I was driven mad by the Chinese education system • Hacker News Board

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#131

Post by Retric » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 5:05 AM UTC

bokonist wrote: post #128

Retric wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read up on the government of 1908, it was extremely corrupt. Anyway, Technology is driving most of the social changes you're talking about. Something like 50% of the average persons medical expenses occur in the last year of their life which makes insuring the old extremely costly. The government pays for ~50% of all medicine in the US and most of it would not exist if a) it where not available and b) people where no…

Read up on the government of 1908, it was extremely corrupt. Indeed it was. But perhaps you have heard the name K Street before? The retail, envelopes-full-of-cash corruption is now mostly gone. Corruption today is organized, supersized, and legalized. It's called interest group politics. Worse, because government is so much bigger, both in revenues and the extents of its regulations, interest group politics has a fa…

Do you really think 80% of government health care money is wasted? [Citation Needed] Most study's suggest that private inshurance is less efficient than public spending so I am not really sure what your talking about there.

"In 1913 the 16th Amendment was passed, which allowed Congress authority to tax the citizenry on income from whatever source derived." So yes the "income tax" showed up in force, but the government still had plenty of income sources back then. The possibility of free trade is really an outgrowth of the federal government giving up on import taxes for most products.

In 1900 the recorded homicide rate in the US was under 2 per 100,000. 3.7 is about twice that and today Milwaukee has a little over twice the national homicide rate. I would suggest that the statistics under represented the homicide rate back then, but this is just going to go around in circles. Look into the actual numbers and try and come up with an unfiltered view of what that time was like. Hell, read some newspapers from back then. By 1910 the homicide rate had "gone through the roof" which should suggest they where measuring different things. Anyway, have a nice night.

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#132

Post by megaduck » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 12:53 PM UTC

rms wrote: post #79

pg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are some people in China really not legally allowed to leave their villages?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system#Household_registra... They can leave but can't legally hold a job without the right work permit.

Thanks for the link, rms. It's a good summary of the situation.

For the Americans here, you can get a quick "gut" feeling for the hukou system by thinking about the illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. Sure, they can go to any city and find low-wage blue collar work. The odds are also pretty good that they won't be deported. However, they're always going to be stuck at the bottom of the heap.

The situation is practically identical for people here in China with an "agricultural" residence permit. They flock to the cities by the tens of millions to (illegally) work in factories and do construction work. I see them every day. It's better pay than plowing fields, but they'll forever be working dirty, dangerous, low-paying jobs. If they do manage to climb up somehow, they'll live in constant fear of being discovered.

Going to a university gives you an urban registration, which is arguably even more important than the degree.

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#133

Post by ideamonk » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 1:00 PM UTC

azharcs wrote: post #40

After reading this article, All I can say is Indian education is very much identical. Some kids here are pushed even more than this Chinese kid; a kid sister of my friend goes to private tuition so that she could pass the entrance test of another private tuition which takes in less students and trains them to write and pass the entrance exam of a reputed college in India (so in simple words, she is going through two…

Hey Zhang Rui, you're not alone, such a situation would soon arrive in India too. Recession is just another catalyst, for such way of thinking, to become popular here in India -- where opportunities aren't abundant and education system has been sleeping for years. The child of scarcity of opportunities and avenues -- Competition -- about which so many people speak with pride. The word which gives us a false sense that after its occurance, the outcome will be pure gold! The word which kills aapasi bhai chara and life at large. The reason for so many stressed out people in 20-30 years of age... and I guess what not. Anyways coming back to my point, I think competition is the main m&*#^# reason behind all this. And the reason behind the competition is the layed back approach towards education that our government has been adopting and the way we have been giving respect to the ones who get good ranks in a competition. We just keep forgetting that we as human beings we do, and yes we do, all of us, me you and everyone have the ability to learn things we like, to make changes to things around us to suit our needs, to devise better ways to do things, to create things, to do anything that we want. Now what fuck up competition does is that it puts a force, a palm on your back push you, all of you towards one direction. Now that is fundamentally wrong! You can't have the best outputs from me when you won't let me do what I want. And not everyone knows what one wants at ONE particular age. This introduction to competition at early youthful ages is the biggest fuck up of our life. Our education system is trying to hide its fallacies and fallouts under name of Competition and little are they aware that they are actually taking away our little right to do what we feel like at whatever time we want. I know my thoughts haven't been presented in an organized manner, loads of you might just say wtf is he trying to say. So go n relieve yourselves of the doubts and take a lesson, for if you enter the education ministry by your bad luck, your groundnut sized brains would also contain these ideas and with your rice grain sized heart, you would think, and not just think like they have been thinking after independence, you would rather DO something good for my kids, cousins and fellow young citizens who are yet to be born.

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#134

Post by whacked_new » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 5:55 PM UTC

f3lix wrote: post #100

whacked_new wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The result was centuries of stagnation. One of the factors, yes, but making such an attribution overlooks a lot: the Tang is often regarded as a renaissance in China. It follows the Sui, when the imperial exams started. General characteristics of each of the dynasties, and each of the rulers, have large effects on the policies and the culture of the era. Simple example: if Bush was an emperor, and held power for a…

"if Bush was an emperor, and held power for a few generations, it isn't far fetched to see a dark age of bio research." The total federal research and development budget increased under Bush. The objection that some people have is his moratorium on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. This is a small part of all bio research that is morally contentious. I doubt your assertion of seeing a "dark age of bio…

I do admit a great bias in favor of stem cell research and consider it the new frontier. But "morally contentious" is highly subjective, whereas the applicability of bio research is not. That is also to say that you have more wiggle room in interpreting what is contentious research, whereas research results have no wiggle room (well, there is for bio, but there is always the option of disproving something).

Which means that it is easy to muddle the issues by drawing hazy borders around themes that vary from person to person, which is likely a source of impediment for bio research. Therefore, it isn't far fetched, at all. Funding is certainly good, but restricting what areas can be done, or even having a say in it, when it comes to pure research, is not helpful.

But, I am not very educated about these policies and you do make a good point. This is just a mostly personal interpretation of it, which I believe has a good likelihood :)

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#135

Post by whacked_new » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 6:16 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #90

ekpyrotic wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for responding nostrademons. I'll answer your second point as concisely as possible. First, I don't intend to demean creativity; in fact, I intend - at the moment, of course - to pursue a career in the philosophy of science. And philosophy, I hope we all agree, holds creativity and originality at its epicenter. I merely state, as you do, that mastering the basic skills of physics is a "necessary condition"…

> I intend to defend the position that these 10,000 of practice should be worked through as quickly as possible and as early as possible; alike how the Chinese high school system works. I think this is a reasonable position to take. That's actually the part I have a problem with... I was a physics major for most of college. There were 3 of us (Rachel, Nathaniel, and myself) in my entering class that entered with a fu…

> it leaves no room for being wrong

Precisely and concisely the problem. Now, I am particularly interested in some discussion (somewhere else) on how or whether a "best of both worlds" is possible. Knowing that there are education specialists in both cultures, I can only think that 1. it is unsolvable and everything is compromise, 2. there are fundamental cultural incompatibilities, or 3. the specialists are clueless.

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#136

Post by FlorinAndrei » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 7:16 PM UTC

Rabidmonkey1 wrote: post #10

mattmaroon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test scores are like democracy, they're the least bad option. There's simply not a better way to measure progress, or one more accurate to life.

I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment. Surely there must be a better way to show proficiency in something besides testing (in the conventional sense). Besides, the US isn't a Democracy, it's a Republic, albiet a democratic one. The founders really hated the word and made sure it wasn't in any of the founding documents. "Democracy: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any form of di…

Interesting how the etymologies for "democracy" and "republic" are essentially the same. :-)

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#137

Post by triplefox » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 7:38 PM UTC

I had something of an experience like this in the US system. My mom was overly concerned about my grades because, in her view, the only way to get a good education and "be successful" was to test into the top math+science classes, as that was what my older brother did. (She wasn't able to admit that until last year after I finished college and got a job. My brother is finishing his PhD and now realizes that he doesn't want to research math the rest of his life, he just liked studying it.)

Fortunately, the pressure was far less in my instance, and I ultimately found a satisfactory compromise in college between my own goals and "successful" goals, but the bitter feelings are the same. Learning isn't helped by making it a threatening experience.

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#138

Post by quantumhobbit » Tue, Feb 17, 2009, 8:21 PM UTC

It is sad but this mentality seems to have spread to the U.S. at least in the form of Chinese grad students. It isn't very intellectually stimulating to discuss chemistry with someone whose idea of being great in Organic Chemistry is having memorized Org Chem textbooks in English before he could speak English. What is worse is that professors admire the amount of work Chinese students put in compared to their American counterparts. I feel a lot of pressure to work mindlessly and without any creativity. I think that this model of education is not sustainable and will damage American higher education in the long run.

Sometimes I feel out of place in graduate school in an engineering department. I'm the only person I know of here who reads Faulkner and listens to Coltrane in his spare time. I get the feeling that if I told my adviser that I was teaching myself French on the weekends, he would consider it a waste of time. Not that reading Faulkner helps me learn Quantum Chemistry, but I feel like a well rounded education will help me make breakthroughs later in Quantum Chemistry. But I'm finding that dissatisfaction with the slavishly work hard in one chosen area is the minority opinion and it is hard not to be disheartened by this.

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#139

Post by bokonist » Wed, Feb 18, 2009, 1:29 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #131

bokonist wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read up on the government of 1908, it was extremely corrupt. Indeed it was. But perhaps you have heard the name K Street before? The retail, envelopes-full-of-cash corruption is now mostly gone. Corruption today is organized, supersized, and legalized. It's called interest group politics. Worse, because government is so much bigger, both in revenues and the extents of its regulations, interest group politics has a fa…

Do you really think 80% of government health care money is wasted? [Citation Needed] Most study's suggest that private inshurance is less efficient than public spending so I am not really sure what your talking about there. "In 1913 the 16th Amendment was passed, which allowed Congress authority to tax the citizenry on income from whatever source derived." So yes the "income tax" showed up in force, but the governmen…

Do you really think 80% of government health care money is wasted? [Citation Needed]

The Singapore government spends 1.3% of GDP on health care and the private sector spends around 2% of GDP. Overall, their health indicators are slightly better than our indicators in America. The U.S. government spends 7% of GDP on health care and the private sector spends another 7%. The delta between what the U.S. spends and what I think would be spent with a well run system is what I consider the waste. Singapore is an example of much better run system that exists in the real world. It's not an 80% difference in spending, but it's close.

Most study's suggest that private inshurance is less efficient than public spending so I am not really sure what your talking about there.

I do not find that surprising. "Private" healthcare in the U.S. is really a system of government licensed cartels. The nurses unions, AMA, insurance companies, drug companies, big hospitals, etc have all manipulated the political system to drive up the cost of care.

In 1900 the recorded homicide rate in the US was under 2 per 100,000. 3.7 is about twice that and today Milwaukee has a little over twice the national homicide rate.

The crime rate for Milwaukee statistic was from 1911, the immigration stat was from 1900, since I couldn't find one from 1900.

You can ( and I have) read accounts from the time, and the difference in crime and levels of decay becomes even more apparent. Read How the Other Half Lives and then compare it to The Corner or Gang leader for a day.

Either way, the point stands - these cities, with a high proportion of poor immigrants, did not have anything like the underclass problem that exists in the same cities today.

Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

#140

Post by Rabidmonkey1 » Thu, Feb 19, 2009, 2:16 AM UTC

poutine wrote: post #93

Rabidmonkey1 wrote: post #9

This article is by a kid who is still in this situation. I can't speak or write Chinese, but if someone can reach him via the comments on the original article, please tell him to leave there and explore the world. It's much bigger than the silly schools he's in and there are plenty of opportunities for him to become successful.

You really have no clue. This poor kid probably doesn't have the money for a train trip to Shanghai much less to explore the world. He has no ability to work other places inside China and nobody would hire him where he'd make any money where he is. He is trapped and a Chinese university degree is the only way out.

Hey, that's just plain insulting! FYI I've been all over China - I spent 2 weeks there with a sports team in 2005 playing all over the country - literally east from Beijing to as far wast as Urumchi, which nearly hits the Russian border - in fact, Russians came down to watch the team play.

Have you ever been to China? I have. I know what it's like.

The kid obviously has internet access - isn't that something? There are so many possibilities inherent in that alone for him there, heck, even for something as simple as a solid friendship to keep him grounded. What gives you the authority to declare his fate?