Lago PARANOIA wrote:I don't know if I got this across in my previous posts, but I was really surprised to find this out. Like you constantly hear stuff about hearing how Japan/India/China's educational system is so much more awesome than the West's.
As far as I understand it, it goes like this:
We in the West falsely associate things like China's high economic growth and Japan's bitchslapping the rest of the world in personal electronics with their education system, mostly because of discipline fetishists who think Western students have it "too easy" and should be forced to go to school for 10 hours/day with a half day on Saturday, possibly while being whipped. There's also sampling bias at work, since the only products of the system a lot of Westerners in the 80's/90's got to interact with were the ones exceptional enough to be
allowed to represent their country.
But there's basically one thing to remember for Asian school systems: they are
entirely centered around teaching to the test. This is because "the test" is almost literally the only determinant of your acceptance to the next level of education. As if every US college gave it's own version of the SAT and accepted the top X scores based on vacancies. Imagine if acing the SAT let you jump to the front of the line at Yale even after you got all F's Freshman/Sophomore year of high school before dropping out to work at a Taco Bell for two years and you have some idea of what's going on.
It apparently stems from the old (600AD) Imperial Examination in China that filled the ranks of the bureaucracy with whoever did well on it, regardless of station or caste (which was probably a revolution at the time) so the idea that giving positions to the top scorers in some gigantic exam infected most of Asia, that being the kind of thing that the dominant culture on a continent
does.
In China there's a national exam and it is
insane. You can only take it once, and you choose what institutions/programs you're trying for
before you take it. The exam varies slightly by district, and people seriously travel just to take the exam in a district that's "easy" for the subject they're focusing on.
In Japan it's less crazy (people can retake the tests) but no less test centric. People who fail the test for the College of their choice seriously often choose to go "ronin" and spend a year working part time (or not at all) and studying to try again. But there are also tests for Jr. High/HS.
But in both systems it's clear: your grades don't matter, it's just which exam you pass that matters. The more exclusive the program the more difficult the exam and the more status you have for passing it.
In Japan, if Junior does poorly and Mom & Dad want him to pass The Big Test, they don't complain to the school (that would be impolite), they just send Junior to Cram School. This means it's really easy to coast along as long as your parents don't care about your grades (which is happening more and more).
In China, Cram School is a formalized part of education. There was a mild cultural revolution in the 90's where school officials were finally convinced that 2nd graders might not need
four hours of homework a night. But there's still a lot of sand pounding because people think it will help Junior pass The Big Exam.
There's a bunch of other stuff we Westerners tend to misidentify about Asian cultures. Like how most Salarymans in Japan stay at work for 13 hours/day not because they're working hard, but because they're playing a giant game of chicken with each other to see who's going to dishonor himself by leaving work first.
Sort of like that Supreme Court thread. Goddammit, stop abusing my ego TGD.
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