Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Is this the Singapore that so many of you are dying to emulate?
"Birth rates in the 1960s were still perceived as high by the government; on average, a baby was born every 11 minutes in 1965. Kandang Kerbau Hospital (KKH) — which specialised in women's health and was the most popular hospital to have children — saw over 100 deliveries per day in 1962. In 1966, KKH delivered 39835 babies, earning it a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for "largest number of births in a single maternity facility" for ten years. Because there was generally a massive shortage of beds in that era, mothers with routine deliveries were discharged from hospitals within 24 hours.[16]
In September 1965 the Minister for Health, Yong Nyuk Lin, submitted a white paper to Parliament, recommending a "Five-year Mass Family Planning programme" that would reduce the birth rate to 20.0 per thousand individuals by 1970. In 1966, the Family Planning and Population Board (FPPB) had been established based on the findings of the white paper, providing clinical services and public education on family planning.[17]
By 1970, the Stop at Two campaign was firmly established, implementing incentives, disincentives and public exhortation to discourage families from having more than two children. After 1975, the fertility rate declined below replacement level, in a sign that Singapore was undergoing the demographic transition. In 1983, the Graduate Mothers' Scheme was implemented in an attempt to get educated women, especially women with a university degree, to marry and procreate, while the government encouraged women without an O-level degree to get sterilised. This was done out of the Lee Kuan Yew government's belief that for the nation to best develop and avoid hardship, the educated classes should be encouraged to contribute to the nation's breeding pool, while the uneducated should not, sparking the Great Marriage Debate.
In 1986, the government reversed its population policy — except its stance on low-income, lowly-educated women — and initiated the Have Three or More (if you can afford it) campaign, offering cash and public administration incentives to have children. In 2001, the Singapore government started its Baby Bonus scheme."
(And don't give me crap about the source. If you don't believe it find a credible source to refute it)
Add to this the fact that Singapore has a completely urban population approximately equal to the population of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island combined, and a land area about 15% larger than those three boroughs together, and you might see how it may be difficult to scale their educational system to a far more diverse population numbering more than 50 times their size.
Last edited by rugrats2001; 05-02-2016 at 05:18 PM..
US education in math and science are way behind China. The Chinese STEM model was built upon the old Soviet education system. Students start physics, chemistry and biology in middle school. They have learned 2D geometry and algebra before moving up to high school. Middle school kids have done many "proof type" problems. They are capable to solve equations with 3 unknowns (X, Y, and Z). Quadratic and factorization are introduced and done in grade 6 and 7. A good high school student can do complex trigonometry operations and 3D geometry proofs. Their last math topic is calculus.
Give me a break. Do you really believe that the approximately 50% of the population of China who lives in the poor rural areas is educated this way? I'm sorry, it just doesn't happen like that.
EVERYWHERE is better than the US in education when you let the other countries cherry pick what regions and students they want to include. We include EVERYONE in our statistics.
Give me a break. Do you really believe that the approximately 50% of the population of China who lives in the poor rural areas is educated this way? I'm sorry, it just doesn't happen like that.
EVERYWHERE is better than the US in education when you let the other countries cherry pick what regions and students they want to include. We include EVERYONE in our statistics.
Yes, the PISA chart that Matadora posted didn't include China b/c only kids from Shanghai "fully participated".
Yes, the PISA chart that Matadora posted didn't include China b/c only kids from Shanghai "fully participated".
Shanghai is considering not participating in future PISA testing:
"Whether or when Shanghai decides to drop PISA is unknown and dependent on many factors, political consideration being one. But it is clear that Shanghai officials have acknowledged that PISA does not give them what they want. Its narrow definition of education quality as test scores obscures other aspects of education that are much more important."
"Scores on the 2015 reading test have dropped five points since 1992, the earliest year with comparable scores, and are unchanged in math during the past decade."
It is obvious we have long passed the point of diminishing returns in education. The next additional $ we spend on will not produce any better outcomes than the last $200 billion or whatever. That dollar could be better spent on road and bridges, on new cell phones, on ice cream.
Paying more for something that could be had for less never increases social welfare. It only reduces it. Although it might increase someones private welfare.
If we want to improve education, reduce taxes so people have to work less. Let them get on with their family lives, which we are always told when kids fail is more important than teaching inputs anyway.
We should recognize that preparing 60% or so of the kid for college is all that can be achieved no matter what we do. We've about run out of potions, spells and incantations. "College material" is just not what most kids are, never were, and never will be.
I apologize if this is a repeat post, as I did not read this whole thread, but I agree that the problem is in HOW math is being taught. It's taught as something meaningless to memorize. I survived math class in high school by memorizing the problems and their solutions. I had one set of operations for this, another for that, etc. If we instead taught the LANGUAGE of math, then maybe we would see dramatic improvement. I work with kids on a daily basis, and, from what I've seen, they just don't understand what they are being taught, because they aren't really being taught. They're expected to reproduce an answer to get a grade; they're not expected to actually learn, remember, or apply it in a new set of situations. A lot of my students don't even know how fractions are related to decimals.
I fault not only the schools but the culture as a whole.
The grouping and social pressures of even good high schools encourage students who don't understand the topics to keep their mouths shut or face ridicule from the student body or disapproval from the teacher. Students are filed from class to class like cattle and aren't given a chance to engage in deep questioning and study. It's either, "man, you should know this; that's so easy. or dude, you aren't that stupid, right?" The irony is that the kids saying these things and putting others down are usually the ones who need it the most.
As was mentioned earlier, the U.S. doesn't expect their K-12 pupils to actually LEARN anything! This fact has been pointed out by game shows that recycle the meaningless trivia of K-5 as challenge questions for college graduate contestants. We don't trust our kids with a lot. Much of school consists of jumping through the same academic hoops. I hope colleges never start taking hints from public schools and try to cram mountains of meaningless facts into their students' heads. It would be a different, and dangerous, world. In high school, you are marked down and sometimes even punished for the answers and inquisitiveness you would be praised for in college. High school is set up in the U.S. to promote conformity, not inquiry.
Plus, how can kids even concentrate when we have Lord of the Flies going on? Jackie is concerned about who is going to ask her to the prom. Mary is devastated because someone made some bad comments about her on Facebook. Jake is angry because Billy and Marty called him "gay" for not liking sports, and the list goes on. High school in the U.S. is a deadly self-esteem sink hole. The kids aren't being challenged and have nothing to work for, so they spend their time building popularity contests and tearing down each others' self-esteem. Believe it or not, twelve to eighteen year-old's are capable of a lot, more than we probably want to give them credit for. I submit that is one of the reasons we have more teenagers in the juvenile justice system. These kids have very active brains. Instead of giving them a hamster wheel to run on, why don't we challenge them to rise to our level and trust them with real work?
The goal of school should be re-examined and the policies should be changed.
That's interesting. I remember in grade school, the stragglers in reading skills were boys, and some of us girls were asked to help the boys. But isn't it generally believed that boys are better at abstract thinking? That's touted to explain why so many boys and so few girls go into engineering. Maybe that ability comes when they're a little older, and beyond 9th grade algebra and 10th grade geometry.
Interesting that you bring that up. I had a professor in college who gave a test at the beginning of each year that involved abstract reasoning. He claimed the girls blew the socks off the boys. Of course there were fewer of us. His theory was that only the brightest and most capable girls would tackle engineering while boys just assumed they'd be good at it because they were boys. If he's right then many women who would make good engineers never went into the major.
Something I found interesting was the male to female break down in the engineering college. Each of the majors except one had a small percentage of women. The one that didn't was chemical engineering. While it was the smallest of the majors student wise it was normal to have close to 50% women in the major (there was actually one more woman than man in my graduating class). I would think that it's the most abstract of the engineering majors offered at my university and it was women who dominated the top of the class.
Interesting that you bring that up. I had a professor in college who gave a test at the beginning of each year that involved abstract reasoning. He claimed the girls blew the socks off the boys. Of course there were fewer of us. His theory was that only the brightest and most capable girls would tackle engineering while boys just assumed they'd be good at it because they were boys. If he's right then many women who would make good engineers never went into the major.
Something I found interesting was the male to female break down in the engineering college. Each of the majors except one had a small percentage of women. The one that didn't was chemical engineering. While it was the smallest of the majors student wise it was normal to have close to 50% women in the major (there was actually one more woman than man in my graduating class). I would think that it's the most abstract of the engineering majors offered at my university and it was women who dominated the top of the class.
Thank you, great answer! Informative stories. I always thought my math whiz niece (mentioned earlier) should have gone into engineering, and I brought it up several times with my brother (her dad), but he wouldn't hear of it. It would have made a huge difference in her life if she had, it turns out. After graduating, she went to Germany and talked her way into some grunt job, and eventually worked her way into an Eng.-lang. web-design job from there. She had to get her work permit/visa renewed every 6 months, for several years. But if she'd had the right engineering degree, she could have sailed right into a well-paid, high-status job with a proper work visa. Germany gives engineers the red-carpet treatment. For some reason, engineers have a negative image in the US.
They have neither fear of failure nor incentive to learn. Why work on equations when they can throw a ball and get a full scholarship?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
