Basically, what they do in asia is spend 12 hours a day memorizing the answers to government tests and standardized tests. Americans better think long and hard before saying that this is a model system of education worth emulating.
What’s the difference between memorizing the answer and knowing the answer? Please. I watch them in Starbux teaching one another stuff. It’s not just rote learning. The tests are well designed to spot real intelligence and understanding.
It sounds like something anyone could emulate and beat them at. So why hasn't anyone done so? You don't think grit and discipline are worth something? Or are you simply saying the average non-Asian American is too weak to beat them at their own game and must be coddled, via lower test score requirements, in order to be admitted to elite schools?
Your assertions are ludicrous on their face. Elite academic types study their butts off, whatever their ethnicity or race. Jocks are jocks and nerds are nerds. Asians just do a better job than the average non-Asian because they have higher IQ's. If you think Asian Americans are not real Americans and should be systematically discriminated against, that's certainly a respectable point of view - for decades after the Civil Rights Act, it was held to be true by large segments of the US population. The solution is to end Asian immigration and begin to de-naturalize and deport Asians to their country of origin. What is it with this sissy we can't work as hard as these yellow subhumans stuff?
Exactly. This isn’t about racism — it’s about nationalism and the imposition of a foreign culture — the brutal, sick Chinese school system — on Americans. Who never voted for it. At American taxpayer expense.
Sure, American kids can get in — if they give up baseball and cheerleading and inner-tubing down the river in July instead of taking on differential equations at 13. Why are we rewarding parents who give up their kids’ childhood?
Somehow, Americans managed to lead the world for almost 250 years without subjecting our kids to this brutal prison-state school regimen. That’s all the evidence you need that this system isn’t needed here.
Why are American kids being punished — no admittance to American public schools — for wanting to live an American life in their own country?
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.
...”Basically, what they do in asia is spend 12 hours a day memorizing the answers to government tests and standardized tests. Americans better think long and hard before saying that this is a model system of education worth emulating.”...
Mr. Ethan, Americans would do much much better to do a little memorization, like, of the Constitution of the United States. I know several Asians and some of them are brilliant thinkers and problem solvers. They excel because they are intelligent and they have a work ethic in school. Their culture teaches them the importance of that. They take advantage of the strength of their youth to study and learn unlike American students who, for the most part, would rather play video games, listen to rap music, have sex and have babies while in high school. Asians will be abused by the current powers that be in this country because they are a minority. It is called racism and the Mayor of New York is trying to institutionalize it.
So what does "they do in asia" have to do with test scores here? Your argument makes it seem as if parents here ship their children off to some Chinese sweat shop to memorize all day long.
If on the other hand, the majority of Asian children here get together, individually or collectively, and study - memorize as you say - what privileged advantage are they being given over a black or Hispanic child? Certainly nothing here is stopping them from doing the same thing except their parents (or lack thereof), their culture and their peers.
I suspect that if DeBlasio were to change the test to gauge intellect and thought process more than knowledge of facts (your rote memorization theorem) , the black and Hispanic children would do all the more worse. In the end, he'd have to change the tests to reflect the innate abilities of the preferred groups, and without rote memorization (of culturalist dogma) they wouldn't stand a chance.
In the end, it will boil down to an enforced preference/quota system (while not actually calling it that) for blacks and Hispanics.
I kind of have a dog in this fight as I live in Asia and my kids go to school there.
It’s funny but if I lived in the West I would want my kids to go to a traditional old-style school (the sort of Catholic schooling I got), with the desks in neat rows facing the teacher, who was an old-fashioned educator trained to impart knowledge and not be a government propagandist. School uniforms would be essential as would a good deal of rote learning the basics (times tables, spelling etc).
However as I live in Asia and see the kids turned into zombies without any social life, being picked up from school to go straight to extra-curricular English lessons, piano lessons, science cramming etc I don’t want that sort of education for two reasons.
One, I reject such a soul-less life for kids, they do need a bit of goofing off time, if not the pressure cooker will blow in their later teens and it won’t be pretty.
But more importantly is that I can’t see the advantage in it if everyone is doing it, they are all turning out super qualified kids to do what? Get a job as an accountant in a computer assembly plant in some industrial town in the provinces? How many rocket scientist or professor of molecular biology jobs are going to be waiting for all these kids at the end of the production line?
Instead against all my original plans my kids to to a local US-franchise school that goes very much against my original gut instinct. It’s a very child-centred education where kids are taught to be expressive, questioning (up to a point) and to find their own talents. It seems to be the sort of place that turns out more creative, artistic types and whilst there may be a surplus of such people in California or New York, in Asia those types are thin on the ground.
I also feel my kids seem to be a lot more relaxed and self-confident than the almost autistic types being turned out by the rote-learning educational factories. Given that much of the ordinary tasks today can already be done by computer program and this is likely to continue I can’t help think my kids will have an advantage. After all who earns more money, the technical people who make TVs and DVD players or the creative types who make the content for those devices?
Maybe I am wrong, only time will tell.
Ethan — the “asians” referred here are Americans.... of asian origin
Basically, what they do in asia
Maybe I misunderstood your comment but Firebrand isn't talking about "Asia", he's referring to American born Asian children whose parents are of Asian descent and living in the U.S.
And it's not only Asian children but Indian children too.......
One only has to look at all the various competitions such as the national spelling Bee and engineering competitions to see that the vast majority of the kids in these competitions are Asians and Indians......
In my opinion it's a cultural thing where the Asians and Indians and their close knit family structure put the education of their children foremost above all the other crap that is available to kids today......
Emphasis on "close knit family"...........