Politics: Education in China and US

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm

Interesting BBC article about how math education in China - as measured by difficulty of exam questions - outstrips anything in the UK, and by implication, in the west. Shocking that the UK college diagnostic test is testing the pythagorian theorem, i.e. what i learned in middle school.

The argument against the type of testing regime in China is that it kills creativity and creates advanced test-takers rather than people with the "creative problem solving" abilities that Western education systems are supposed to engender. Critics argue that the fact that the US still leads in technical innovation reflects the superiority of its "creativity-first" model over a more mechanized approach.

For two reasons, this argument is flawed:

1) The US creativity-first model works for only the wealthiest schools. Allowing student creativity requires a teacher-student ratio of around 20:1 or less. Any more and the "creativity" is overshadowed by the necessity of classroom management. So if the model works at all, it only does so for a small section of schools. For everyone else, this model creates a diversion from fundamental principles and an inability to hold failing schools accountable. General chaos ensues as "inspired" school teachers teach the class to build popcicle-stick bridges, without first teaching them how to do fractions.

And if you look closer, the best schools in the US don't even emphasize "creativity" that much. They emphasize honors classes, AP sciences classes, SAT prep -> all the things that are, guess what, oriented towards the fundamentals.

2) As people who've ever watched a NBA game realizes - fundamentals always win over glamor. Time after time, it's the team that blocks out and that makes free throws that wins over the team that shoots 50 3-pointers or attempts alley-oops every other possession. But there isn't actually a tension: the best teams are the ones who have the fundamentals and then build off that to create pretty-looking plays.

Same in education. If you look underneath the US creativity, you'll realize that it's been fueled by those Chinese and Indian engineers who got their fundamentals first and then learned how to improvise. They get a good solid primary and secondary education in their home countries, and then come to the West - where there is the resources - to do tertiary training. These are the people getting pH.D.'s nowadays and - increasingly - the people publishing in the top journals.

So emphasize creativity, at your risk, but don't let it be an excuse for failing test scores.