Goddard's interest in aerodynamics led him to study some of Samuel Langley's scientific papers in the periodical Smithsonian. In these papers, Langley wrote that birds flap their wings with different force on each side to turn in the air. Inspired by these articles, the teenage Goddard watched swallows and chimney swifts from the porch of his home, noting how subtly the birds moved their wings to control their flight. He noted how remarkably the birds controlled their flight with their tail feathers, which he called the birds' equivalent of ailerons. He took exception to some of Langley's conclusions, and in 1901 wrote a letter to St. Nicholas magazine[16]:5 with his own ideas. The editor of St. Nicholas declined to publish Goddard's letter, remarking that birds fly with a certain amount of intelligence and that "machines will not act with such intelligence."[13]:31 Goddard disagreed, believing that a man could control a flying machine with his own intelligence.
Around this time, Goddard read Newton's Principia Mathematica, and found that Newton's Third Law of Motion applied to motion in space. He wrote later about his own tests of the Law:
I began to realize that there might be something after all to Newton's Laws. The Third Law was accordingly tested, both with devices suspended by rubber bands and by devices on floats, in the little brook back of the barn, and the said law was verified conclusively. It made me realize that if a way to navigate space were to be discovered, or invented, it would be the result of a knowledge of physics and mathematics.[13]:32
Academics
As his health improved, Goddard continued his formal schooling as an 19-year-old sophomore at South High Community School[19] in Worcester in 1901. He is an alumni of the Goddard Scholars Program at South High Community School, and the program was named in his honor after he graduated. He excelled in his coursework, and his peers twice elected him class president. Making up for lost time, he studied books on mathematics, astronomy, mechanics and composition from the school library.[13]:32 At his graduation ceremony in 1904, he gave his class oration as valedictorian. In his speech, entitled "On Taking Things for Granted," Goddard included a section that would become emblematic of his life:
[J]ust as in the sciences we have learned that we are too ignorant to safely pronounce anything impossible, so for the individual, since we cannot know just what are his limitations, we can hardly say with certainty that anything is necessarily within or beyond his grasp. Each must remember that no one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly endeavored, and he should derive courage from the fact that all sciences have been, at some time, in the same condition as he, and that it has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.[16]:19
Goddard enrolled at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1904.[13]:41 He quickly impressed the head of the physics department, A. Wilmer Duff, with his thirst for knowledge, and Professor Duff took him on as a laboratory assistant and tutor.[13]:42 At WPI, Goddard joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and began a long courtship with high school classmate Miriam Olmstead, an honor student who had graduated with him as salutatorian. Eventually, she and Goddard were engaged, but they drifted apart and ended the engagement around 1909.[13]:51
Goddard received his B.S. degree in physics from Worcester Polytechnic in 1908,[13]:50 and after serving there for a year as an instructor in physics, he began his graduate studies at Clark University in Worcester in the fall of 1909.[20] Goddard received his M.A. degree in physics from Clark University in 1910, and then stayed at Clark to complete his Ph.D. in physics in 1911. He spent another year at Clark as an honorary fellow in physics, and in 1912, he accepted a research fellowship at Princeton University's Palmer Physical Laboratory.[13]:56–58
Exactly.
The difference in systems is that students in the United States are taught to think critically and give their perspective on what should or shouldn’t be done and this is something that develops a radically different result in exams and test scores.
American parents need to redevelop their own self interest and start looking after their kid’s interests.
As a civilization, China's not superior today. But it was superior then. Whenever a Chinese person gives you any guff about how they've got 5000 years of recorded history behind them, and you're not feeling polite, you can respond with the rejoinder that this is like a Rockefeller shaking a tin cup on a street corner boasting about how his forebears were big cheeses back in the day. It's kinda pathetic. Sic transit gloria mundi.
What is undeniable, however, is that the Chinese have higher IQ's. They do better in schools for the same reason Jews do - more innate processing power.
Why, then, is China so backward today, if the hardware is superior, or at least not inferior? Lousy software (i.e. Marxism-Leninism), combined with lousy nutrition through decades of famine and near-famine. Think North Korea vs South Korea. West Germany vs East Germany.
Interesting ideas/opinion.
Yes, of course you would comfort yourself, with delusion.
Because learning in a foreign language, along with trying to make your way in a foreign culture, are a major handicaps. Assuming your ancestors are English, why wouldn't you want to go to school in England, where the language is the same, the culture isn't too different, and you don't have to deal with an infestation of yellow mud people?
A person, not having a clue- towards critical thought— has made your same statement. Do you know who?
So, according to you, chinese culture is a handicap to the chinese, who, despite being the smartest people in the world, can't handle it. So how come all the chinese in china are climbing the walls to get into Harvard? "Cultural handicap" doesn't stop them.
Why are you pretending, to care- about anything? You do not come across, well...
My prediction: that might reduce the gap between Asians and whites (who aren't so hard-core on the memorization stuff), but it would leave the other groups even further in the dust, thus thwarting DeBlasiyoyo's objective.
“But it was superior then.”
Then was a loooong time ago.
And the bad software well predates the communist takeover.
I have not written anywhere that the Chinese are the smartest people in the world. I have quoted studies that show they have above average IQ's and that is why they have generally excelled in schools and in the private sector. It's mainly IQ, rather than hard work, that's gotten them there. But that is immaterial. It boils down to the question - should Asian Americans have the same rights as other Americans? If you think they shouldn't, maybe you would be more comfortable posting on Stormfront rather than Free Republic.
Playing that Al Sharpton race crap isn't going to win you much sympathy.
The diligence and discipline of some kids from Chinese families is not that different than the traditional Protestant work ethic.
Your complaints sound like sour grapes, based on racial animosity.
Sounds like liberals complaining about “white privilege” but this would be Chinese privilege.
And, Whites are also overrepresented in these schools because the kids do well on the tests, not just Asians.
Ja Wohl! Herr Zhang said so!
Four thousand years of Chinese superiority was a long time. Britain's several century long period of ascendancy is short compared to that. Good vs bad software is relative. China used to have superior software, then fell behind. Without the 30-year interlude of Marxist economic planning from 1949 to 1979, China would already have the biggest economy in the world, by far (50%), if you use Taiwan's (the laggard among ethnic Chinese-run, majority ethnic Chinese economies) GDP per capita. If you use Singapore's per capita GDP, then China's economy would be 4x the size of the US economy. We are fortunate that China went through its communist interlude - it slowed them down. China is an ancient empire that has traditionally expanded its territory in times of strength. We will be grateful for that respite in the decades ahead.
Well a good number of those “idiots” didn’t do it by working harder than everyone else. Many of them in were the right place at the right time and they were smart enough to take advantage of their situation. Some of them are brilliant. Some of them not so much.
No amount of work or discipline can make you an Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. No amount of work can make you a Mozart or Michelangelo. It comes from somewhere else.
Brilliant people can do great things and they can do great damage. To really go off the rails and take lesser people with them it often takes genius, genius that an ounce of common sense would clarify. Take Marx for example. I’d argue that genius and self discipline are critical to being productive in a positive way but even that is no guarantee success. Take Nikola Tesla for example. That genius and low self discipline eventually leads to personal destruction in ways that ordinary people wouldn’t know how to achieve...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.