Friday, March 1, 2013



Posted by Stuart Schneiderman at 8:31 AM

2 comments:

Sam L. said...

I translate that to "dumbing down the American people, one student at a time".

March 1, 2013 at 4:26 PM
Anonymous said...

When Asian students go to school they are taught virtue.

Oh? That's a pretty broad brush and a loosely defined virtue. What is virtue in China, where it's apparently not uncommon for vendors to replace the contents of walnuts with bits of concrete, or for baby formula and pet food to be tainted with poison because it's cheaper, not to mention the endemic hacking, use of slave labor in mines (both real and virtual), and the horrific ways the state deals with unapproved children?

Or in education particularly, what does it say that Chinese exchange students have a reputation (as I've just heard from my niece, who is working on her graduate thesis in a STEM program) for rampant, unrepentant cheating?

If you wanted to discuss virtue in Asian schools, you might at least make an example of South Korea, where all students are required to study the Talmud. I'd be very interested to know what kind of results they are seeing from such a program.

There are a lot of Asian nations; many of them seem to have a cultural character that is anything but virtuous. And not all of them do a great job of teaching their children genuine knowledge. America's schools, particularly the public schools, have serious problems, I agree with that. But to say that we should be "more like the Asians" or even (as your post seems to suggest) "more like the Chinese" just sounds, quite frankly, insane. Replacing an educational culture of feel-good emotionalism with one that values "success" at any cost does not strike me as a step in the right direction.

March 2, 2013 at 4:54 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)