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The land of the future: In Shanghai Chinese students amazed with test scores.
In the article, note the results of Americans. America is way past due for the wake-up call. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/ed...ef=todayspaper
I tried this with the "PISA results" thread, but I guess that title was too confusing.
I'm not sure they did fake it, although it wouldn't surprise me if they biased it in a way. Still the Chinese portion only concerned Shanghai and they've done massive work to make Shanghai's educational system good. If everything is above-board this states that a relatively affluent Chinese city that the regime wants to show off has in fact impressed, that they got what they paid for. I don't think it means average Chinese kids are much smarter or better educated than ours.
Average Finnish, Korean, Singaporean, or Taiwanese kids however are smarter or better educated than ours. We've known that for awhile though.
I tried this with the "PISA results" thread, but I guess that title was too confusing.
I'm not sure they did fake it, although it wouldn't surprise me if they biased it in a way. Still the Chinese portion only concerned Shanghai and they've done massive work to make Shanghai's educational system good. If everything is above-board this states that a relatively affluent Chinese city that the regime wants to show off has in fact impressed, that they got what they paid for. I don't think it means average Chinese kids are much smarter or better educated than ours.
Average Finnish, Korean, Singaporean, or Taiwanese kids however are smarter or better educated than ours. We've known that for awhile though.
Apparently this was only a sampling of 5000 students in one particular district in Shanghai- for all we know it could be the one district that is the top, cream of the crop of China. I would not be so quick to think China's students are doing better than any others in the world from this report- but the thing to take from this is simply the fact that they are rapidly improving, and of course as we've known for a generation or more, we here in the US are declining, especially in Math and Science.
I doubt if they faked it. I lived and taught English in Korea for many years.
Generally speaking, Koreans were absolutley obsessed with being 'better than Japan' for as long as you can imagine. They constantly strive to be #1, and absolutely obsessed about English and Education. Basically EVERY Junior High and High School will spend ALL of their available time after school attending MORE school in private institutues.
When I've visited China (been there 4 times), they remind me exactly of the Koreans. Just completely obsessed with nationally being the best, and education being the KEY.
Thinking back 20 years ago, when I use to work in my college library....I often worked Friday night...and I went to a very WHITE college...state school in the middle of Michigan. I didn't know we had any Asian students at my college. But weekends, particularly Friday night, our library was filled with seemingly EVERY Asian student, primarily Chinese, that attended our university. All the other kids, were partying their ass off on Friday night, and had no interest in opening a college textbook until SUnday night around 11pm or so.
In short, no real surprise here that Chinese would blow away other countries by large margins.
^^^ I can vouch for that. Whenever I went into my university libraries at the weekend I'd be the only white person there and all the others would be Chinese/Indians all doing their PhDs in finance, engineering, IT and the like. You never saw any Asians in the pubs or societies/sports teams etc. You know what they say about all work and no play though.
The U.S. education system needs improvement, no argument about that. However, the constant finger pointing and blaming teachers for students' failure isn't helping the situation. Haven't politians ever heard the old "you can lead a horse to water" adage? American students do not care that they are behind the rest of the world. It is a symptom of our attitude of entitlement.
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