Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
I think that both the USA and Europe is letting itself down in the area of education.
Look at how they study in China, Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries.
Russians used to be top class scholars too, study really hard - I don't know what it's like now.

But large parts of Europe the school discipline is awful and the kids know almost nothing.

I read about some refugee kids coming to Sweden from Syria. They were way ahead of the Swedish kids in all subjects, because they were actually forced to sit down, pay attention and study in their school. They were totally shocked that we have all the prerequisites to have good schools here, yet the schools are a disgrace. From what I understand, things are even worse in the USA where gang members turn up with guns to school and most of the kids care only about showing up in school for the social life.

China must be laughing at us, and if we all don't get our act together in this area.

A while back, this excellent series was on the BBC.

The interest in schooling in any given country, while obviously a topic which can be tied to many interests (women's libbers could say "we want better education in order to make our future generations better educated about our gender rights issues"; ultra-cons could say "we want.. so people know the dangers of communism" etc etc), is ultimately about one thing, and that is INIQUITY.

"What a weird thing to say Kidkboom!" Yes, but it's true. Ultimately the paradigm I'm seeing here is not one of cooperation but of COMPETITION. So, the prize here is not "knowledge" but INIQUITY - that one country should have an imbalance of information superior to another's. That their people should have an imbalance of information superior to another people's. We can beat around the bush all day but that's the topic at hand.

So, when in a competitive paradigm, we look at the performance bottleneck. Much like a runner examines his running stance and his shoes and his knees and everything that could be a performance bottleneck, here we look at the political structures that create and maintain these scholastic functions.

To put it simply and save a lot of headache, these systems vary a lot. It's easiest to lock education into "HIGH" position when the popular or autonomous freedom/control buttons have been switched "OFF." I don't know much about Syria but they don't look to me to be a country that's highly focused on human freedoms and the ability to act autonomously as individual within the system. I.e. the autonomous freedom button is switched "OFF" or at least set to "LOW," and to put it simply, people will do what they're told to do.

I believe here in the states our trade-off is a low amount of control over the results of the individuals in the system, and a high amount of freedom for exploration given to those individuals WITHIN the system. One boon to public schooling in America almost never mentioned is the rather unique freedom to choose classes, electively and selectively, throughout Middle and High school, a privelege most countries if I'm not mistaken don't receive until college (and as to the selective nature of classes in some state-paid-for colleges in Europe, including Russia, I'm really not sure how much freedom they are given!). Whle the merit of this might be hard to see from an external point of view, it's reflective of the individuals' freedoms within the system, freedoms I suspect no Syrian student has ever been offered.

But what's to be said about the student, psychiatrically? In one country you've got a group of people who learn things having been driven to them by INTEREST and INTRIGUE, by FASCINATION, by a sheer desire to KNOW a thing. In another, you've got a group of people who learn because they are afraid of what will be done in REPERCUSSION if they don't obey this order. Those things they learn will be what they are told to learn, and they will not study with the glint of an interested student such as Einstein or Tesla, who learned what they had a passion for. Instead they will have a cold, flat, lifeless if accurate understanding of the information, which may function well if building nuclear warheads to exact specs under a harsh military timeline, but will most certainly never turn out a Dr. Suess or a John Williams.

You can tune a computer to operate at a very high efficiency, but it increases the rate of burn-out.

Really I guess it's about what you want as a result, at the end of the day.

Just my two cents.

PS - Guns in schools may seem uniquely American, but that's again because of freedoms - we're allowed to have guns as citizens here. In the UK I doubt this has ever happened, but I'm not sure I'd trade liberty for safety on this one.. =\

(Silver Lining: If Chechen terrorists take over an american school, they will have to pat down all the students)