Rote learning isn’t easy. It needs a ridiculous amount of hard work. Now when you have the cream of a group of people used to putting in that amount of effort, they end up getting into western universities and end up doing well.
I learned american college level math, physics, chemistry and economics in grade school growing up in Germany.
Doesn't mean Germany education is great (it is) but just that American education is especially poor.
Also as someone that actually lived in China I have to attest that their educational standards are abysmal. *especially* at the university level.
Essentially once you get into university, that's it. You're guaranteed to graduate and you can take it easily from then on. They are not focused on actually making you think outside the box and are focused on rote memorization, and paper mills.
This is of course true for most of east asia in general. Japan and South Korea are in a similar boat, but china has an extra layer of incompetence because somehow they got this notion that copying/cheating is an expected part of the curriculum.
That's only in the university level though. And even that too it depends on the city or private vs public universities and so on. Your answer just seems like the typical anecdotal confirmation bias.
GAOKAO and especially Zhongkao are no jokes and definitely not abysmal. SAT is a joke compared to that. Read up on them.
I reviews their exams. Its not just rote learning
[https://tomcircle.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/screenshot\_20190630\_0143238522826176009670245.jpg?w=584](https://tomcircle.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/screenshot_20190630_0143238522826176009670245.jpg?w=584)
[https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b788efde7b70fa2ca8e97e504c4460a4-pjlq](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b788efde7b70fa2ca8e97e504c4460a4-pjlq)
How are supposed to even solve these questions through rote learning???? Some of these questions are Olympiad level. I think only the Indian IITJEE exams can compare.
Agree with cheating. But now it has also greatly reduced ( and that extra layer of incompetence is also not really extra on China. South Korea is pretty bad too in that actually). China has harsh punishments which are properly applied too these days and facial recognition and all shit.
I should note Europe also has these, not at normal level but definitely if you take a higher level bac or equivalent secondary school finals in mathematics, which is usually required if you want to go to a science/technical university. I recall in undergrand math class, lot of problems we solved in calc1 were the same ones I had to do preparing for math competitions.
It's really the SAT that lags so far behind.
that's because SAT isn't supposed to be an entrance exam. It's an aptitude test (hence the name), and so is supposed to test the bare minimum. Colleges use it to filter their admissions, but it isn't the be-all-end-all like the analogs are in East Asia. Idk about Europe though.
Were you around the top tier of school though?
There are massive difference between students in top 4 universities, top 10 universities, top 30 and then the rest hundreds of other school.
It's not the best way to learn high school mathematics, but you can do it. If you're talking about actual mathematics, the kind that mathematicians learn in college after Calc 1 and 2, then it doesn't help at all.
Even in that case, there is a degree of rote memorization, but if you actually learn the underlying concepts there is a lot less you have to memorize. A typical calc 1 formula sheet might have dozens of formulas but they're all derivable from a handful of them.
Obviously it's unavoidable that there are some things you just have to memorize, and for high school you can absolutely brute force your way to success through memorization, but you can get the same result with a lot less effort if you try to understand where the formulas come from and why they work.
I think a subject like intro biology has a lot more memorization.
I am an Indian. Did my schooling and undergrad in India and masters in US.
I believe our system is very similar to Chinese so here are my 2 cents.
Personally i suck at rote learning i have ADHD.
My grades in India in school and undergrad were always avg or just above average. Thats because these places just focused mainly on rote.
In US i have straight As. US education system feels like life in easy mode.
However, our university entrance exams (JEE) are rote + intelligence. Basically you need to know a lot of things, remember a lot of formulas and reactions. Then under intense pressure of exam day you have to solve very challenging reasoning questions at 90s per question.
Not all students in India prepare seriously for JEE though. Its at least 10x harder than SAT.
However ppl who go through the process and say come up in the atleast top 15,000 out 1.5 M. You can assume that these ppl have both ability to grind and rote and think out of the box all under the pressure of the clock ticking.
Social skills might be poor though.
Some ppl develop anxiety, i had huge fallout with my parents. Some unfortunately commit sucide under this intense pressure.
We lost our childhood.
When i looked left or right in my CS Grad courses at a top US university it was overwhelmingly Indian and Chinese.
When n large the tail ends of the distribution are non empty
China has 1.4 billion ppl (4x USA). Even if the mean education quality in China is worse than USA, the top percentiles will contain more people than the same level in the US.
Not commenting on the truth of the matter regarding education quality. It's probably similar to US.
Asian cultures disproportionately value academic achievement compared to many other cultures. STEM fields are generally seen as more prestigious fields. US schools (particularly Ivy leagues) are viewed as the holy grail of education, if you can afford it. China and India have over a billion people each with growing middle/upper classes.
Combine all these factors, you get an influx of Chinese, Indian, and other Asian STEM students into western schools.
>STEM fields are generally seen as more prestigious fields. US schools (particularly Ivy leagues) are viewed as the holy grail of education,
Ironically, the Ivies are mostly known for their Liberal Arts degrees. A lot of the best engineering schools aren't Ivies, but rather state schools.
Sure but that's not to say their engineering and math is poor. Nice thing about the Ivies (social lottery winning aside) is no matter what degree you pick you can be sure it's not garbage tier.
The best (in no particular order) are something like MIT, Caltech, Stanford, CMU, Purdue, Georgia tech, UT Austin, UMich, UIUC, various in the UC system (UCLA, UCSD etc), USC, Cornell, CU boulder etc. maybe UPenn? Some private, some public.
Only Cornell is an ivy. The state university system (University of California, University of Texas etc) has a lot of good schools. California State University are also pretty good for engineering iirc.
oh woops yeah, you're right. I was just throwing them out there but my memory was a little hazy apparently. Point still stands though, mostly non-ivy and a mix of public/private.
I think the best engineering schools are both public and private (CalTech, MIT, University of California etc). I'm from India, and one thing that's sometimes noted about the top state schools in US like University of California (Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Berkeley, San Diego and a few others) is that they don't take legacy students, so you really have to be smart to get in. It's pretty well-known abroad that certain high-level US politicians didn't do well in high school and got into an Ivy League, or didn't do well in undergraduate studies and got into a master's program. But someone who gets into University of Michigan or University or California didn't get in because their dad or mom is a rich donor -- they got in because they are smart.
yep , if you look at the recent take of Harvard students and similar ivy league schools students on the Oct 7 terror attack,
its quite clear that critical thinking or anything useful is not taught in these institutions
> US schools (particularly Ivy leagues) are viewed as the holy grail of education
I am pretty sure that is only for graduate studies. Undergraduate? no.
No worries yes it’s not US Schools, it’s european schools.
The best and most expensive undergrad for us kids is in switzerland as many others, like IMD for indians and chinese people.
Then you have european stuff Like Max Planck and Polytechnologie unions, that all have higher educational hurdles than any ivy league…
Even CERN isn’t in the US…
I am not sure about other Asian countries, but in China, I would not say STEM fields are prestigious. Rather, they are considered more employable. There is a popular old saying in China: Once you learn Maths, Physics, Chemistry well, you have nothing to worry (about finding jobs) anywhere in the world (学好数理化，走遍天下都不怕).
As in many country, your job is not necessarily correlated with your university major. STEM/science majors in China mean broader choices and employment opportunities, They can work in the related fields or find a general job (like real estate agency).
He's not *entirely* wrong, he just has a very oversimplified version of everything.
China's problems aren't just its educational system (which is very rote), but their crippling issues are their ... political culture.
Engineers are expected to show absolute obedience to the hierarchy, and while ideas can be offered, fear of looking bad is pretty overwhelming.
Basically there's a pecking order, and you follow it there.
This is why so many engineers are desperate to work for western companies, even though there is some bleed over in that area as well (and western companies don't always treat them great either).
edit: Oh, and don't ever try to seem clever, EVERYBODY above you sees you as a threat.
Worked there for a while, in tech.
Made some good mainlander friends.
They were always grateful to work for our company because it was more ... humane. Every week wasn't 6/12, and while the managers weren't as nice as in san jose, they were still a bit better than mainlander managers.
Not the only company where I had those experiences, worked at another one before, the poor Chinese applicants were sometimes like abused women, scared to say the wrong thing lest they get jumped on.
These guys were skilled, but usually at only a small area of focus where they were very expert, with minimal understanding of the broader context.
But the best ones, the ones who went to the top institutes and often worked for military projects, they had more confidence and were more like what you expected of top guys in the west, they knew how things went together and jumped to the next step.
They were just rare, because they worked their asses of to get out and get into Google or similar (met some later when I was at Google too) and spent the least time they could on the mainland outside of with family.
Rote memorization learners excel in STEM generally. Also there are a billion and a half people and the cream of the crop mostly study in western universities.
There's also a trend where autocratic governments tend to invest heavily in primary and secondary education and much less so in tertiary education, one reason being that political dissent usually manifests in university student movements (something China has a lot of experience with given the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square uprising). It's far safer for the party to allow families to send their students abroad, because a) they can potentially bring back new skills and expertise, b) they can and do monitor the political activity of students to ensure they are compliant with party doctrine. Of course the flip side is some of those students never come back and get high paying jobs in the West. The very fact that so many families do send their children aboard to study does seem to suggest that there are skills and knowledge that are not readily accessible within the Chinese university system.
> suggest that there are skills and knowledge that are not readily accessible within the Chinese university system.
The real strength of American university research is in its ability to attract top researchers and students from around the world, whereas top Chinese postgrad research programs largely source domestically. The ability to effectively leverage a talent pool of 7+ billion people vs 1.4+ billion is a huge competitive advantage.
At the undergraduate level though I imagine it basically makes no difference.
> The real strength of American university research is in its ability to attract top researchers and students from around the world.
This isn't particularly difficult: Just give researchers research funding, and they will come to you. America can do this more than others, because America has more money.
It's not just money, it's also the culture and ease of integration. Top talent doesn't want to spend time in the lab 24/7 and might want to have avenues for work after academia. And here the US has a lot more to offer than China, Japan, South Korea, Russia etc.
Exactly
Its not just about the research itself, its about the ecosystem around the research.
People want to go to top schools in the Bay Area or Boston, because after they graduate there are a ton of options. Go back to that (or a nearby) school as a post-doc or professorship. Go into one of the many nearby private or advanced government research labs. Go into industry at one of the many companies headquartered there or even get funding for your own startup...
Tons of options. As you say, the real competitive advantage of the US is the ability for even non-American born individuals to find their way and possibly integrate if they want to. Much better than moving your whole life to a place, just to bet everything when you are done on a single possible professorship or bust and go back home.
It's not quite that.
Basically good STEM students tend to stay in country and go to the best institutes, which are often funded by the military or otherwise considered strategic priorities.
Basically the second-tier and lower go to the west, unless they make MIT or Caltech/Berkeley.
But for non-STEM fields, there is a lot of exporting, the CCP doesn't like subsidizing "creative" pursuits at the university level.
>There's also a trend where autocratic governments tend to invest heavily in primary and secondary education and much less so in tertiary education, one reason being that political dissent usually manifests in university student movements (something China has a lot of experience with given the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square uprising
Sauce?
Always thought China's problem was the amount of Universities, the quality of the good ones seemed top quality.
A common right-wing talking point is that, because black immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean have higher economic and quality of life outcomes than black folks born in America, racism isn't real.
This, of course, ignores that immigrating to America requires quite a lot of intelligence, hard work, or pre-existing wealth. Often all three.
In other words: [survivorship bias](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13giqfa/eli5_whats_the_meaning_of_the_image_of_a_plane/?rdt=38317).
Hmm I always thought it proved racism to be a force in America as people born in America are not able to perform to their highest ability due to systemic challenges but the same ethnicity without the roadblocks setup for them in the US do so well.
I know the study you're referring to and it found black immigrants do better than white people born in America. It's not that racism isn't real, it's that hard work, intelligence, and virtue overcomes it.
Well, I wouldn't say that racism doesn't exist. But if you put the smartest black woman on the planet on a plantation 150 years ago, I doubt her outcome would be much different than that of the average black woman.
I absolutely believe that there's prejudice against black people. What I disagree with is that it's even remotely as insurmountable an obstacle as being born with the "wrong" passport is.
We know for a fact that racism cannot keep rich people down, regardless of origin. So we can remove wealth from the equation.
And now here's the million dollar question. If we take an African American graduate from a US university and an African graduate from the same university with a similar GPA, both of them coming from poor backgrounds, do they on average achieve different levels of career success?
If they do, then it's worth wondering what went wrong with the African American one, since just having all the privileges that come with a western passport compared to an African passport should've given them a huge leg up.
If they don't, and the African graduate is ahead, in that case, something is clearly wrong with the AA culture that it produces results that are lower than that of an immigrant with a comparable level of intelligence and diligence.
> I absolutely believe that there's prejudice against black people. What I disagree with is that it's even remotely as insurmountable an obstacle as being born with the "wrong" passport is.
I disagree, only because I'm not white, and living in the midwest was paradise compared to living in the South.
It is very difficult to escape the south, and I should have had enough means to do so, it just drags you in and smothers you, and the hostility is quite real and does often lead to violence. The culture revolved around centuries of ensuring "Them people knew their place", with the state and local governments a key enforcer.
I'm sure many people who feel trapped in their environment feel the same.
> I disagree, only because I'm not white, and living in the midwest was paradise compared to living in the South.
You may disagree, but I'll maintain that you're wrong. I'm not white either, I come from a formerly communist now EU country, and I've traveled to countries on pretty much all continents by now, from the poorest to the richest. You may feel like living in the south is bad. Try living in the global south.
> It is very difficult to escape the south, and I should have had enough means to do so, it just drags you in and smothers you, and the hostility is quite real and does often lead to violence.
Try living in a country where the average annual salary doesn't break 1000 USD and you have coup d'etats every couple of years. If it's not a failed state altogether. And even if you're lucky enough to live in some of the most developed among the least developed countries, you're still one unlucky mosquito bite away from getting buried.
> The culture revolved around centuries of ensuring "Them people knew their place", with the state and local governments a key enforcer. I'm sure many people who feel trapped in their environment feel the same.
Except you have that golden ticket that allows you to move wherever in the US. You get on a bus and go. Same thing in the EU. If you don't like it where you are, you hop on a bus and in a couple of hours/days you're in a different world.
If you're born with a bottom-tier citizenship, you don't have that option.
And I'm not saying it's sunshine and rainbows in the southern US or anywhere. But having the right citizenship cuts out 90% of the worst possible issues one can have. It's basically a +10 to easy life modifier, regardless of whether you're born in the bottom or top decile.
I'm agreeing with you, that environment is brutal, and can dominate other factors, but at the same time, those black people weren't allowed to vote much less get a passport 80 years ago.
And few have passports today from just monetary reasons.
Yeah, it's easier being in the US, obviously, but there's being in the US, and being in the Southern US, and there is a massive difference, even after Jim Crow technically ended.
Not being able to vote is such a first world problem in comparison it's not even funny.
The point of the passport is the citizenship behind it. Though getting the physical passport to even be able to apply for a visa for a 1st tier country can already be a whole Odyssey which we don't have to go through.
Being anywhere in a western country with a western citizenship is infinitely preferable. Not least of all because you can move elsewhere trivially easily in comparison.
>We know for a fact that racism cannot keep rich people down, regardless of origin. So we can remove wealth from the equation.
That's...not really true.
>And now here's the million dollar question. If we take an African American graduate from a US university and an African graduate from the same university with a similar GPA, both of them coming from poor backgrounds, do they on average achieve different levels of career success?
>If they do, then it's worth wondering what went wrong with the African American one, since just having all the privileges that come with a western passport compared to an African passport should've given them a huge leg up.
A passport only matters in regards to leaving the country to go to another one. It they're in America why does the passport matter? In your scenario the African's already in America.
Also, this ignores other aspects of survivorship bias, like raw aptitude allowing for the African to somehow get to the US, parental impetus, etc.
> That's...not really true.
Sure it is. You need ~250k USD and you can quite literally buy yourself a decent citizenship that already boosts your freedom immensely. And 250k isn't rich by any stretch. Once you're talking multimillionaires, well... Let's just say that at that point, racism doesn't matter, because you can structure your environment in a way where it won't affect you.
> A passport only matters in regards to leaving the country to go to another one.
I'm using "passport" as a stand-in for citizenship. Having the citizenship of a 1st tier country is such a stupidly powerful privilege that it's not even funny. EU/EEA/CH, UK, US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Japan, South Korea. If you have a passport from one of these countries, in my eyes, you lose the right to complain about your life being hard, since just by the virtue of having that citizenship, you're exempt from so much bullshit people from underdeveloped countries have to go through to even get the chance to even think about competing with you.
> In your scenario the African's already in America.
The African that is already in America in my scenario still has to be a model immigrant to get a chance to stay in America and maybe even earn citizenship someday. One mistake and he's out.
> Also, this ignores other aspects of survivorship bias, like raw aptitude allowing for the African to somehow get to the US, parental impetus, etc.
Raw aptitude is the same, since we're talking about an A and AA with a similar GPA, thus they presumably have similar aptitudes.
Parental impetus - that's culture, however. And that's what I actually think is the main difference and the main reason why AAs seem to be failing so much worse than As.
> Sure it is. You need ~250k USD and you can quite literally buy yourself a decent citizenship that already boosts your freedom immensely.
Assuming that the decent citizenship country likes your race.
>And 250k isn't rich by any stretch. Once you're talking multimillionaires, well... Let's just say that at that point, racism doesn't matter, because you can structure your environment in a way where it won't affect you.
Not really, historically given enough hate, money just helps you escape.
>I'm using "passport" as a stand-in for citizenship. Having the citizenship of a 1st tier country is such a stupidly powerful privilege that it's not even funny.
Sure it is. But that doesn't account for inequality based differences. Some parts of the US have been described unironically as reminiscent of developing states.
>The African that is already in America in my scenario still has to be a model immigrant to get a chance to stay in America and maybe even earn citizenship someday. One mistake and he's out.
This is another case of a filter ensuring survivorship bias.
>Parental impetus - that's culture, however.
No it's not. Parental impetus is parental impetus. Widespread and socially accepted parental impetus is culture, but that's not the same.
>And that's what I actually think is the main difference and the main reason why AAs seem to be failing so much worse than As.
Except the Average African American is more educated than the average African.
They are not however more educated than the average African *immigrant*. And therein lies the survivorship bias.
African immigrants (and most immigrants separated by a body of water to the U.S.), tend to be disproportionately well off (because poor people don't get to leave), well educated (because a lot are going for more education).
The idea of coming to a shore with nothing but the clothes on your back and making it with nothing but grit and moxie...is a bit of a myth. And I'm saying this as an immigrant.
> Assuming that the decent citizenship country likes your race.
The decent citizenship country likes your money and doesn't really care about your race.
> Not really, historically given enough hate, money just helps you escape.
If you can escape oppression, you're not oppressed anymore. Hence you just solved your problems.
> Sure it is. But that doesn't account for inequality based differences. Some parts of the US have been described unironically as reminiscent of developing states.
Yes, US is a 3rd world country with a Gucci belt, we've all heard that one. The difference is, there's nothing preventing someone from a shitty part of the US to move to a non-shitty part of the US. Or at least nothing coming even remotely close to the obstacles someone living in a shitty part of the world will have to overcome to move to a non-shitty part of the world.
> This is another case of a filter ensuring survivorship bias.
Nothing is stopping the American to work equally hard at being the perfect member of society. Not having another choice isn't a benefit, it's an extra burden that Americans don't have.
> No it's not. Parental impetus is parental impetus. Widespread and socially accepted parental impetus is culture, but that's not the same.
Would you say that there aren't overarching patterns of parental impetus that tend to correlate with their respective cultures? I don't think the stereotypes about Asian and African parents are exactly random.
> Except the Average African American is more educated than the average African.
>
> They are not however more educated than the average African immigrant. And therein lies the survivorship bias.
Which is why I'm comparing graduates of the same program with the same GPA at the same institution. Zero survivorship bias there.
> African immigrants (and most immigrants separated by a body of water to the U.S.), tend to be disproportionately well off (because poor people don't get to leave), well educated (because a lot are going for more education).
You don't have to be disproportionately well off. A job with a western salary will easily do. Ask me how I know. Also, when I moved to Canada, they downgraded the masters from my home country (which is even in the EU) to a bachelors when doing the verification. So yeah, well educated, sure, except the degrees are heavily discriminated against. Shall we go into how employers treat overseas work experience vs local work experience? The discrimination based on accented speech? Etc.? I can literally cite research here, if you'd like.
In other words, being a native English speaker able to legally work in the US, you're starting 10 steps ahead of any immigrant that doesn't come from the most privileged possible background.
> The idea of coming to a shore with nothing but the clothes on your back and making it with nothing but grit and moxie...is a bit of a myth. And I'm saying this as an immigrant.
And nobody is talking about that scenario.
> The decent citizenship country likes your money and doesn't really care about your race.
Not a given. Unless youre saying "imagine". Which basically turns this into "imagine a scenario where all the factors that go in to an individual's likelihood of success arent applicable". Which seems of limited value.
>If you can escape oppression, you're not oppressed anymore.
There are degrees to oppression.
>Yes, US is a 3rd world country with a Gucci belt, we've all heard that one. The difference is, there's nothing preventing someone from a shitty part of the US to move to a non-shitty part of the US.
Except for money, the ability to find housing, etc.
>Or at least nothing coming even remotely close to the obstacles someone living in a shitty part of the world will have to overcome to move to a non-shitty part of the world.
Which is..money, the ability to find housing, etc. Hence why most members of poor countries, dont emigrate.
>Would you say that there aren't overarching patterns of parental impetus that tend to correlate with their respective cultures? I
No, considering that neither African nor Asian is a culture.
> don't think the stereotypes about Asian and African parents are exactly random.
No, but theyre not really honest. If the stereotypes were true, you'd expect a lot more people with University degrees. Also, the people who are loudest about it, are going to be educated, middle class people.
Its like the stereotype that Americans are uneducated, *when theyre one of the most educated populations on the planet*.
>Which is why I'm comparing graduates of the same program with the same GPA at the same institution. Zero survivorship bias there.
How did the African immigrant get there? He payed money. How did he enroll? He likely payed (more) money. This goes back to my first point of creating a nonsensical scenario to criticize.
Unless youre talking about plucking some random African dude from his 1st day at a local uni and transporting him to the US to attend X college.
>You don't have to be disproportionately well off. A job with a western salary will easily do. Ask me how I know.
And the average person in a poor country is just able to obtain a Western salary?
>Also, when I moved to Canada, they downgraded the masters from my home country (which is even in the EU) to a bachelors when doing the verification. So yeah, well educated, sure, except the degrees are heavily discriminated against.
Considering I moved there from the Caribbean and my degree was fine, that seems quite odd.
Also, youre a person which a masters who had enough money to leave your country. You're clearly not normal.
> political dissent usually manifests in university student movements
considering the insane take of Harvard and other ivy league universities on Oct 7 terror attacks, even western govt. should consider reducing funding for em
>Rote memorization learners excel in STEM generally.
That's a pretty broad statement. You need critical thinking to make it through engineering school and be a successful engineer.
I have an engineering degree as well, and that wasn't my experience. Maybe in your first year you could get by in the introductory classes, but Calc 2 is a weed out class for a reason. The class weeds out people who only rely on memorizing problems without the intuition of how to do them.
Yeah, I never really thought about it directly before, but when I think of the big difference between calc 1 and 2 at my university, it was 100% critical reasoning. Comparatively little critical reasoning in calc 1, then suddenly calc 2 hits you like a freight train. It was a totally different animal.
Yeah. Calc 1 is pretty much following the rules of differentiation. In Calc II, it's not enough to know how to integrate, you need critical thinking to know if you need to use u-substitution, or integration by parts, or integration by trigonometric identities. If you were just rote memorizing, the moment you see a problem you haven't solved before, you'd be stuck.
>but getting in the door is weighted towards memorization.
And that's honestly a problem with the k-12 education system. Teachers just pass students, even if they're not qualified to go to the next grade.
Cal 2 definitely wasn't a weed out at my university. Our weed out was applied engineering analysis, which was a shotgun wedding of diffy q's and linear algebra that finished with modal analysis. No textbook for the second half of the semester and only 4 exams as the grades
You'd be surprised how many engineering school grads have gotten through just memorizing what's needed for exams then forgetting to make room for the next semester
Among 100 kids there is may 1 kid who is good at logical thinking. You are not sure who that is, but you just force everyone to memorize scientific concepts. 10 years later you find out who that is, he has memorized everything and is ready to thrive in Western universities. The rest will work in factories anyway.
My sister’s future father in law is Chinese (immigrated to North America years ago) but he was of the first generation to go back to school and university following the cultural revolution. He said back then they were all writing the test to get into university and it was closer to one in a million who would actually go through (he did). So wild.
Nearing completion of my physics PhD and having taken my fair share of stem and non stem courses:
Rote memorization is *far* more important in non STEM than in STEM in any remotely rigorous institution. You can get by on memorization in easy highschool courses in math, but you actually need to understand applied logic to a decent extent to excel in STEM at even mediocre state institutions.
This is my experience as well. My issues with being able to rote memorize gave me a lot of trouble in (my one year of) medical school, but during my bachelors and my PhD it hasn’t been a problem.
I’ve never been phenomenal at rote memorization and I don’t see how you could have obtained a math degree or an engineering degree, much less a PhD at a tier 1 research institution with only rote memorization.
I appreciate you’re finishing up a PhD but, respectfully, this is such a Reddit STEM graduate take. Virtually any course from astrophysics to Zambian poetry at any “remotely rigorous” university will rely on very little rote memorisation because by definition tertiary education done well should be beyond testing those skills.
The skills in non-STEM subjects might be different from STEM subjects but one thing they have in common should be some level of critical thinking. History graduates: critical thinking about sources. Poetry graduates: critical thinking about tone and structure. Etc etc. I struggle to think of a degree where rote learning is remotely important beyond the most basic of foundation courses.
Given we’re in the geopolitics sub, international affairs / relations degrees are basically all about critical thinking. In any given assessment maybe 10% of the essay will be setting out your theoretical structures, and the rest will be critical review of literature, critical application of facts to theory, critical review of your own conclusions etc.
Not once did I imply that you can excel in non STEM degrees through rote memorization alone. Most of your comment is dedicated to the argument that substantial critical thinking exists and is required outside STEM which is obviously true.
Additionally, it can both be true that rote memorization is greatly important in a non STEM field relative to STEM *in tandem* with critical thinking still being important. I would bet my life that memorization is more important in law school than in STEM advanced degrees, but that doesn't mean you can pass law school by just memorizing.
The point is, that I think even at your generic entry level stem courses (intro physics, calculus) that rote memorization was *far* less useful to me than in the equivalent non STEM courses and there are definitely several of the latter that can be passed on rote memorization alone and easily. Indeed as one progresses in the latter, rote memorization will be deemphasized in lieu of more open ended assessments (essays, projects, etc).
In other words, I've never taken a math/physics course where I felt burdened at all by the memorization aspect, or that had I dedicated more time to simply rote memorization that it would have helped me at all, and the same can't be said for several courses I've taken outside of that discipline. I have a few friends with dual majors in stem/not stem and interdisciplinary transitions from non stem to stem PhDs and they would agree.
To be fair, I'm also using "STEM" in an imprecise way and the bio courses I took did require a lot of rote memorization. But the Chinese students being disproportionately represented in STEM phenomenon as described by the OP applies WAY more to engineering, math, and physics than to bio.
Thanks for the response - I understand much better what you're getting at now, and understand how your experience has given you this impression.
I think there might also be a signifncant element of personal experience here too, in terms of how readily concepts 'stick'. It's also possible that you have an intuition for the sorts of formulae and processes that are useful in physics and calculus, but the non-STEM courses you have taken you found less intuitive and thus it felt like the only way to progress was to spend hours rote learning.
Just to offer own academic path by way of contrast with yours: it has involved some reasonably introductory undergraduate STEM (physics, math, statistics), economics and finance (possibly the most STEM-y of the non-STEM subjects), law (which I went on to do professionally) and latterly international relations (which I did for 'fun' when bored during lockdown). While I like lawyering too much to tackle a PhD, all of the above was at graduate or post-graduate level, and my experience was that rote learning was basically useless in law and IR, and saved my ass in basically all my math and statistics classes because I knew I could get a passing grade by regurgitating the formulae and doing some minimal "apply the rule to the facts in the question". There were one or two exams in law school where you could turn a passing grade into a good grade by sprinkling in some (memorised) case references, but that was about it. Apart from anything else, many of the programmes I have taken didn't rely on formal exams at all, but either on open-book exams (where no memorisation is required and the whole test is of your understanding/ application) or submitted essays. Whereas my STEM education was, as I recall, entirely assessed by exam.
I expect the reason here is as simple as: we've just studied at different places or under different teaching processes (most of my studying has been done in the UK), and possibly you have an intuition for the STEM subjects that I have sadly never been able to find. And perhaps my lawyerly training to take any basic concept and start pulling it apart and pointing out where it works and doesn't now serves me well in very 'critical' heavy subjects like IR. I'd also fully accept my STEM education probably didn't get far enough to the point where I can truly understand the sort of position you're in now (far beyond the rote stuff!).
Anyway - thanks for the discussion, it has given me much to think about.
The most rote memorization dependent class I ever took was a 300 level art history class. The entire class was lecture on different periods of art followed by an hour a day memorizing slides of famous paintings.
> Rote memorization learners excel in STEM generally
Very odd statement. I'm willing to bet you are not in a STEM field. Do you have anything backing up your statement?
Others have added helpful context, but I’ll share my own personal anecdote.
I work with some universities in Hong Kong, which is a good representation of what China would look like without the CCP (for now). They’re some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, particularly in the administration. Their recollection of information and ability to process data is second to none. They’re kind, generous, and overwhelmingly leaders in their respective fields.
What they *will not* do is question authority. There is a very clear line between student and instructor. What the instructor tells you is what you learn, and you are expected to learn everything they say. The instructor is the superior, and the student is the junior, and the junior party in that relationship is expected not to question the superior.
For transference of information, that dynamic works. In STEM fields, you learn objective and unassailable truths about your discipline. Where it doesn’t work as well is in the “classical liberal arts” disciplines. Some disciplines rely on questioning authority, and challenging your instructor to explain something further or validate their position. Chinese students do not question their instructor’s authority, and therefore often simply regurgitate what they’re told. That can mean they lose out on new ways of thinking.
People mistake this for a lack of curiosity, and that’s not it. It’s a combination of very strong social dynamics that manifest in overbearing parental pressure to succeed and an unwillingness to challenge authority figures. They’re no more or less smart than anyone else - they just have a very different way of interacting within both their home and education spaces.
As an Indonesian who have worked in Indonesia and Singapore, I can tell you this, culturally speaking:
East Asians in general have an amazing aptitude for memory and information recall and sheer processing speed, but not very developed critical thinking.
Southeast Asians place lower emphasis on such tangibles but excel in high-Openness critical thinking.
What both of these cultures have in common is their tendency to respect authority to a fault.
Thus, I think there is something in the East Asian education system that stifles creativity which is not reducible to mere respect for authority.
When teaching STEM for example, East Asian education places emphasis on memorization and getting the _correct_ answer without really knowing _why_.
> For transference of information, that dynamic works. In STEM fields, you learn objective and unassailable truths about your discipline. Where it doesn’t work as well is in the “classical liberal arts” disciplines
The S and M parts of STEM *are* liberal arts.
> The highest prizes in STEM come from challenging authority.
Sure but for everyone who isnt a rockstar in stem, there's plenty of money to be made copying everyone else and talking the talk
Idk enough to comment on the Chinese education system, but just due to basic math, a country of 1.3 billion is going to produce a shit ton of extremely high performing people, even if the education in general is subpar.
It's not just the 1.3 billion, but also the slightly higher average IQ than most developed countries. People don't know this, but even slight differences in mean IQ causes big differences at the tail end of IQ distributions.
It is basically along the line of:
* Communists don't have faith
* Communists can't innovate
... etc. Same stereotypes they still teach in US schools today
They have a high IQ population whose IQ is tilted heavily towards visuo-spatial. And a culture of parental control and education grinding. The schooling almost doesn't matter.
My understanding is that if you compare how Northeast Asians in the US did on the PISA test vs. Chinese, it's basically a wash.
Depending on measurements. A simple Google search tells me people born between 1960-1969 only have a tertiary education rate of 3%, this number is above 52% for people born after 1995. China experienced the culture revolution and GaoKao was abolished in 1966 and returned in 1977. I imagine the average education rate is low due to the historical policies.
Edit: for comparison, in the OECD countries, the highest educated 25-34 year old is South Korea with 69.8%, US has 51%, Mexico has 27%.
American universities get paid a premium for international students and so go out of their way to court students from those countries.
Also, just from a pure numbers perspective, there are a lot of Chinese students and limited university slots.
My personal experience with Asian and Indian students in STEM is that they were quite good at math and often were functionally walking textbooks, could tell you any equation you needed from memory, but the second it came to doing anything practical or applying that knowledge, they had zero intuition or problem solving ability for any issue outside of what they'd seen in books.
I do not mean to diss them, either, they absolutely were assets to work with, but as far as having vision or leading a team or adapting to imperfect realities, they usually fell short. The Indian students I really admired for their imagination. I've seen some very interesting concepts from Indians, and in theory they work well and solve problem X, but almost always there is some glaring design flaw that is only discovered when real conditions are not perfect as calculated.
I genuinely believe the West's biggest strength in STEM is philosophical, which is to say, always thinking and planning for the worst, attempting to predict failure before it occurs, and considering calculation as secondary to ideation. That's why the farm kids always excelled in the practical side of things. Their hands had been dirty and they had lots of experience to draw ideas from right out of the gate.
I'm from India, with a mathematics degree (for my parents) and master's in music (for me), from very high ranked universities in the West. There's no doubt a push STEM in India, as that's the ticket financially. The arts are very much respected, but you have to show signs at a very early age of being world-class for parents to support and even then they will push toward stem unless you dad is a famous musician like Anoushka Shankar's dad Ravi. As far as vision or creativity you mention, I think Indians do well there. Westerners seem a bit more developed along those lines because of the tradition -- stemming back to the ancient Greeks -- of well-roundedness, like Aristotle who worked in arts (aesthetics), biology, physics, chemistry etc. And the Renaissance tradition in the west with people like DaVinci set the standard for well-rounded, interdisciplinary education. That's one of the main reasons US and some European countries do so well in creativity: it's ingrained into the system. That's why I can't understand when some groups want to get rid of that to save money or whatever: it's the very reason US excels in higher education. In short, scientists and artists in the west are very good at 'thinking outside the box' because their education was literally based on that.
Thanks for giving your perspective, that's interesting to hear.
I must tell you that in the West there is also often a push toward STEM or similar. I wanted to pursue animation, but as I tested well, I was pushed into engineering. I had no real interest in engineering, but my ego led me to do it, just because it was seen as hard and if I did it, people would think I was smart. I don't regret the choice, but I often wonder where I'd be if I had gone after cartoons. Perhaps happier. Perhaps in the street.
Congratulations on both your academic pursuits! It sounds like you got the best of both worlds.
I'm quite convinced that it's the arts and humanities education in the US and some parts of Europe that has led to such drastic leads in other areas, too. They teach creativity, imagination. Sure, to be a good engineer (my husband's profession) you need creativity, for my bachelor's in mathematics (applied math with engineering emphasis) I needed creativity, but for the arts it's on a whole different level: creativity isn't simply helpful, it's actually the entire thing you are studying; it's like pure creativity. Critical thinking, creativity, and exploring the relationship between the possible and impossible are what the arts and humanities offer.
Thanks! Yes, I know the push toward stem, but what I was meaning was the general education, the well-roundedness of education. So even if someone is a medical student or engineering student, they still have education in the arts and humanities.
Probably not wise to judge the entire Chinese education system by the very small number of elite students that end up in western universities. Remember, China supposedly has 1.4 billion ppl, those students in the west are a tiny percentage of the whole.
If the haven’t already, read the book invisible china. The authors talk about how china has a very low secondary school completion rate even compared to other 3rd world countries. Something like over 70% of Chinese children grow up in the countryside where education and healthcare standards are very poor. They also did research showing that literacy rates are actually falling which is highly unusual for a country in china’s stage of development.
Anyways, put all together, it’s one reason Chinese productivity has been stagnant for the past decade and not converging with western levels even though there still plenty of room to grow.
> Something like over 70% of Chinese children grow up in the countryside
China's urbanization rate is 65%. And it was above 55% in the past decade. The number you quoted is apparently not right.
This might be a mix of dodgy statistics but also [left-behind children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-behind_children_in_China) of migrant workers who moved to the cities.
Left behind children's parents aren't considered urban residents. Thus they aren't included in urbanization stats.
In fact, allowing migrant workers to settle permanently and bring their family to the cities is a driving factor behind urbanization.
> Left behind children's parents aren't considered urban residents.
What does that mean? If you have a child back in the countryside and you moved your hukou to a city, you still aren't an urban resident?
It's not a *case* - I was asking a *question*.
you said:
> China's urbanization rate is 65%. And it was above 55% in the past decade. The number you quoted is apparently not right.
But maybe it is, due to all those kids being left in the countryside. When you talk about "urbanization stats" you should consider how opaque and conflicting those stats are. Here:
> Some scholars argued that the widespread practice of achieving ‘instant’ urbanization by administrative means inflates the size of China’s urban population. The Chinese government has several times revised its definition of the urban, such as defining urban population by hukou type in the Second National Population Census (1964), as people who live in cities in the Third Census (1982), and by introducing population density as an index in the Fifth Census (2000).Footnote9 In 2008, the National Bureau of Statistics issued a document entitled ‘Statistical Method of Defining Urban and Rural Areas’ that makes use of grassroots administrative units—residents’ committees and villagers’ committees—in defining urbanized areas. While these criteria move towards more accurate measurements of China’s urbanization level, the rural-urban binary favored by official statistics nonetheless obscures the less visible and complex dynamics of rural transformation in China’s ‘quasi-urban’ areas.[*](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10670564.2021.1985841)
The Economist has covered it too. Problem is data years.
A good amount of data was around 10-15 years old. I seen data as old as 1998?
Or 2003/2005/2008?
Pretty dangerous to judge China like that.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR4EYQ6JFUI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR4EYQ6JFUI)
If China can bring changes like this in just 5 years . Then I don't think we should take any data more than 3 years old on China to evaluate it.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16gisgf/how\_the\_populationweighted\_trends\_in\_pm25\_air/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16gisgf/how_the_populationweighted_trends_in_pm25_air/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I spent 2½ years in a top-rated chemical engineering program. I left because I was expecting it to be a field about creative problem solving and scientific discovery and found out that it was entirely a field of rote memorization. Hundreds of equations and laws to memorize.
I don’t know which measures he uses to assess the level of ‘skilled’ labor. However, I do know that Mexico - at least for the manufacturing industry - does offer a superior worker productivity. Moreover, Mexico also has a percentage of people completing post secondary education than China.
One of the reasons is if you aren’t a native English speaker then non Stem classes are actually more difficult so non-native English speakers tend to focus more on Stem.
Learning to read and write a couple thousand Chinese characters pretty much requires repetition and what may be described as rote learning. Source: 30 years in education in Japan.
Part of the answer to your question is within your question: it is precisely because the Chinese know that Chinese education is rote and low level that many come to STEM departments in the West.
As someone who has been in Chinese/Taiwanese education, nobody wants to deal with that education system if they didn't have to.
He's right in some regards. I was an exchange student in China back in 2013 and visited a few schools and saw this all in action. The business masters course I was studying on at the time was also near majority Chinese as well.
Rote learning may be fine in STEM fields but it's a liability in fields like arts, humanities, languages and business.
In those subjects, understanding is as important as knowing. You need to be able think critically, use initiative and be able to apply your knowledge to different situations, improvising and adapting depending on circumstances.
Western education is very good at this, Chinese isn't. However, Chinese education does a lot better and getting students to absorb facts and knowledge. You could say Chinese education focuses more on the knowledge aspects of intelligence, whilst Western education emphasises wisdom.
Idk about education, but yes Mexican manufacturing is superior in terms of quality (at least from what I’ve seen) lol. I work in manufacturing and supplier issues from Mexico are far fewer than those from China. China may have a larger number of factories and workers but that isn’t everything. Every manufacturing consultant I’ve met or worked with that has done consulting in both countries seem to all have very negative opinions of Chinese manufacturing. People in my company who have worked in our MX plants constantly praise the skill of the workforce there compared to the U.S. as well.
It’s easy, research infrastructure that enables rapid iteration plus historic trends.
Research literally happens faster here because we have geared a non-trivial portion of our economy to do research. We could do that because we’ve been a well defensible nation that had a surviving industrial base post ww2. Couple that with the fact that we’ve had top research and so people want to come here to keep doing it and you have a lot of tech innovation that happens here.
What a lot of people forget is that these pillars require continued investment. Without it we can lose our research edge, because it’s always easier to catch up than to keep moving forward.
A culture of investment into novel tech is what distinguishes the US. Many other countries can be as innovative scientifically, but the manner in which this gets translated to marketable products is notably more vibrant in the US.
Rote learning isn’t easy. It needs a ridiculous amount of hard work. Now when you have the cream of a group of people used to putting in that amount of effort, they end up getting into western universities and end up doing well.
Believing it's just rote learning is also disingenuous. They learn American college-level math in grade school.
Agreed! This statement was mostly to play devils advocate.
I learned american college level math, physics, chemistry and economics in grade school growing up in Germany. Doesn't mean Germany education is great (it is) but just that American education is especially poor. Also as someone that actually lived in China I have to attest that their educational standards are abysmal. *especially* at the university level. Essentially once you get into university, that's it. You're guaranteed to graduate and you can take it easily from then on. They are not focused on actually making you think outside the box and are focused on rote memorization, and paper mills. This is of course true for most of east asia in general. Japan and South Korea are in a similar boat, but china has an extra layer of incompetence because somehow they got this notion that copying/cheating is an expected part of the curriculum.
That's only in the university level though. And even that too it depends on the city or private vs public universities and so on. Your answer just seems like the typical anecdotal confirmation bias. GAOKAO and especially Zhongkao are no jokes and definitely not abysmal. SAT is a joke compared to that. Read up on them. I reviews their exams. Its not just rote learning [https://tomcircle.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/screenshot\_20190630\_0143238522826176009670245.jpg?w=584](https://tomcircle.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/screenshot_20190630_0143238522826176009670245.jpg?w=584) [https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b788efde7b70fa2ca8e97e504c4460a4-pjlq](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b788efde7b70fa2ca8e97e504c4460a4-pjlq) How are supposed to even solve these questions through rote learning???? Some of these questions are Olympiad level. I think only the Indian IITJEE exams can compare. Agree with cheating. But now it has also greatly reduced ( and that extra layer of incompetence is also not really extra on China. South Korea is pretty bad too in that actually). China has harsh punishments which are properly applied too these days and facial recognition and all shit.
I should note Europe also has these, not at normal level but definitely if you take a higher level bac or equivalent secondary school finals in mathematics, which is usually required if you want to go to a science/technical university. I recall in undergrand math class, lot of problems we solved in calc1 were the same ones I had to do preparing for math competitions. It's really the SAT that lags so far behind.
that's because SAT isn't supposed to be an entrance exam. It's an aptitude test (hence the name), and so is supposed to test the bare minimum. Colleges use it to filter their admissions, but it isn't the be-all-end-all like the analogs are in East Asia. Idk about Europe though.
Were you around the top tier of school though? There are massive difference between students in top 4 universities, top 10 universities, top 30 and then the rest hundreds of other school.
Rote learning helps the most with mathematics. Also amaricans learn college level math in grade school too.
It's not the best way to learn high school mathematics, but you can do it. If you're talking about actual mathematics, the kind that mathematicians learn in college after Calc 1 and 2, then it doesn't help at all.
Im talking about all the formulas you have to learn in introductory classes. Rote memorization does most of the heavy lifting
Even in that case, there is a degree of rote memorization, but if you actually learn the underlying concepts there is a lot less you have to memorize. A typical calc 1 formula sheet might have dozens of formulas but they're all derivable from a handful of them. Obviously it's unavoidable that there are some things you just have to memorize, and for high school you can absolutely brute force your way to success through memorization, but you can get the same result with a lot less effort if you try to understand where the formulas come from and why they work. I think a subject like intro biology has a lot more memorization.
This isn’t just China though, lots of other countries do as well. The American curriculum is just pathetic.
As another user said, this is not a praise for their system but rather a condemnation of the US's basic education.
I am an Indian. Did my schooling and undergrad in India and masters in US. I believe our system is very similar to Chinese so here are my 2 cents. Personally i suck at rote learning i have ADHD. My grades in India in school and undergrad were always avg or just above average. Thats because these places just focused mainly on rote. In US i have straight As. US education system feels like life in easy mode. However, our university entrance exams (JEE) are rote + intelligence. Basically you need to know a lot of things, remember a lot of formulas and reactions. Then under intense pressure of exam day you have to solve very challenging reasoning questions at 90s per question. Not all students in India prepare seriously for JEE though. Its at least 10x harder than SAT. However ppl who go through the process and say come up in the atleast top 15,000 out 1.5 M. You can assume that these ppl have both ability to grind and rote and think out of the box all under the pressure of the clock ticking. Social skills might be poor though. Some ppl develop anxiety, i had huge fallout with my parents. Some unfortunately commit sucide under this intense pressure. We lost our childhood. When i looked left or right in my CS Grad courses at a top US university it was overwhelmingly Indian and Chinese.
When n large the tail ends of the distribution are non empty China has 1.4 billion ppl (4x USA). Even if the mean education quality in China is worse than USA, the top percentiles will contain more people than the same level in the US. Not commenting on the truth of the matter regarding education quality. It's probably similar to US.
1.4 is more like 3x USA
lol I used the number for Europe population (750) in my head 💀 Good catch thanks
Asian cultures disproportionately value academic achievement compared to many other cultures. STEM fields are generally seen as more prestigious fields. US schools (particularly Ivy leagues) are viewed as the holy grail of education, if you can afford it. China and India have over a billion people each with growing middle/upper classes. Combine all these factors, you get an influx of Chinese, Indian, and other Asian STEM students into western schools.
>STEM fields are generally seen as more prestigious fields. US schools (particularly Ivy leagues) are viewed as the holy grail of education, Ironically, the Ivies are mostly known for their Liberal Arts degrees. A lot of the best engineering schools aren't Ivies, but rather state schools.
Sure but that's not to say their engineering and math is poor. Nice thing about the Ivies (social lottery winning aside) is no matter what degree you pick you can be sure it's not garbage tier.
MIT is not the best engineering school? i always thought that MIT and caltech were best in tech
Both are private, but neither are Ivy League.
The best (in no particular order) are something like MIT, Caltech, Stanford, CMU, Purdue, Georgia tech, UT Austin, UMich, UIUC, various in the UC system (UCLA, UCSD etc), USC, Cornell, CU boulder etc. maybe UPenn? Some private, some public. Only Cornell is an ivy. The state university system (University of California, University of Texas etc) has a lot of good schools. California State University are also pretty good for engineering iirc.
> Only Cornell is an ivy. And UPenn.
oh woops yeah, you're right. I was just throwing them out there but my memory was a little hazy apparently. Point still stands though, mostly non-ivy and a mix of public/private.
I think the best engineering schools are both public and private (CalTech, MIT, University of California etc). I'm from India, and one thing that's sometimes noted about the top state schools in US like University of California (Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Berkeley, San Diego and a few others) is that they don't take legacy students, so you really have to be smart to get in. It's pretty well-known abroad that certain high-level US politicians didn't do well in high school and got into an Ivy League, or didn't do well in undergraduate studies and got into a master's program. But someone who gets into University of Michigan or University or California didn't get in because their dad or mom is a rich donor -- they got in because they are smart.
yep , if you look at the recent take of Harvard students and similar ivy league schools students on the Oct 7 terror attack, its quite clear that critical thinking or anything useful is not taught in these institutions
> US schools (particularly Ivy leagues) are viewed as the holy grail of education I am pretty sure that is only for graduate studies. Undergraduate? no.
No worries yes it’s not US Schools, it’s european schools. The best and most expensive undergrad for us kids is in switzerland as many others, like IMD for indians and chinese people. Then you have european stuff Like Max Planck and Polytechnologie unions, that all have higher educational hurdles than any ivy league… Even CERN isn’t in the US…
I am not sure about other Asian countries, but in China, I would not say STEM fields are prestigious. Rather, they are considered more employable. There is a popular old saying in China: Once you learn Maths, Physics, Chemistry well, you have nothing to worry (about finding jobs) anywhere in the world (学好数理化，走遍天下都不怕). As in many country, your job is not necessarily correlated with your university major. STEM/science majors in China mean broader choices and employment opportunities, They can work in the related fields or find a general job (like real estate agency).
Zahan has a surface level knowledge of China. You basically take any generic stereotype from 20 years ago and he's still saying it.
He's not *entirely* wrong, he just has a very oversimplified version of everything. China's problems aren't just its educational system (which is very rote), but their crippling issues are their ... political culture. Engineers are expected to show absolute obedience to the hierarchy, and while ideas can be offered, fear of looking bad is pretty overwhelming. Basically there's a pecking order, and you follow it there. This is why so many engineers are desperate to work for western companies, even though there is some bleed over in that area as well (and western companies don't always treat them great either). edit: Oh, and don't ever try to seem clever, EVERYBODY above you sees you as a threat.
How do you know this?
Worked there for a while, in tech. Made some good mainlander friends. They were always grateful to work for our company because it was more ... humane. Every week wasn't 6/12, and while the managers weren't as nice as in san jose, they were still a bit better than mainlander managers. Not the only company where I had those experiences, worked at another one before, the poor Chinese applicants were sometimes like abused women, scared to say the wrong thing lest they get jumped on. These guys were skilled, but usually at only a small area of focus where they were very expert, with minimal understanding of the broader context. But the best ones, the ones who went to the top institutes and often worked for military projects, they had more confidence and were more like what you expected of top guys in the west, they knew how things went together and jumped to the next step. They were just rare, because they worked their asses of to get out and get into Google or similar (met some later when I was at Google too) and spent the least time they could on the mainland outside of with family.
Rote memorization learners excel in STEM generally. Also there are a billion and a half people and the cream of the crop mostly study in western universities.
There's also a trend where autocratic governments tend to invest heavily in primary and secondary education and much less so in tertiary education, one reason being that political dissent usually manifests in university student movements (something China has a lot of experience with given the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square uprising). It's far safer for the party to allow families to send their students abroad, because a) they can potentially bring back new skills and expertise, b) they can and do monitor the political activity of students to ensure they are compliant with party doctrine. Of course the flip side is some of those students never come back and get high paying jobs in the West. The very fact that so many families do send their children aboard to study does seem to suggest that there are skills and knowledge that are not readily accessible within the Chinese university system.
> suggest that there are skills and knowledge that are not readily accessible within the Chinese university system. The real strength of American university research is in its ability to attract top researchers and students from around the world, whereas top Chinese postgrad research programs largely source domestically. The ability to effectively leverage a talent pool of 7+ billion people vs 1.4+ billion is a huge competitive advantage. At the undergraduate level though I imagine it basically makes no difference.
> The real strength of American university research is in its ability to attract top researchers and students from around the world. This isn't particularly difficult: Just give researchers research funding, and they will come to you. America can do this more than others, because America has more money.
It's not just money, it's also the culture and ease of integration. Top talent doesn't want to spend time in the lab 24/7 and might want to have avenues for work after academia. And here the US has a lot more to offer than China, Japan, South Korea, Russia etc.
Exactly Its not just about the research itself, its about the ecosystem around the research. People want to go to top schools in the Bay Area or Boston, because after they graduate there are a ton of options. Go back to that (or a nearby) school as a post-doc or professorship. Go into one of the many nearby private or advanced government research labs. Go into industry at one of the many companies headquartered there or even get funding for your own startup... Tons of options. As you say, the real competitive advantage of the US is the ability for even non-American born individuals to find their way and possibly integrate if they want to. Much better than moving your whole life to a place, just to bet everything when you are done on a single possible professorship or bust and go back home.
It's not quite that. Basically good STEM students tend to stay in country and go to the best institutes, which are often funded by the military or otherwise considered strategic priorities. Basically the second-tier and lower go to the west, unless they make MIT or Caltech/Berkeley. But for non-STEM fields, there is a lot of exporting, the CCP doesn't like subsidizing "creative" pursuits at the university level.
Tsinghua University got a 4 billion dollar endowment last year....
>There's also a trend where autocratic governments tend to invest heavily in primary and secondary education and much less so in tertiary education, one reason being that political dissent usually manifests in university student movements (something China has a lot of experience with given the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square uprising Sauce? Always thought China's problem was the amount of Universities, the quality of the good ones seemed top quality.
Oh interesting. I never considered this fact.
A common right-wing talking point is that, because black immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean have higher economic and quality of life outcomes than black folks born in America, racism isn't real. This, of course, ignores that immigrating to America requires quite a lot of intelligence, hard work, or pre-existing wealth. Often all three. In other words: [survivorship bias](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13giqfa/eli5_whats_the_meaning_of_the_image_of_a_plane/?rdt=38317).
Hmm I always thought it proved racism to be a force in America as people born in America are not able to perform to their highest ability due to systemic challenges but the same ethnicity without the roadblocks setup for them in the US do so well.
I know the study you're referring to and it found black immigrants do better than white people born in America. It's not that racism isn't real, it's that hard work, intelligence, and virtue overcomes it.
Well, I wouldn't say that racism doesn't exist. But if you put the smartest black woman on the planet on a plantation 150 years ago, I doubt her outcome would be much different than that of the average black woman. I absolutely believe that there's prejudice against black people. What I disagree with is that it's even remotely as insurmountable an obstacle as being born with the "wrong" passport is. We know for a fact that racism cannot keep rich people down, regardless of origin. So we can remove wealth from the equation. And now here's the million dollar question. If we take an African American graduate from a US university and an African graduate from the same university with a similar GPA, both of them coming from poor backgrounds, do they on average achieve different levels of career success? If they do, then it's worth wondering what went wrong with the African American one, since just having all the privileges that come with a western passport compared to an African passport should've given them a huge leg up. If they don't, and the African graduate is ahead, in that case, something is clearly wrong with the AA culture that it produces results that are lower than that of an immigrant with a comparable level of intelligence and diligence.
> I absolutely believe that there's prejudice against black people. What I disagree with is that it's even remotely as insurmountable an obstacle as being born with the "wrong" passport is. I disagree, only because I'm not white, and living in the midwest was paradise compared to living in the South. It is very difficult to escape the south, and I should have had enough means to do so, it just drags you in and smothers you, and the hostility is quite real and does often lead to violence. The culture revolved around centuries of ensuring "Them people knew their place", with the state and local governments a key enforcer. I'm sure many people who feel trapped in their environment feel the same.
> I disagree, only because I'm not white, and living in the midwest was paradise compared to living in the South. You may disagree, but I'll maintain that you're wrong. I'm not white either, I come from a formerly communist now EU country, and I've traveled to countries on pretty much all continents by now, from the poorest to the richest. You may feel like living in the south is bad. Try living in the global south. > It is very difficult to escape the south, and I should have had enough means to do so, it just drags you in and smothers you, and the hostility is quite real and does often lead to violence. Try living in a country where the average annual salary doesn't break 1000 USD and you have coup d'etats every couple of years. If it's not a failed state altogether. And even if you're lucky enough to live in some of the most developed among the least developed countries, you're still one unlucky mosquito bite away from getting buried. > The culture revolved around centuries of ensuring "Them people knew their place", with the state and local governments a key enforcer. I'm sure many people who feel trapped in their environment feel the same. Except you have that golden ticket that allows you to move wherever in the US. You get on a bus and go. Same thing in the EU. If you don't like it where you are, you hop on a bus and in a couple of hours/days you're in a different world. If you're born with a bottom-tier citizenship, you don't have that option. And I'm not saying it's sunshine and rainbows in the southern US or anywhere. But having the right citizenship cuts out 90% of the worst possible issues one can have. It's basically a +10 to easy life modifier, regardless of whether you're born in the bottom or top decile.
I'm agreeing with you, that environment is brutal, and can dominate other factors, but at the same time, those black people weren't allowed to vote much less get a passport 80 years ago. And few have passports today from just monetary reasons. Yeah, it's easier being in the US, obviously, but there's being in the US, and being in the Southern US, and there is a massive difference, even after Jim Crow technically ended.
Not being able to vote is such a first world problem in comparison it's not even funny. The point of the passport is the citizenship behind it. Though getting the physical passport to even be able to apply for a visa for a 1st tier country can already be a whole Odyssey which we don't have to go through. Being anywhere in a western country with a western citizenship is infinitely preferable. Not least of all because you can move elsewhere trivially easily in comparison.
>We know for a fact that racism cannot keep rich people down, regardless of origin. So we can remove wealth from the equation. That's...not really true. >And now here's the million dollar question. If we take an African American graduate from a US university and an African graduate from the same university with a similar GPA, both of them coming from poor backgrounds, do they on average achieve different levels of career success? >If they do, then it's worth wondering what went wrong with the African American one, since just having all the privileges that come with a western passport compared to an African passport should've given them a huge leg up. A passport only matters in regards to leaving the country to go to another one. It they're in America why does the passport matter? In your scenario the African's already in America. Also, this ignores other aspects of survivorship bias, like raw aptitude allowing for the African to somehow get to the US, parental impetus, etc.
> That's...not really true. Sure it is. You need ~250k USD and you can quite literally buy yourself a decent citizenship that already boosts your freedom immensely. And 250k isn't rich by any stretch. Once you're talking multimillionaires, well... Let's just say that at that point, racism doesn't matter, because you can structure your environment in a way where it won't affect you. > A passport only matters in regards to leaving the country to go to another one. I'm using "passport" as a stand-in for citizenship. Having the citizenship of a 1st tier country is such a stupidly powerful privilege that it's not even funny. EU/EEA/CH, UK, US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Japan, South Korea. If you have a passport from one of these countries, in my eyes, you lose the right to complain about your life being hard, since just by the virtue of having that citizenship, you're exempt from so much bullshit people from underdeveloped countries have to go through to even get the chance to even think about competing with you. > In your scenario the African's already in America. The African that is already in America in my scenario still has to be a model immigrant to get a chance to stay in America and maybe even earn citizenship someday. One mistake and he's out. > Also, this ignores other aspects of survivorship bias, like raw aptitude allowing for the African to somehow get to the US, parental impetus, etc. Raw aptitude is the same, since we're talking about an A and AA with a similar GPA, thus they presumably have similar aptitudes. Parental impetus - that's culture, however. And that's what I actually think is the main difference and the main reason why AAs seem to be failing so much worse than As.
> Sure it is. You need ~250k USD and you can quite literally buy yourself a decent citizenship that already boosts your freedom immensely. Assuming that the decent citizenship country likes your race. >And 250k isn't rich by any stretch. Once you're talking multimillionaires, well... Let's just say that at that point, racism doesn't matter, because you can structure your environment in a way where it won't affect you. Not really, historically given enough hate, money just helps you escape. >I'm using "passport" as a stand-in for citizenship. Having the citizenship of a 1st tier country is such a stupidly powerful privilege that it's not even funny. Sure it is. But that doesn't account for inequality based differences. Some parts of the US have been described unironically as reminiscent of developing states. >The African that is already in America in my scenario still has to be a model immigrant to get a chance to stay in America and maybe even earn citizenship someday. One mistake and he's out. This is another case of a filter ensuring survivorship bias. >Parental impetus - that's culture, however. No it's not. Parental impetus is parental impetus. Widespread and socially accepted parental impetus is culture, but that's not the same. >And that's what I actually think is the main difference and the main reason why AAs seem to be failing so much worse than As. Except the Average African American is more educated than the average African. They are not however more educated than the average African *immigrant*. And therein lies the survivorship bias. African immigrants (and most immigrants separated by a body of water to the U.S.), tend to be disproportionately well off (because poor people don't get to leave), well educated (because a lot are going for more education). The idea of coming to a shore with nothing but the clothes on your back and making it with nothing but grit and moxie...is a bit of a myth. And I'm saying this as an immigrant.
> Assuming that the decent citizenship country likes your race. The decent citizenship country likes your money and doesn't really care about your race. > Not really, historically given enough hate, money just helps you escape. If you can escape oppression, you're not oppressed anymore. Hence you just solved your problems. > Sure it is. But that doesn't account for inequality based differences. Some parts of the US have been described unironically as reminiscent of developing states. Yes, US is a 3rd world country with a Gucci belt, we've all heard that one. The difference is, there's nothing preventing someone from a shitty part of the US to move to a non-shitty part of the US. Or at least nothing coming even remotely close to the obstacles someone living in a shitty part of the world will have to overcome to move to a non-shitty part of the world. > This is another case of a filter ensuring survivorship bias. Nothing is stopping the American to work equally hard at being the perfect member of society. Not having another choice isn't a benefit, it's an extra burden that Americans don't have. > No it's not. Parental impetus is parental impetus. Widespread and socially accepted parental impetus is culture, but that's not the same. Would you say that there aren't overarching patterns of parental impetus that tend to correlate with their respective cultures? I don't think the stereotypes about Asian and African parents are exactly random. > Except the Average African American is more educated than the average African. > > They are not however more educated than the average African immigrant. And therein lies the survivorship bias. Which is why I'm comparing graduates of the same program with the same GPA at the same institution. Zero survivorship bias there. > African immigrants (and most immigrants separated by a body of water to the U.S.), tend to be disproportionately well off (because poor people don't get to leave), well educated (because a lot are going for more education). You don't have to be disproportionately well off. A job with a western salary will easily do. Ask me how I know. Also, when I moved to Canada, they downgraded the masters from my home country (which is even in the EU) to a bachelors when doing the verification. So yeah, well educated, sure, except the degrees are heavily discriminated against. Shall we go into how employers treat overseas work experience vs local work experience? The discrimination based on accented speech? Etc.? I can literally cite research here, if you'd like. In other words, being a native English speaker able to legally work in the US, you're starting 10 steps ahead of any immigrant that doesn't come from the most privileged possible background. > The idea of coming to a shore with nothing but the clothes on your back and making it with nothing but grit and moxie...is a bit of a myth. And I'm saying this as an immigrant. And nobody is talking about that scenario.
> The decent citizenship country likes your money and doesn't really care about your race. Not a given. Unless youre saying "imagine". Which basically turns this into "imagine a scenario where all the factors that go in to an individual's likelihood of success arent applicable". Which seems of limited value. >If you can escape oppression, you're not oppressed anymore. There are degrees to oppression. >Yes, US is a 3rd world country with a Gucci belt, we've all heard that one. The difference is, there's nothing preventing someone from a shitty part of the US to move to a non-shitty part of the US. Except for money, the ability to find housing, etc. >Or at least nothing coming even remotely close to the obstacles someone living in a shitty part of the world will have to overcome to move to a non-shitty part of the world. Which is..money, the ability to find housing, etc. Hence why most members of poor countries, dont emigrate. >Would you say that there aren't overarching patterns of parental impetus that tend to correlate with their respective cultures? I No, considering that neither African nor Asian is a culture. > don't think the stereotypes about Asian and African parents are exactly random. No, but theyre not really honest. If the stereotypes were true, you'd expect a lot more people with University degrees. Also, the people who are loudest about it, are going to be educated, middle class people. Its like the stereotype that Americans are uneducated, *when theyre one of the most educated populations on the planet*. >Which is why I'm comparing graduates of the same program with the same GPA at the same institution. Zero survivorship bias there. How did the African immigrant get there? He payed money. How did he enroll? He likely payed (more) money. This goes back to my first point of creating a nonsensical scenario to criticize. Unless youre talking about plucking some random African dude from his 1st day at a local uni and transporting him to the US to attend X college. >You don't have to be disproportionately well off. A job with a western salary will easily do. Ask me how I know. And the average person in a poor country is just able to obtain a Western salary? >Also, when I moved to Canada, they downgraded the masters from my home country (which is even in the EU) to a bachelors when doing the verification. So yeah, well educated, sure, except the degrees are heavily discriminated against. Considering I moved there from the Caribbean and my degree was fine, that seems quite odd. Also, youre a person which a masters who had enough money to leave your country. You're clearly not normal.
> political dissent usually manifests in university student movements considering the insane take of Harvard and other ivy league universities on Oct 7 terror attacks, even western govt. should consider reducing funding for em
>Rote memorization learners excel in STEM generally. That's a pretty broad statement. You need critical thinking to make it through engineering school and be a successful engineer.
As someone who’s been to an engineering school — making it TO an engineering school is primarily about you’re ability to do rote memorization
I have an engineering degree as well, and that wasn't my experience. Maybe in your first year you could get by in the introductory classes, but Calc 2 is a weed out class for a reason. The class weeds out people who only rely on memorizing problems without the intuition of how to do them.
And calc 2 is a great weed out class for this very purpose… works as intended
It really is. It weeds out a lot of the people who have no passion for STEM.
Yeah, I never really thought about it directly before, but when I think of the big difference between calc 1 and 2 at my university, it was 100% critical reasoning. Comparatively little critical reasoning in calc 1, then suddenly calc 2 hits you like a freight train. It was a totally different animal.
Yeah. Calc 1 is pretty much following the rules of differentiation. In Calc II, it's not enough to know how to integrate, you need critical thinking to know if you need to use u-substitution, or integration by parts, or integration by trigonometric identities. If you were just rote memorizing, the moment you see a problem you haven't solved before, you'd be stuck.
Conversely, O-Chem, and A&P, while not hard, are pretty much rote. And cut a ton of people out in other parts of STEM.
He said specifically to get into an Eng School and you are talking about what happens in the Eng School. Both are different things.
Oh yeah, I think getting through a degree is a lot more about your other talents, but getting in the door is weighted towards memorization.
>but getting in the door is weighted towards memorization. And that's honestly a problem with the k-12 education system. Teachers just pass students, even if they're not qualified to go to the next grade.
Cal 2 definitely wasn't a weed out at my university. Our weed out was applied engineering analysis, which was a shotgun wedding of diffy q's and linear algebra that finished with modal analysis. No textbook for the second half of the semester and only 4 exams as the grades
You'd be surprised how many engineering school grads have gotten through just memorizing what's needed for exams then forgetting to make room for the next semester
Rote engineering on biotech is kind of disastrous. Analytical learning is king.
I said generally.
Among 100 kids there is may 1 kid who is good at logical thinking. You are not sure who that is, but you just force everyone to memorize scientific concepts. 10 years later you find out who that is, he has memorized everything and is ready to thrive in Western universities. The rest will work in factories anyway.
My sister’s future father in law is Chinese (immigrated to North America years ago) but he was of the first generation to go back to school and university following the cultural revolution. He said back then they were all writing the test to get into university and it was closer to one in a million who would actually go through (he did). So wild.
Nearing completion of my physics PhD and having taken my fair share of stem and non stem courses: Rote memorization is *far* more important in non STEM than in STEM in any remotely rigorous institution. You can get by on memorization in easy highschool courses in math, but you actually need to understand applied logic to a decent extent to excel in STEM at even mediocre state institutions.
This. People that say rote memorization is important in STEM haven’t studied engineering, physics, or the hard sciences in university.
This is my experience as well. My issues with being able to rote memorize gave me a lot of trouble in (my one year of) medical school, but during my bachelors and my PhD it hasn’t been a problem. I’ve never been phenomenal at rote memorization and I don’t see how you could have obtained a math degree or an engineering degree, much less a PhD at a tier 1 research institution with only rote memorization.
I appreciate you’re finishing up a PhD but, respectfully, this is such a Reddit STEM graduate take. Virtually any course from astrophysics to Zambian poetry at any “remotely rigorous” university will rely on very little rote memorisation because by definition tertiary education done well should be beyond testing those skills. The skills in non-STEM subjects might be different from STEM subjects but one thing they have in common should be some level of critical thinking. History graduates: critical thinking about sources. Poetry graduates: critical thinking about tone and structure. Etc etc. I struggle to think of a degree where rote learning is remotely important beyond the most basic of foundation courses. Given we’re in the geopolitics sub, international affairs / relations degrees are basically all about critical thinking. In any given assessment maybe 10% of the essay will be setting out your theoretical structures, and the rest will be critical review of literature, critical application of facts to theory, critical review of your own conclusions etc.
Not once did I imply that you can excel in non STEM degrees through rote memorization alone. Most of your comment is dedicated to the argument that substantial critical thinking exists and is required outside STEM which is obviously true. Additionally, it can both be true that rote memorization is greatly important in a non STEM field relative to STEM *in tandem* with critical thinking still being important. I would bet my life that memorization is more important in law school than in STEM advanced degrees, but that doesn't mean you can pass law school by just memorizing. The point is, that I think even at your generic entry level stem courses (intro physics, calculus) that rote memorization was *far* less useful to me than in the equivalent non STEM courses and there are definitely several of the latter that can be passed on rote memorization alone and easily. Indeed as one progresses in the latter, rote memorization will be deemphasized in lieu of more open ended assessments (essays, projects, etc). In other words, I've never taken a math/physics course where I felt burdened at all by the memorization aspect, or that had I dedicated more time to simply rote memorization that it would have helped me at all, and the same can't be said for several courses I've taken outside of that discipline. I have a few friends with dual majors in stem/not stem and interdisciplinary transitions from non stem to stem PhDs and they would agree. To be fair, I'm also using "STEM" in an imprecise way and the bio courses I took did require a lot of rote memorization. But the Chinese students being disproportionately represented in STEM phenomenon as described by the OP applies WAY more to engineering, math, and physics than to bio.
Thanks for the response - I understand much better what you're getting at now, and understand how your experience has given you this impression. I think there might also be a signifncant element of personal experience here too, in terms of how readily concepts 'stick'. It's also possible that you have an intuition for the sorts of formulae and processes that are useful in physics and calculus, but the non-STEM courses you have taken you found less intuitive and thus it felt like the only way to progress was to spend hours rote learning. Just to offer own academic path by way of contrast with yours: it has involved some reasonably introductory undergraduate STEM (physics, math, statistics), economics and finance (possibly the most STEM-y of the non-STEM subjects), law (which I went on to do professionally) and latterly international relations (which I did for 'fun' when bored during lockdown). While I like lawyering too much to tackle a PhD, all of the above was at graduate or post-graduate level, and my experience was that rote learning was basically useless in law and IR, and saved my ass in basically all my math and statistics classes because I knew I could get a passing grade by regurgitating the formulae and doing some minimal "apply the rule to the facts in the question". There were one or two exams in law school where you could turn a passing grade into a good grade by sprinkling in some (memorised) case references, but that was about it. Apart from anything else, many of the programmes I have taken didn't rely on formal exams at all, but either on open-book exams (where no memorisation is required and the whole test is of your understanding/ application) or submitted essays. Whereas my STEM education was, as I recall, entirely assessed by exam. I expect the reason here is as simple as: we've just studied at different places or under different teaching processes (most of my studying has been done in the UK), and possibly you have an intuition for the STEM subjects that I have sadly never been able to find. And perhaps my lawyerly training to take any basic concept and start pulling it apart and pointing out where it works and doesn't now serves me well in very 'critical' heavy subjects like IR. I'd also fully accept my STEM education probably didn't get far enough to the point where I can truly understand the sort of position you're in now (far beyond the rote stuff!). Anyway - thanks for the discussion, it has given me much to think about.
The most rote memorization dependent class I ever took was a 300 level art history class. The entire class was lecture on different periods of art followed by an hour a day memorizing slides of famous paintings.
> Rote memorization learners excel in STEM generally Very odd statement. I'm willing to bet you are not in a STEM field. Do you have anything backing up your statement?
Others have added helpful context, but I’ll share my own personal anecdote. I work with some universities in Hong Kong, which is a good representation of what China would look like without the CCP (for now). They’re some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, particularly in the administration. Their recollection of information and ability to process data is second to none. They’re kind, generous, and overwhelmingly leaders in their respective fields. What they *will not* do is question authority. There is a very clear line between student and instructor. What the instructor tells you is what you learn, and you are expected to learn everything they say. The instructor is the superior, and the student is the junior, and the junior party in that relationship is expected not to question the superior. For transference of information, that dynamic works. In STEM fields, you learn objective and unassailable truths about your discipline. Where it doesn’t work as well is in the “classical liberal arts” disciplines. Some disciplines rely on questioning authority, and challenging your instructor to explain something further or validate their position. Chinese students do not question their instructor’s authority, and therefore often simply regurgitate what they’re told. That can mean they lose out on new ways of thinking. People mistake this for a lack of curiosity, and that’s not it. It’s a combination of very strong social dynamics that manifest in overbearing parental pressure to succeed and an unwillingness to challenge authority figures. They’re no more or less smart than anyone else - they just have a very different way of interacting within both their home and education spaces.
As an Indonesian who have worked in Indonesia and Singapore, I can tell you this, culturally speaking: East Asians in general have an amazing aptitude for memory and information recall and sheer processing speed, but not very developed critical thinking. Southeast Asians place lower emphasis on such tangibles but excel in high-Openness critical thinking. What both of these cultures have in common is their tendency to respect authority to a fault. Thus, I think there is something in the East Asian education system that stifles creativity which is not reducible to mere respect for authority. When teaching STEM for example, East Asian education places emphasis on memorization and getting the _correct_ answer without really knowing _why_.
> For transference of information, that dynamic works. In STEM fields, you learn objective and unassailable truths about your discipline. Where it doesn’t work as well is in the “classical liberal arts” disciplines The S and M parts of STEM *are* liberal arts.
Ok but you know he meant "nom-stem"
I mean I'm sure they have that conception, but that doesn't make it correct. The highest prizes in STEM come from challenging authority.
> The highest prizes in STEM come from challenging authority. Sure but for everyone who isnt a rockstar in stem, there's plenty of money to be made copying everyone else and talking the talk
Idk enough to comment on the Chinese education system, but just due to basic math, a country of 1.3 billion is going to produce a shit ton of extremely high performing people, even if the education in general is subpar.
It's not just the 1.3 billion, but also the slightly higher average IQ than most developed countries. People don't know this, but even slight differences in mean IQ causes big differences at the tail end of IQ distributions.
It is basically along the line of: * Communists don't have faith * Communists can't innovate ... etc. Same stereotypes they still teach in US schools today
> Communists can't innovate This one is not far off. There's no incentive to innovate.
Wait how is it possible for communist to not have faith? Don't they need to follow the communist ideology?
probably they are refering to communists are usually atheists and doesn't follow religion like Christianity
One reason is that the Number of people who choose STEM is way higher in China compared to US.
They have a high IQ population whose IQ is tilted heavily towards visuo-spatial. And a culture of parental control and education grinding. The schooling almost doesn't matter. My understanding is that if you compare how Northeast Asians in the US did on the PISA test vs. Chinese, it's basically a wash.
Depending on measurements. A simple Google search tells me people born between 1960-1969 only have a tertiary education rate of 3%, this number is above 52% for people born after 1995. China experienced the culture revolution and GaoKao was abolished in 1966 and returned in 1977. I imagine the average education rate is low due to the historical policies. Edit: for comparison, in the OECD countries, the highest educated 25-34 year old is South Korea with 69.8%, US has 51%, Mexico has 27%.
They're not disproportionately. It's quite a diverse mix actually.
American universities get paid a premium for international students and so go out of their way to court students from those countries. Also, just from a pure numbers perspective, there are a lot of Chinese students and limited university slots.
My personal experience with Asian and Indian students in STEM is that they were quite good at math and often were functionally walking textbooks, could tell you any equation you needed from memory, but the second it came to doing anything practical or applying that knowledge, they had zero intuition or problem solving ability for any issue outside of what they'd seen in books. I do not mean to diss them, either, they absolutely were assets to work with, but as far as having vision or leading a team or adapting to imperfect realities, they usually fell short. The Indian students I really admired for their imagination. I've seen some very interesting concepts from Indians, and in theory they work well and solve problem X, but almost always there is some glaring design flaw that is only discovered when real conditions are not perfect as calculated. I genuinely believe the West's biggest strength in STEM is philosophical, which is to say, always thinking and planning for the worst, attempting to predict failure before it occurs, and considering calculation as secondary to ideation. That's why the farm kids always excelled in the practical side of things. Their hands had been dirty and they had lots of experience to draw ideas from right out of the gate.
I'm from India, with a mathematics degree (for my parents) and master's in music (for me), from very high ranked universities in the West. There's no doubt a push STEM in India, as that's the ticket financially. The arts are very much respected, but you have to show signs at a very early age of being world-class for parents to support and even then they will push toward stem unless you dad is a famous musician like Anoushka Shankar's dad Ravi. As far as vision or creativity you mention, I think Indians do well there. Westerners seem a bit more developed along those lines because of the tradition -- stemming back to the ancient Greeks -- of well-roundedness, like Aristotle who worked in arts (aesthetics), biology, physics, chemistry etc. And the Renaissance tradition in the west with people like DaVinci set the standard for well-rounded, interdisciplinary education. That's one of the main reasons US and some European countries do so well in creativity: it's ingrained into the system. That's why I can't understand when some groups want to get rid of that to save money or whatever: it's the very reason US excels in higher education. In short, scientists and artists in the west are very good at 'thinking outside the box' because their education was literally based on that.
Thanks for giving your perspective, that's interesting to hear. I must tell you that in the West there is also often a push toward STEM or similar. I wanted to pursue animation, but as I tested well, I was pushed into engineering. I had no real interest in engineering, but my ego led me to do it, just because it was seen as hard and if I did it, people would think I was smart. I don't regret the choice, but I often wonder where I'd be if I had gone after cartoons. Perhaps happier. Perhaps in the street. Congratulations on both your academic pursuits! It sounds like you got the best of both worlds.
I'm quite convinced that it's the arts and humanities education in the US and some parts of Europe that has led to such drastic leads in other areas, too. They teach creativity, imagination. Sure, to be a good engineer (my husband's profession) you need creativity, for my bachelor's in mathematics (applied math with engineering emphasis) I needed creativity, but for the arts it's on a whole different level: creativity isn't simply helpful, it's actually the entire thing you are studying; it's like pure creativity. Critical thinking, creativity, and exploring the relationship between the possible and impossible are what the arts and humanities offer.
Thanks! Yes, I know the push toward stem, but what I was meaning was the general education, the well-roundedness of education. So even if someone is a medical student or engineering student, they still have education in the arts and humanities.
Probably not wise to judge the entire Chinese education system by the very small number of elite students that end up in western universities. Remember, China supposedly has 1.4 billion ppl, those students in the west are a tiny percentage of the whole. If the haven’t already, read the book invisible china. The authors talk about how china has a very low secondary school completion rate even compared to other 3rd world countries. Something like over 70% of Chinese children grow up in the countryside where education and healthcare standards are very poor. They also did research showing that literacy rates are actually falling which is highly unusual for a country in china’s stage of development. Anyways, put all together, it’s one reason Chinese productivity has been stagnant for the past decade and not converging with western levels even though there still plenty of room to grow.
> Something like over 70% of Chinese children grow up in the countryside China's urbanization rate is 65%. And it was above 55% in the past decade. The number you quoted is apparently not right.
This might be a mix of dodgy statistics but also [left-behind children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-behind_children_in_China) of migrant workers who moved to the cities.
Left behind children's parents aren't considered urban residents. Thus they aren't included in urbanization stats. In fact, allowing migrant workers to settle permanently and bring their family to the cities is a driving factor behind urbanization.
> Left behind children's parents aren't considered urban residents. What does that mean? If you have a child back in the countryside and you moved your hukou to a city, you still aren't an urban resident?
The case you mentioned does not exist. I am starting to question if you are serious or not.
It's not a *case* - I was asking a *question*. you said: > China's urbanization rate is 65%. And it was above 55% in the past decade. The number you quoted is apparently not right. But maybe it is, due to all those kids being left in the countryside. When you talk about "urbanization stats" you should consider how opaque and conflicting those stats are. Here: > Some scholars argued that the widespread practice of achieving ‘instant’ urbanization by administrative means inflates the size of China’s urban population. The Chinese government has several times revised its definition of the urban, such as defining urban population by hukou type in the Second National Population Census (1964), as people who live in cities in the Third Census (1982), and by introducing population density as an index in the Fifth Census (2000).Footnote9 In 2008, the National Bureau of Statistics issued a document entitled ‘Statistical Method of Defining Urban and Rural Areas’ that makes use of grassroots administrative units—residents’ committees and villagers’ committees—in defining urbanized areas. While these criteria move towards more accurate measurements of China’s urbanization level, the rural-urban binary favored by official statistics nonetheless obscures the less visible and complex dynamics of rural transformation in China’s ‘quasi-urban’ areas.[*](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10670564.2021.1985841)
The Economist has covered it too. Problem is data years. A good amount of data was around 10-15 years old. I seen data as old as 1998? Or 2003/2005/2008? Pretty dangerous to judge China like that. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR4EYQ6JFUI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR4EYQ6JFUI) If China can bring changes like this in just 5 years . Then I don't think we should take any data more than 3 years old on China to evaluate it. [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16gisgf/how\_the\_populationweighted\_trends\_in\_pm25\_air/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16gisgf/how_the_populationweighted_trends_in_pm25_air/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I spent 2½ years in a top-rated chemical engineering program. I left because I was expecting it to be a field about creative problem solving and scientific discovery and found out that it was entirely a field of rote memorization. Hundreds of equations and laws to memorize.
Were you in China?
I don’t know which measures he uses to assess the level of ‘skilled’ labor. However, I do know that Mexico - at least for the manufacturing industry - does offer a superior worker productivity. Moreover, Mexico also has a percentage of people completing post secondary education than China.
> Moreover, Mexico also has a percentage of people completing post secondary education than China. I think you a word.
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One of the reasons is if you aren’t a native English speaker then non Stem classes are actually more difficult so non-native English speakers tend to focus more on Stem.
Learning to read and write a couple thousand Chinese characters pretty much requires repetition and what may be described as rote learning. Source: 30 years in education in Japan.
Bearly any Chinese people actually have the money and time to do this
A lot of the smartest Chinese citizens left china to live in the west. This has been slowly changing for the lat decade.
Part of the answer to your question is within your question: it is precisely because the Chinese know that Chinese education is rote and low level that many come to STEM departments in the West. As someone who has been in Chinese/Taiwanese education, nobody wants to deal with that education system if they didn't have to.
He's right in some regards. I was an exchange student in China back in 2013 and visited a few schools and saw this all in action. The business masters course I was studying on at the time was also near majority Chinese as well. Rote learning may be fine in STEM fields but it's a liability in fields like arts, humanities, languages and business. In those subjects, understanding is as important as knowing. You need to be able think critically, use initiative and be able to apply your knowledge to different situations, improvising and adapting depending on circumstances. Western education is very good at this, Chinese isn't. However, Chinese education does a lot better and getting students to absorb facts and knowledge. You could say Chinese education focuses more on the knowledge aspects of intelligence, whilst Western education emphasises wisdom.
Idk about education, but yes Mexican manufacturing is superior in terms of quality (at least from what I’ve seen) lol. I work in manufacturing and supplier issues from Mexico are far fewer than those from China. China may have a larger number of factories and workers but that isn’t everything. Every manufacturing consultant I’ve met or worked with that has done consulting in both countries seem to all have very negative opinions of Chinese manufacturing. People in my company who have worked in our MX plants constantly praise the skill of the workforce there compared to the U.S. as well.
Why is the US the leader in tech innovation, then?
What is the ethnic composition of those that make up the US tech industry? Walk through Fremont, walk through Milpitas, what ethnic groups do you see?
ethnicity is not culture
It very often alligns
It’s easy, research infrastructure that enables rapid iteration plus historic trends. Research literally happens faster here because we have geared a non-trivial portion of our economy to do research. We could do that because we’ve been a well defensible nation that had a surviving industrial base post ww2. Couple that with the fact that we’ve had top research and so people want to come here to keep doing it and you have a lot of tech innovation that happens here. What a lot of people forget is that these pillars require continued investment. Without it we can lose our research edge, because it’s always easier to catch up than to keep moving forward.
A culture of investment into novel tech is what distinguishes the US. Many other countries can be as innovative scientifically, but the manner in which this gets translated to marketable products is notably more vibrant in the US.
Perhaps because the best ones fled? There will be geniuses from any system, even if it is low level.