No matter the education or the business, I think what the Chinese should pick up again is conscience.
I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
61–70 of 142 posts
Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
By who? Then you're getting into subjective territory. What if the examiner doesn't like the student or is having a bad day? Both of those have been shown to have subtle effects on that sort of thing. Even a teacher who considers herself fair will subconsciously lean toward grading students they dislike worse than ones they like. Or what if the student knows the material but isn't a very good talker? Tests are consid…
I'm not sure...in your parent post, you mentioned being "accurate to life" as an important measure. While subjective, verbal examinations (and all the possible unfairness they entail) can be significantly more true to life (in the real-world, post-school sense) than the multiple-choice/short-answer tests that are common today. "Objective" tests are best for only the very few things that can be "objectively" measured.…
How does a math test, or a history test, or an SAT reward mediocrity or parroting?
Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
#63I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the Chinese education system, coupled with discipline through fear works. I competed at last year's International Physics Olympiad (Viet Nam), who won? China, as usual. China starts preparation for the competition when their participants are just 8; they work ~16 hours a day on physics problems. The result? Winning with ease. You have, I all presume, read Gladwell's latest book…
I'm currently [one of] the best physics students in the UK and I'd pay anything to have had an uprising like that,
Sure, because you are (unrealistically) imagining yourself compelled to excel at your current aspiration. Consider instead the case where you were forced to put in 10000 hours becoming a master concertina player.
* 1) A productive society is one with experts. (2) Expertise is only accomplished with relentless practice. (C) The most productive society will be accomplished if citizens are made to constantly work at their discipline.*
Who do you admire and look up to? Did they have childhoods chained to the oar, compelled to excel with discipline through fear? Is that how they came to achieve amazing things?
I doubt it. I'm not a physicist at all, but I know at least that Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson did not.
Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
#64It's really depressing to read articles like this, partly because it does seem like there's no way out when you're in the middle of it, and partly because there are significant parts of the American educational system that are really little better. I did not have abusive parents or extended family members, and I did not have to endure the suffering that this author did in a far-away boarding school, but I certainly c…
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.
Which is why PG and RTM worked so hard to develop the admission test for YC applicants . . .
Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doing well in the Physics Olympiad is not the same as doing well in physics. In the Physics Olympiad, you solve simple problems based on well-understood formulae. In physics, you create new knowledge. It may be telling that China has won only three physics Nobel prizes, and all three of the winners got their PhDs in the US. I admire your dedication to working hard on physics, but I think that creative, effortful prac…
Thank you wwalker3 for your keen response; however, I going to have to both agree and disagree - cliché through it is. Doing well in the Physics Olympiad is a prerequisite to doing well in physics. Yes, I agree, creating knowledge requires a creative flare; however, I don't believe such heights can be achieved without first going through "the relentless drill". I'll use to example of literature to better illustrate m…
Your point is well taken, but "creative, effortful practice" also requires a foundation of creative and critical thinking. Like physics, critical thinking is a skill that should be learned and practiced, preferably from a young age and alongside your other training.
One of the deficiencies in the Chinese educational system is that critical thinking simply isn't taught. The SOLE focus is consumption and rote regurgitation of material. I'm currently attending a top university in Beijing, and one thing I find strange is the incurious nature of many of the Chinese students. They've simply never been taught how to question things or contextualize knowledge.
Sure, there are a few highly creative thinkers, but they've had to be entirely autodidactic.
Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that test scores are somehow the least bad option. It's that they're the cheapest least bad option. Actually assessing a students comprehension would require a verbal examination.
By who? Then you're getting into subjective territory. What if the examiner doesn't like the student or is having a bad day? Both of those have been shown to have subtle effects on that sort of thing. Even a teacher who considers herself fair will subconsciously lean toward grading students they dislike worse than ones they like. Or what if the student knows the material but isn't a very good talker? Tests are consid…
My high school measured performance through "Exhibitions" and "Gateways" (the difference was that an Exhibition was usually the culmination of a 2ish month long project, while a Gateway was the culmination of a 2 year Division, roughly equivalent to 2 grades in a conventional school).
The requirements for a Gateway were:
1.) A substantial portfolio - we usually needed 2-3 pieces of work that met the standards for advancement into the next Division, in each skill area (there were like 6 core skill areas).
2.) An oral presentation of one of those pieces of work in front of a panel of judges, similar to a thesis defense.
The panel would have 4-5 people and would usually consist of one's teachers in the subject area (all classes were team-taught, so we had 2 teachers), a teacher who was not one of ours, a classmate, and an outside community member.
The oldest graduates of my high school are only 4 years out of college now, so it's hard to judge how successful this is. But consider that the first two graduating classes were 32 and 48 students, respectively. Of those, I'm at Google. One engineering-ish friend is at Intuit. Two classmates are at Harvard Law, one of whom spent a couple years at Bain beforehand. There're a bunch that have gone into teaching, and several that have started blue-collar businesses (the school was in central Massachusetts, which has much less of a knowledge economy than the immediate Boston area).
Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
miniature versions of this happen in american high schools (especially magnet high schoos), where the children of recent immigrants will have to deal with a parent being angry if they do not get A/A+'s in their coursework.
Again it usually happens when parents are not well educated. They only realize the importance of education, but they're not educated enough to evaluate their children's progress, so they often have to rely on the not always reliable association of good grades with good progress.
My dad has a PhD and he pretty much pressured me as others have described.
I'd say it's not about education as much as about wisdom.
Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
#68My favorite theory about why the West and China diverged starting in the 16th century is that entrepreneurial capitalism thrived in the West. The ambitious acheived success by finding a competent master, learning a trade, and then making stuff people wanted, whether that be clocks or caravels. In China, the ambitious were sucked into the civil service exam system. They were judged by arbitrary tests rather than by pr…
> 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…
Good point. It should also be pointed out how difficult it was to sustain productive and fair policies in the dynastic system. All it took is one bad ruler to ruin centuries of progress.
This is why the integrity and structure of the system is more important than individual rulers. The best form of government may be a benevolent king, and even if that's somehow sustained for 5 generations, all it takes is one malevolent one to ruin everything.
Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
#69I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the Chinese education system, coupled with discipline through fear works. I competed at last year's International Physics Olympiad (Viet Nam), who won? China, as usual. China starts preparation for the competition when their participants are just 8; they work ~16 hours a day on physics problems. The result? Winning with ease. You have, I all presume, read Gladwell's latest book…
Doing well in the Physics Olympiad is not the same as doing well in physics. In the Physics Olympiad, you solve simple problems based on well-understood formulae. In physics, you create new knowledge. It may be telling that China has won only three physics Nobel prizes, and all three of the winners got their PhDs in the US. I admire your dedication to working hard on physics, but I think that creative, effortful prac…
Even if China's universities had developed first-class physics departments 30 years ago, you wouldn't see the effect in Nobel prizes yet.
I guess you're referring to Daniel C. Tsui, Yáng Zhènníng, and Lǐ Zhèngdào. Yáng and Lǐ won their Nobel in 1957. Lǐ got his Ph.D. in the late 1940s; Yáng got his in 1942. China in the 1930s and 1940s was not only a desperately poor undeveloped country; it was also being invaded by Japan. Nobody will argue with you if you say studying physics in China in the 1930s and 1940s was a bad bet.
The physics Nobelists in 2006, 2007, and 2008 got their Ph.D.s in 1974 (Mather), 1970 (Smoot), 1970 (Fert), 1969 (Grünberg), 1972 (Kobayashi), 1967 (Masukawa), and 1952 (Nambu, D.Sc. rather than Ph.D.). So really what we learn from China's lack of physics Nobel prizes in recent years is that China's physics schools were terrible in the 1950s and 1960s. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were happening there in the 1960s, and the problems with Chinese educational outcomes included things like "widespread illiteracy" and "professors sent to prison camps because students thought they were unpatriotic", not problems like "too much time spent on rote learning".
I agree that the Physics Olympiad is not the same as doing physics research; but people who can't do well in things like the Physics Olympiad (as it's been described here) lack the foundation to do physics research.
In computer science, there have recently been some very substantial results out of Chinese universities; Wang Xiaoyun et al.'s breaks of MD5 and SHA-0 and attack on SHA-1 in 2004 and 2005 come to mind. She got her Ph.D. at Shandong in 1993. So I am optimistic that in the coming years there will be many significant results from Chinese universities.
Re: I was driven mad by the Chinese education system
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you wwalker3 for your keen response; however, I going to have to both agree and disagree - cliché through it is. Doing well in the Physics Olympiad is a prerequisite to doing well in physics. Yes, I agree, creating knowledge requires a creative flare; however, I don't believe such heights can be achieved without first going through "the relentless drill". I'll use to example of literature to better illustrate m…
Your point is well taken, but "creative, effortful practice" also requires a foundation of creative and critical thinking. Like physics, critical thinking is a skill that should be learned and practiced, preferably from a young age and alongside your other training. One of the deficiencies in the Chinese educational system is that critical thinking simply isn't taught. The SOLE focus is consumption and rote regurgita…
and one thing I find strange is the incurious nature of
many of the ... students. They've simply never been taught how to question things or contextualize knowledge.
Sure, there are a few highly creative thinkers, but they've had to be entirely autodidactic.
This sounds like every student body I've ever encountered anywhere in the world. Do you think the problem is worse in Beijing (what university?) than at Berkeley or Stanford?