New Education Performance Data Published: Asia Dominates 263
jones_supa writes "The latest PISA (Programme for International Assessment) results are out today. Since 2000, the OECD has attempted to evaluate the knowledge and skills of 15-year olds across the world through its PISA test. More than 510,000 students in 65 economies took part in the latest test, which covered math, reading and science, with the main focus on math — which the OECD state is a 'strong predictor of participation in post-secondary education and future success.' Asian countries outperform the rest of the world, according to the OECD, with Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Macau and Japan amongst the top performing countries and economies. Students in Shanghai performed so well in math that the OECD report compares their scoring to the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling above most OECD countries. The study shows also a slight gender cap: in all countries, boys generally perform a bit better than girls, but this applies only to math."
Here's a spreadsheet listing each country's results. The U.S. ranked 26th in math (below average), 17th in reading (slightly above average), and 21st in science (slightly below average).
USA (Score:5, Funny)
Re:USA (Score:5, Funny)
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According to the article they WERE testing 15 year olds.
Perspective from a Chinese American (Score:5, Interesting)
I was from China, and I am a naturalized citizen of the United States of America.
Regarding education - back when I escaped from China (that was some 40 odd years ago) the schools in East Asia (countries which were/are heavily influenced by the Confucianism school of thought such as China, Korea, Japan, Singapore ) were pretty much based on the top-down rote-learning mode - whereby the students have no say, and they must do EVERYTHING their teachers told them to do.
It operated that way because the basic tenet of the Confucianism teaching is that the young uns are SLAVES to their elders (it's pretty much based on the blind obedience mode).
When I reached the West I was totally astounded when my classmate actually questioned the teachers !
That was a super NO-NO in Asia.
Back then, even if the student asked a totally legitimate question to the teacher in class that student will be summoned to the headmaster and/or discipline master's office for punishment.
That was how the Asian school had operated back then.
Now ... except for Korea, which is still practicing strict Confucianism as what it has been doing for the past 2,000 years ... many schools in the East Asian countries (those populated by yellow-skin folks) have drastically improved their teaching method.
Nowadays students are encouraged to solve problems, rather than to remember the facts laid out by their teachers.
From Singapore to Tokyo to Hong Kong to Taiwan, everywhere I go I see great improvements.
As for the other East Asian countries, those which are being populated by the brown skin folks such as Indonesia or the Philippines or Thailand, their schools are still as sucks as 50 years ago.
I see that there are people here trying to justify their own country's failing by saying that the "comparison is not fair", that the comparison is comparing "cities to countries".
For those folks, what I see is nothing much but sour grapes.
Yes, comparing schools in Hong Kong or Singapore to schools in the United States of America is comparing schools in CITIES to a LARGE COUNTRY --- but so what ?
If the schools in the United States of America sux, it's STILL SUX, no matter if it's in the city of Detroit or if it's in the city of Little Rock.
How many of my fellow Americans have been to the public schools ? How many of you have seen the effect of gangsterism in the public schools in America ?
I have.
I have 2 friends who were teachers in public schools in America who were MURDERED by their students.
On the other hand, I have a lot of friends who teach in schools in Asia, and so far, none of them have been killed by their students yet.
When I asked my teacher friends in Asia about a recent news of a math teacher in Boston who got her throat slit by her student. all of them were horrified by that news.
But when I post that same news to my friends who used to teach (and some are STILL teaching) in American public schools, they just shrug.
This reflects how bad the American school system has become.
You guys may want to deny it as much as you can, but for one who was from afar (I am not a product of the American high school system), the American school system has failed.
Study is flawed -- compares cities to countries (Score:5, Informative)
As Slate pointed out this morning (), the way that this study mixes data from individual urban areas with data from whole countries makes it impossible to perform fair comparisons. Note that 4 out of the 7 asian "countries" that the Slashdot summary refers to (Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau) are either city-states or aren't even countries at all!
Comparing non-countries (or city-states) with countries biases the results by comparing poorer, less educated rural areas with better educated cities.
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Forgot the URL: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2013/12/03/we_need_to_stop_letting_china_cheat_on_international_education_rankings.html
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Maybe the conclusion is flawed (if not all regions are included in the comparison, such as mainland china, maybe asia isn't doing so well) but of course you can compare a city with a rural area, why shouldn't you? If the average american child are worse at math than the average singaporian, of course Singapore deserves a higher ranking, why shouldn't it?
Re:Study is flawed -- compares cities to countries (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally reject the assertion that math scores predict future success (there might be a small relationship in certain nations, but not worldwide), I also reject that cultural bias is being neglected.
I've met plenty of engineers from cultures where questioning and innovation are highly discouraged and they couldn't innovate their way out of a paper bag. Great at the book learning and can duplicate the solution to any problem they've seen but handling real world problems where the constraints don't match the book? They don't even reach the level of western high school students even when compared against PHD's. There is a real cultural bias, and ultimately that bias is going to handicap the advancement of every culture it infects.
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I've met plenty of engineers from cultures where questioning and innovation are highly discouraged and they couldn't innovate their way out of a paper bag.
True and I believe that is why this discrepancy in knowledge has not had any real, noticeable impact yet because at university you have to question if you are going to learn anything. However this is not a static picture - standards in the west are dropping and at some point all the innovation in the world is not going to help us because our kids won't have enough background to be able to ask interesting questions or, to use your analogy, they will find the inside of the paper bag so new and exciting becau
Re:Study is flawed -- compares cities to countries (Score:4, Insightful)
Comparing non-countries (or city-states) with countries biases the results by comparing poorer, less educated rural areas with better educated cities.
And this is bad exactly why?
If it's true that in the U.S., the rural areas lack education and are less wealthy, when compared with urban areas, then it's a fact studies like this are pointing out. It's not that the results are biased. They just reflect reality. Obviously the U.S. misses a strategy to bring enough education to rural areas and less wealthy people.
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Comparing non-countries (or city-states) with countries biases the results by comparing poorer, less educated rural areas with better educated cities.
And this is bad exactly why?
Because rankings can easily get messed up if there's some sort of confounding variable or factor. If education is generally poorer in rural areas worldwide (which is roughly true), then this ranking system may partially be measuring percentage of urban areas within a given country, rather than a meaningful comparison of educational performance.
Of course, it's probably more than that, but rigorous statistical comparisons need to take demographics into account to assert causality.
It's not that the results are biased. They just reflect reality. Obviously the U.S. misses a strategy to bring enough education to rural areas and less wealthy people.
No one's saying that the U
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If in most of the rest of the world the best schools are in the cities and this is reflected in the test scores then it tells you that you need to do more about the quality of your inner city schools.
Umm, I think you're agreeing with my general point. We need to figure out exactly where and in what environments schools are performing better or worse. If they are performing worse in rural areas or inner cities or whatever, that needs to be the focus.
If demographic trends are actually well correlated with these sorts of things in other countries, it may turn out that we may not be ranking countries by educational performance, but rather by some demographic trend -- and that's important to know when ju
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You got the causation backwards. It's not that Singapore causes its families to become educated, it's that families that value education and are looking for a place to succeed move to those places. And if you look at those nations, they actually spend far less per pupil than the US. They also have greater economic freedoms, less regulation, and far lower taxes than the US. Top income tax rates in Singapore
Re:Study is flawed -- compares cities to countries (Score:5, Informative)
This is a totally fair point, so let's remove the Chinese cities and leave only genuinely independent states. City states count as independent states. Then we end up with
Singapore
Taiwan
South Korea
Japan
Liechtenstein
Switzerland
Netherlands
Estonia
Finland
Canada
If our pride is still hurt, and I note that Britain, Germany and Norway aren't on the list yet so mine certainly is, we can go further and decide that we won't count city states either (though that's a step that isn't really very well justified at all.) Then we're left with
Taiwan
South Korea
Japan
Switzerland
Netherlands
Estonia
Finland
Canada
Poland
Belgium
Alas, I'd have to find another reason to cut out a state before Germany finally popped into the top ten, and I'd have to cut out every single one of these somehow before the UK even came in at number 10. We'd have to lose all those *again* before the USA finally appears in the list.
The thing that gets me about people's responses to these lists is the air of hurt nationalism. It seems people will say "shitty inner-city areas in the USA are dragging down the average". That's totally true. But the USA is coming in below Slovakia, which has shitty inner-city areas, and Russia, which these days is very little *but* shitty inner-city areas once you're outside of Petersburg and Moscow. Most (indeed all) the European nations have some horrible shitty inner-city areas, too. Unfortunately for humanity, the USA does not hold a monopoly on shitty inner-city schools bringing down the averages.
The other point is that these tests are indicative, and not much more than that, and in nations with the populations of France, the UK and particularly the USA, you don't *need* an extremely highly-educated workforce to be more than able to keep an edge and keep ahead. You only need enough to fill positions needing high education and high skill, and otherwise people who may not do so well in these tests are more than capable enough to fill in the gaps. (Or, come to that, learn on the job anyway.) So the USA can still more than fill its various three-letter agencies and its universities and its technology firms, as can the UK, as can France. A nation like Liechtenstein, with its 35,000 inhabitants, is less likely to be able to rely on the long tail to do that.
None of this should be taken as an argument for complacence - Lord knows I'd like our education system(s) dramatically improved - but I don't think being "mid-table" (as the UK, the USA and France all are) is a cause for any new concern.
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Certainly not saying it's not a problem that should be solved. Of course it damn well should, I absolutely agree with you. The attitudes of Western Europe to their inner cities is reprehensible, and so far as I can see (from a position of basically ignorance; I've spent some time in Chicago but am otherwise ignorant of American cities firsthand) the attitude of America is even worse. Given its GDP and its GDP per capita, the USA should be able to raise standards across the board and particularly in its citi
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Singapore is a country even though it is a small island. Hong Kong & Macau could be counted as one country; however, I don't know how people in Hong Kong think whether they are in the same country. Only Shanghai is a CITY in China and cannot represent the whole country.
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Further to that,
Liechtenstein (8th): 35,000
Switzerland (9th): 8m
Estonia (11th): 1.3m
Finland (12th): 5.4m
Liechtenstein would be debatable to people who seem to think city states can't be nations, but I'm sure no-one would argue that Switzerland, Estonia and Finland aren't nations. Nations with fairly extensive rural and urban areas, too. Switzerland is roughly requivalent to Hong Kong and Estonia and Finland are rather smaller.
Re:Study is flawed -- compares cities to countries (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Study is flawed -- compares cities to countries (Score:5, Informative)
in Europe, city centers tend to be expensive, prestigious, and very well equipped with top schools. It's probably the poor suburbians who fare worse.
In America it is exactly the opposite.
I lived in Shanghai for several years, and my kids attended school there. In American math class they say "show your work". In Chinese math classes they say "do it in your head". Chinese kids have to stand with their hands behind their backs, looking at a list of integers on the whiteboard, and add them up in their head. They do the same with subtraction, multiplication, and division. They drill until they get good at it. As an American, I never learned to do that. So when I need a list of numbers added, I just ask my Chinese educated daughter to do it. That is usually quicker than looking for a calculator.
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As an American, you were probably allowed only into the better schools.
I lived in Gubei, which is a nice neighborhood in Puxi (western Shanghai), so the school was probably above average. It was the official public school for our area. There was nothing fancy about it. There was no heat or AC. Shanghai is hot and humid in the summer, and often below freezing in the winter. The kids use gloves with the fingertips removed, so they can keep their hands warm but still write. I have nieces and nephews in other parts of China, and while the facilities vary, the discipline and
Re:Study is flawed -- compares cities to countries (Score:5, Informative)
The study is flawed because it takes into account the same crappy tests that utterly fail to test for any sort of understanding of the material. This is not "education," unless you consider pure rote memorization to be education.
Baloney. Have you even looked at the test? Here are some example questions [theguardian.com]. The questions involve a lot more than "rote memorization".
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Countries that dismis
Re:Study is flawed -- compares cities to countries (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to quote the reply from ShanghaiBill to a similar comment in the thread above this one:
Baloney. Have you even looked at the test? Here are some example questions http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/03/are-you-smarter-than-a-15-year-old-oecd-pisa-questions [theguardian.com] [the guardian]. The questions involve a lot more than "rote memorization".
Unless you think solving logical puzzles and doing calculations is just "rote memorization". Because that would mean that all of science is based on that, which would also indicate that they're on to something there if they go for that as well.
As an aside: rote memorization is an important part of learning anyway, since if you don't *know* when stuff happened, or what the base formulas are for something that took us 2000 years to develop, you're not going to just deduce them from the basics when you need them. You're not even going to know what you don't know. So the basis of learning is knowing what there is - then applying that with skill, intelligence and creativity.
My in-laws are Chinese. And while their educational system is still geared towards suppressing deviating opinions, right up into university, their students are quite able to keep up with Western students when they come over here to study (we met quite a few over the last years). Here, they find the hard part is not the knowledge - they can learn - but the "intelligent application of learned skills". Once they learn that as well (it's a thing you can learn), they still have the advantage of a huge pool of knowledge they can draw from, as well as the creative bits. And since these students are slowly replacing the teachers in China as well, you can bet the Chinese system will change as well. The Dragon is still just gearing up...
Teach to the test (Score:2)
Re:Teach to the test (Score:4, Interesting)
No, you just find clever ways to eliminate all the poor people from your numbers--like defining Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Macau as separate countries so you don't have to count all the illiterate poor people out in the Chinese countryside.
Re:Teach to the test (Score:5, Interesting)
Asia Dominates in teach the test (Score:2)
And not real real skill if they are not on the test.
Is this any real surprise? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm not surprised. At first, I saw people home-schooling, and it was just the RW types. However, I'm seeing the same thing on the left as well, where parents are just getting tired of a broken education system.
How to fix? I have thought of vouchers as an idea, but my fear that it would trade failed public schools for failed schools owned by a private corporation. A national school system would not fly because of the history of state/local autonomy. Bashing unions are not going to help much, as non-unio
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The what types?
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It always pisses me off when people toss around names like that. There's no fucking wings, there's idiots, assholes, and morons.
Re:Is this any real surprise? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have thought of vouchers as an idea, but my fear that it would trade failed public schools for failed schools owned by a private corporation.
Why? First, they needn't be owned by for-profit corporations. Traditionally private schools are not. I'd be happy with banning the use of the school vouchers for for-profit schools (if nothing else, the fireworks would be entertaining!). With vouchers you'd have a choice, and schools would have to compete with each other. I'm not a market fundamentalist, or even RW, but I am an empiricist. School vouchers are very popular and successful in an extreme right-wing bastion called Sweden.
Probably the best way is from the ground up... get homeschooling parents to trade off, and form the old "one room schoolhouse" of yore.
What makes you think they aren't? My neighbors are home schooling their daughter. Admittedly she's only in the first grade, but amongst other things kids go to some classes that are taught by various parents. BTW, politically they lean to the left a bit (mom's even a vegetarian!).
Re:Is this any real surprise? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree - unions have nothing to do with it.
Finland, for example has an excellent education system. Their teachers are fully unionized. Likewise Massachusetts.
The US states that don't have unionized teachers are also the states that do the worst on measures of education.
Re:Is this any real surprise? (Score:4, Insightful)
You should put a warning on a comment like that. A sufficiently high level of cognitive dissonance has been known to make heads explode.
You forgot to rant about (Score:2)
You cannot flunk the dolts because, "it might damage their self-esteem."
Deal with it [despair.com].
Cheers,
Dave
What country is Shanghai? (Score:2)
Students in Shanghai performed so well in math that the OECD report compares their scoring to the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling above most OECD countries.
Not sure about math, reading and science, but clearly my geography is bad. I had no idea Shanghai was a country.
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Re:What country is Shanghai? (Score:4, Funny)
Students in Shanghai performed so well in math that the OECD report compares their scoring to the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling above most OECD countries.
Not sure about math, reading and science, but clearly my geography is bad. I had no idea Shanghai was a country.
Your reading doesn't seem to be up to much either. Nowhere in that sentence does it even imply that Shanghai is a country.
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You are aware that contextual clues [slashdot.org] form a rather large part of reading comprehension?
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So you believe comparing two different things on the same level is even approaching accuracy or responsible reporting?
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I would agree that comparing a city to a country is unfair, but that's not what this conversation started off as.
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Perhaps you meant sarcasm
Perhaps you don't understand that irony is the device most commonly used in sarcasm, and that they're not entirely separate concepts. The distinction is a matter of tone, with sarcasm being very sharp or bitter. Hence the OP is not sarcastic. Despite being a product of the American public schools that are being so sharply criticized here, I learned such advanced literary and rhetorical concepts in an advanced setting call the 8th grade. Now that's sarcasm. See the difference?
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Ah, the old "well actually I was only being ironic" defence. Nice try.
At What Cost (Score:4, Interesting)
Japan is on track to experience negative population growth.
What do all these wonderfully educated youth have to look forward to besides leaving their native country to go find somewhere they can actually live
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Fewer people of working age to fund the pensions of retired people. Kinda like the baby-boomer time bomb that's in the process of going off here.
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Re:At What Cost (Score:4, Funny)
They're not teaching them the joy of sex.
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Have some reading. [wikipedia.org] Yes, that is apparently a real thing over there.
highest suicide rate (Score:2)
Only when they play Terran!
"While expendable, the massive losses of terran Marines during the Great War began to become cost prohibitive. The Medic's use of chemical modifiers has greatly enhanced the survival rate of UED forces, lengthening the expected battlefield life expectancy to over nine seconds." [wikia.com]
Massachusetts (Score:5, Insightful)
Results among the states varies a lot. For example Massachusetts is fully competitive with the Asian countries. On the TIMSS exam (generally thought to be more difficult than the PISA test) Massachusetts finished sixth in the world in mathematics, and second in the sciences for it's 8th grade students.
High levels of achievement ARE attainable in the US. It isn't a matter of cultural problems, or the society we live in. It's a matter of politicians and parents adopting the attitude that it can be done, and sticking to that idea. Effective reform though is not something that can be done overnight. Massachusetts has been at it for 20 years.
http://boston.com/community/blogs/rock_the_schoolhouse/2012/12/massachusetts_aces_internation.html [boston.com]
Massachusetts has shown how to do it. Now all it takes is realization of what can be done and applying it elsewhere.
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I grew up in West Virginia, in a not particularly wealthy or prestigious part of the state. However, we did have a lot of local chemical plants, and thus lots of chemical engineers. When these sorts of tests
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That's no mystery: just attract a highly educated workforce, and education, health, income, life expectancy, etc. will all follow. Unfortunately, getting the top 5% of the population to move to your state is not something every state can do.
Cannot compare a city to a country (Score:4, Insightful)
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That accounts for 4 of the 25 entries ahead of the US on this list. It really isn't that significant.
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Uh no. Drop the 4 cities and you still have COUNTRIES like Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Estonia, Taiwan, Ireland etc etc whupping the USA bad on this particular test.
It doesn't change the conclusion the we are getting fucked by our education system one teeny bit.
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Re:Cannot compare a city to a country (Score:4, Informative)
More than that, Shanghai's hukou system [wikipedia.org] ensures that the children of poor residents from other parts of China aren't even a part of the Shanghai school system. It's more than half the population, and probably more than that by children (poor people and ethnic minorities either aren't subject to, or ignore, the single-child rule). So this is comparing the wealthiest portion of a single city, the city with the best school system in China, to the population of the US as a whole.
Take the test yourself (Score:5, Informative)
Here
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/ [oecd.org]
You can take a sample test yourself. See how basic the questions are and feel appalled to see the % of students in your country that managed to pass each level.
For example, only 11% of students in my country (Argentina) were able to reach level 3 (identify the smallest value in a table). Highest rank for that question was Shanghai-China (89%). USA was 48%.
Re:Take the test yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
(identify the smallest value in a table). Highest rank for that question was Shanghai-China (89%). USA was 48%.
Thanks, before I was just disappointed with America, now I'm disappointed in the world!
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Which gets us to the question: did the teenagers fail on purpose?
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As someone who took this test (I believe, if not this exact one it was very similar) when I was in school, I can guarantee you people did. Once we were told it didn't have any impact on our grade, people just started marking down answers and either spent zero time thinking about it or specifically chose the wrong ones just to be defiant.
Believe it or not, teenagers by and large don't care how statistically valid someone's survey is when they feel like it has no impact on them.
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That's a really good point, most of them probably didn't care. They should have offered the kids some kind of incentive for doing well just to make sure they were paying attention.
Granted the same incentive doesn't really translate to the same motivation across cultures so that would skew the results a little but that's better than the current situation where the test merely measures the number of students who immediately pay attention to any arbitrary commands issued by an authority figure. And on that n
Missing in action. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, whole of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan ... Looks like the entire subcontinent is missing. China has a few urban centers represented. Africa is gone. So it falls into the bemoan the ... category.
"Asia dominates...." (Score:2)
In gaming out standardized tests...
that's all this is measuring...whose standardized test-prep is better...
this does not measure education level or mental ability
Gender gaps (Score:5, Informative)
TFS: "The study shows also a slight gender cap: in all countries, boys generally perform a bit better than girls, but this applies only to math."
PISA 2012 Overview: "Boys perform better than girls in mathematics in only 37 out of the 65 countries and economies that participated in PISA 2012, and girls outperform boys in five countries." (For the curious, they're Jordan, Qatar, Thailand, Malaysia and Iceland.)
The Guardian article didn't get this wrong. What the hell, submitter?
Intellectual wealth (Score:2)
Agreed, Asia rocks education (Score:2)
I don't think so (Score:2)
On average (Score:2)
You have to take into consideration that US demographics are extremely diverse where as china's stats are pretty much uniform.
Point being... we have a lot of stupid people in the US. Just stupid. Not a lot to be done about it.
That said, we also have some of the smartest people in the world. And what is more, we draw smart people to the US from all around the world. And they come here and have children.
Are they massively outnumbered by the exceptionally stupid? Yes. But we have them all the same.
Does it do any good? (Score:2, Interesting)
While Asian countries are often accused of taking jobs from the West, the President of South Korea's Hyundai Motors visited factories in Russia and the Czech Republic. He said he was impressed by the quality of workers who were far superior to South Korean workers -- they never staged strikes and had far lower wages. While a South Korean factory takes 30 hours to make a car, the Czech factory takes 16. The visiting Korean managers could not keep up with the pace of production, so they received help from loc
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In Asia, they are teaching kids Math.
In America they are teaching kids (and their parents) that the American educational system sucks. This helps keep up the funding for the educational-industrial-congressional complex.
Re:Asia Vs. America (Score:4, Interesting)
In America they are teaching kids (and their parents) that the American educational system sucks. This helps keep up the funding for the educational-industrial-congressional complex.
That's an interesting thought. If you tell people that their education system is bad, it may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the students fail to learn only because they've been told they will fail to learn.
Re:Asia Vs. America (Score:5, Informative)
In America, you teach that Intelligent Design is valid science.
In America, belief and opinion is weighed equal to facts and evidence.
That, in a nutshell, is what it wrong with the US educational system -- it has become a tool of drooling idiots who pass rules about things they don't even remotely understand, and act like their religion actually defines reality.
In some ways, and in some places, America is little better than the Taliban ever was. You just change the specifics of the religion, but the results are the same.
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Much as I agree with you, that only affects the science part of the test (and then only the biology part). It has nothing to do with reading and math. I've never heard a fundamentalist preacher say that calculus is evil.
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And we have at least an equally large number who proudly wear their illiteracy as a badge of honor.
Many here on /.
How many people don't know the difference between loose/lose, there/they're/their, wait/weight (no, this one's not from /., saw it elsewhere on the web this AM), etc.?
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But it has the net effect of fundamentally undermining the ability to think critically about things, and evaluate evidence.
I agree, and in the real world that's important. However, it still has little to do with these tests. Reading tests are mostly about comprehension of what was written, not protracted thought or discussion about the material. That's also true of math, at least at that level. It teaches problem solving skills, which are important, but definitely not the same as the ability to think critically about things, and evaluate evidence.
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Re:Asia Vs. America (Score:5, Insightful)
In some ways, and in some places, America is little better than the Taliban ever was.
Yep, because the Supreme Court will stone you to death if you try to teach the truth rather than creationism.
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In America, you teach that Intelligent Design is valid science.
In America, belief and opinion is weighed equal to facts and evidence.
No. Only in a few small isolated areas, and Texas, and on Fox news. Not in the vast majority of the country.
That, in a nutshell, is what it wrong with the US educational system -- it has become a tool of drooling idiots who pass rules about things they don't even remotely understand, and act like their religion actually defines reality.
In some ways, and in some places, America is little better than the Taliban ever was. You just change the specifics of the religion, but the results are the same.
Yes, because in America we typically leave school board meetings over science policy, and go to the homes of our opponents and murder them. I really don't think you understand anything about the Taliban. Your level of ignorance is actually physically painful. Yes there are problems with people misunderstanding science and religion and trying to combine them. Overall you don't seem to understand
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Do people in foreign countries actually believe this? It's hilarious how some foreigners go to US websites and absorb US culture, but believe the most ridiculous anti-US propaganda at face value.
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We believe it just as much as Americans believe that we routinely kill off the elderly in The Netherlands (*), smoke dope all day while walking around on wooden shoes, all while tending to our tulips :)
(*) We do, but only on special, state-appointed holidays.
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No, more like there are two types of school in America: the good schools out in the suburbs where the kids are doing just fine compared with the rest of the world, and the shithole schools in the inner city that have to spend all their energy dealing with discipline problems and can't keep decent teachers. I bet Switzerland has plenty of the former, but does it have to deal with the latter dragging down their average?
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Yeah, they are. Here is an article [washingtonpost.com] on the subject. But this are the key quotes:
Among non-Hispanic white Americans, the average [PISA] score was 525 - not very different from Canada's 524, New Zealand's 521 or Australia's 515. All these countries are heavily white, and all ranked in the top 10 of the 65 participating school systems. The story is the same for Asian Americans. Their average score was 541 - somewhat below Shanghai, about even with South Korea and ahead of Hong Kong (533) and Japan. Again, all these other systems were in the top 10
. . . . . But the most glaring gap is well-known: the stubbornly low test scores of blacks and Hispanics. In the PISA study, their reading scores were 441 (blacks) and 466 (Hispanics).
So, yeah, the affluent white kids out in the suburbs and decent neighborhoods are apparently learning just fine.
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Well done. You've completely missed my point.
How "parallel" do you think these schools will actually be? Of course, the best extracurricular programs and the best teachers will want to work with the well-behaved kids more, so they'll try to get into that one more heavily, giving those good students a better chance at a good education. The "bad" kids will be stuck with the worse programs and teachers, reinforcing that there is no escape from a life of crime and violence. Sure, we could legislate that program
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In Asia, they are teaching kids Science.
In America, we are teaching them that as long as almost all the experts agree, the science doesn't matter.
Worse, they're teaching them their personal feelings and opinions are as good as any amount of reproducible experiments and data.
New country - does China know? (Score:5, Funny)
From the people who yesterday gave us that Gothenburg is the capital of Sweden, now comes the news that Shanghai is a country.
I'm sure the PLA will be thrilled to know this, and can pull out troops in Tibet, or near the Taiwan Straits, and redirect them towards Shanghai!
Can PISA do an assessment test on /. editors & their geography?
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From the people who yesterday gave us that Gothenburg is the capital of Sweden, now comes the news that Shanghai is a country.
Knowing the Shanghai-na, I'm pretty sure they'd agree with this assessment :)
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Watch out. The US is losing ground in areas like scientific papers.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/28/china-us-publisher-scientific-papers [theguardian.com]
In fact China may surpass the US this year.
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It's interesting to hear from someone who had boots on the ground (I made a comment above about being unaware that Shanghai was a country). As for "while we are at it see how well they do at independent problem solving and creative thinking", what do you think about the "'stuffing the duck" system? I've heard Chinese complain about it. How real is it?
Even though it's cherry picked and results in stressed out kids, I don't want to take anything away from the recognition of Shanghai's educational achievements
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