Why America's School "Lag" Has Never Mattered 361
The Organization for Economic and Cooperation and Development (OECD), a forum of the top 34 developed economies, has released an annual education report, and guess what? The U.S. has once again ranked poorly in relation to many other developed countries. An article at TechCrunch argues that we needn't worry because it doesn't matter: "However, the report implies that education translates into gainful market skills, an assumption not found in the research. For instance, while Chinese students, on average, have twice the number of instructional hours as Americans, both countries have identical scores on tests of scientific reasoning.
'The results suggest that years of rigorous training of physics knowledge in middle and high schools have made significant impact on Chinese students’ ability in solving physics problems, while such training doesn’t seem to have direct effects on their general ability in scientific reasoning, which was measured to be at the same level as that of the students in USA,' wrote a team of researchers studying whether Chinese superiority in rote scientific knowledge translated into the kinds of creative thinking necessary for innovation."
Because (Score:5, Funny)
AMERICA IS AWESOME!!!!!! We're #1! We're #1!!!! WHOOOOO!
Different reason (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, American "school lag" does not matter, but it doesn't matter for a different reason. It doesn't matter because education is irrelevant in USA, there is no new manufacturing, old manufacturing is leaving. The people who care about their kids will send them to private schools and probably those kids will not have a 'lag' or it will be a smaller 'lag' and kids that are not sent to private schools are on a lower socio-economic status, probably would have been factory workers in the past, but since today there are no factories, they'll end up serving fries and in other various service sector jobs until the service sector economy melts down and once it does, it won't matter at all what your education was in the past life.
The only thing that will matter in the new life is how well you are able to survive in really harsh economic conditions, no jobs, no money. Does education lag matter in those conditions? Unlikely.
If you can't win the competition, change the rules (Score:4, Funny)
"Hey, China beat us again!"
"Aw, that ranking doesn't matter anyway . . . who cares . . . ? We're better, like, at, you know, stuff that you can't measure . . . got it . . . ?"