Freakonomics again.
I love this blog so much. Just in the past week, they posted a link to a NYT article on adopting Chinese babies (if only they had cleft palates...) and another spurring discussion of the Indian education system.
The latter issue had me vacillating more than John Kerry in Summer 2004. On the one hand, I certainly agree that the Indian educational system is harder than anything we have in the West. But then, I thought about it a little harder and really the Indian education system is only more grueling and more intense than Western systems. It involves a whole lot of memorization and routine practices. My parents tell us stories about how they had to memorize all sorts of things which they no longer remember. And they had to pick their careers in the 9th grade with very little room to change their minds in the future. They were scored as much on their handwriting as they were on the content of their writing. In essence, everything was mechanical. India's education system has been training machines of efficiency. This is, in part, why outsourcing works so well for India. The programming tasks, the troubleshooting tasks, and other typical tasks are in a word formulaic. It is not really that India's children are learning better than those in America; it is only that they are far more disciplined and thus far more efficient.
Thus, the criticism of the Indian school system (and all Eastern school systems, for the most part) is that they do not leave enough room for creativity or the humanities. So, the question is: Is that a problem? For the maths and the sciences, I am going to go out on a limb and say no. Let's face it. Mathematical theory for all intents and purposes does not involve creativity. The basic laws have been established for centuries and there is no need to change them and thus no need to think outside the box. Sure, some may argue that Bayes had to be creative to establish his backwards-driven formulas for statistics, but that is hardly a shining beacon of creativity. I am going to venture a guess that Bayes probably based his results on observation, connecting statistics to the realm of science. And having worked in a biological laboratory for three summers, I can tell you that most of biology at least is doing the same experiments over and over again with minor adjustments until you find reportable results. The fact that a Scientific Method even exists is proof enough that science is rigorously structured, and structure and Indian education go hand in hand. Once again, this is the reason Asia kicks our butts in math and science.
But other than Rabindranath Tagore, how many novelists have they produced? Of all the Bollywood films (greater than 650 per year), only three have ever been nominated for Oscars. The quality of Indian expressionism is far lower than that of the West or even Japan. Even the popular artistic outlets of Indian girls, dance and the harmonium, is highly structured. From personal experience, I can even vouch that Indian parents don't value creativity. The start of every year in high school had been a battle to convince my parents that I should continue with OM. And it got harder with every losing year, because Indian parents are only concerned with results, with success, with the realization of potential. Everything I ever did and ever will do is a competition, a constant race against the children of my parents' friends, my cousins, and random people they read about in the newspaper.
But here I vacillate again. Is competition really such a bad thing? Should we really withhold class standings in high school? What is wrong with knowing how you compare with your peers? We rank nearly all our sports teams (even high school sports are seeded), we hand out awards for film, and yet we still frown upon competition in education? That fact alone shows where the priorities are in America. Who are we protecting by curtailing the practice of ranking? The underachievers, the unmotivated, those without ambition? The problem with the failing U.S. educational system may not be only that the rest of the world has more discipline, but also that the U.S. is willing to sacrifice the potential of thousands of their brightest just for the sake of retaining self-esteem in those marked by intellectual paucity.
So, in short, I do not know where or how I will educate my cleft-palated Chinese girl. Of course, it is pretty much a moot point since she will be living in Tanzania, Mali, and Mozambique simultaneously.
The latter issue had me vacillating more than John Kerry in Summer 2004. On the one hand, I certainly agree that the Indian educational system is harder than anything we have in the West. But then, I thought about it a little harder and really the Indian education system is only more grueling and more intense than Western systems. It involves a whole lot of memorization and routine practices. My parents tell us stories about how they had to memorize all sorts of things which they no longer remember. And they had to pick their careers in the 9th grade with very little room to change their minds in the future. They were scored as much on their handwriting as they were on the content of their writing. In essence, everything was mechanical. India's education system has been training machines of efficiency. This is, in part, why outsourcing works so well for India. The programming tasks, the troubleshooting tasks, and other typical tasks are in a word formulaic. It is not really that India's children are learning better than those in America; it is only that they are far more disciplined and thus far more efficient.
Thus, the criticism of the Indian school system (and all Eastern school systems, for the most part) is that they do not leave enough room for creativity or the humanities. So, the question is: Is that a problem? For the maths and the sciences, I am going to go out on a limb and say no. Let's face it. Mathematical theory for all intents and purposes does not involve creativity. The basic laws have been established for centuries and there is no need to change them and thus no need to think outside the box. Sure, some may argue that Bayes had to be creative to establish his backwards-driven formulas for statistics, but that is hardly a shining beacon of creativity. I am going to venture a guess that Bayes probably based his results on observation, connecting statistics to the realm of science. And having worked in a biological laboratory for three summers, I can tell you that most of biology at least is doing the same experiments over and over again with minor adjustments until you find reportable results. The fact that a Scientific Method even exists is proof enough that science is rigorously structured, and structure and Indian education go hand in hand. Once again, this is the reason Asia kicks our butts in math and science.
But other than Rabindranath Tagore, how many novelists have they produced? Of all the Bollywood films (greater than 650 per year), only three have ever been nominated for Oscars. The quality of Indian expressionism is far lower than that of the West or even Japan. Even the popular artistic outlets of Indian girls, dance and the harmonium, is highly structured. From personal experience, I can even vouch that Indian parents don't value creativity. The start of every year in high school had been a battle to convince my parents that I should continue with OM. And it got harder with every losing year, because Indian parents are only concerned with results, with success, with the realization of potential. Everything I ever did and ever will do is a competition, a constant race against the children of my parents' friends, my cousins, and random people they read about in the newspaper.
But here I vacillate again. Is competition really such a bad thing? Should we really withhold class standings in high school? What is wrong with knowing how you compare with your peers? We rank nearly all our sports teams (even high school sports are seeded), we hand out awards for film, and yet we still frown upon competition in education? That fact alone shows where the priorities are in America. Who are we protecting by curtailing the practice of ranking? The underachievers, the unmotivated, those without ambition? The problem with the failing U.S. educational system may not be only that the rest of the world has more discipline, but also that the U.S. is willing to sacrifice the potential of thousands of their brightest just for the sake of retaining self-esteem in those marked by intellectual paucity.
So, in short, I do not know where or how I will educate my cleft-palated Chinese girl. Of course, it is pretty much a moot point since she will be living in Tanzania, Mali, and Mozambique simultaneously.