Summary
In the 17 years since 2000, 15 people in Japan have won the Nobel Prize in Natural Sciences. Is the gap between us and Japan really lies in scientific research itself? Too young,Too simple! In recent years, my country has increased considerable investment in scientific research, and the number of papers published in international scientific and technological journals has actually far exceeded that of Japan. The key to the
problem is: my country has a strong administrative color to allocate scientific research resources and evaluate scientific research results, there is a lot of waste of scientific research funds, and a large number of papers are published to cope with assessment, evaluation, and promotion, which lacks the required innovative value. Today, I recommend Mr. Chen Chuanxi's article "Don't cultivate intellectuals with low personality", which may give us some inspiration.
Don’t cultivate intellectuals with low personality
Author | Chen Chuanxi
Professor and doctoral supervisor
Nobel Prize winner Li Yuanzhe
1986 to 1987, I worked as a researcher at a university in the United States. At a Chinese party, several people suddenly ran to me and congratulated me warmly. I was shocked, and they stopped immediately, "You are..." It turned out that they were wrong. I only found out during the conversation that a Chinese man won the Nobel Prize in Science, probably named Li Yuanzhe, who looked very much like me, "Look, age, temperament, demeanor... Ah, he is a little shorter than you. But it looks so much like you." They are all Taiwanese, working or studying in the United States. They just heard the news that Li Yuanzhe won the Nobel Prize on the radio, and Li Yuanzhe is also in this city. He himself heard the news that others told him that he won the Nobel Prize, which was later confirmed on the radio.
It turns out that the winner of the Nobel Prize did not know at all in advance. Don’t report your scientific research results one by one like a beggar, don’t fill in forms, and don’t boast about the originality and cleverness of your achievements. There is no connection or opening backdoor, etc., but it is recommended by relevant experts and does not notify the scientist himself. Then the authoritative experts will judge. After the judgment, the news will be published, so the winner often does not know at all. After the news was released, everyone congratulated the winner, and of course the winner was very happy and even more glorious.
But if scientists are asked to report and ask for awards by themselves, ask others to pay Nobel prizes for themselves, and they must boast about how clever their achievements are. At the same time, they must belittle the achievements of others (people) and fill out forms, report, review, etc., then, is this scientist still noble? Is his personality still noble? Does he still have the time and mood to engage in research?
Chen Chuanxi is really a bit similar to Li Yuanzhe
Nobel's wife was taken away by a mathematician. Nobel was very sad about this, so the Nobel Prize did not win the mathematical prize . Later, an international organization established the World Mathematics Prize (I forgot the specific name), which is equivalent to the Nobel Prize. The winner last time was a Russian mathematician. This mathematician devoted himself to mathematical research and had great skills, but he never published papers. If he were in China, he would definitely not be hired as a university professor, but a Russian university president still hired him as a professor. The mathematician only hangs his research results on his computer website and has never submitted any publication. He believes that submissions are insulting his personality. He wrote a sentence before his research results: "That's it." As a result, he was rated as the highest international mathematics award by an international authoritative organization. The whole world was sensational, and he was indifferent and continued to live his ordinary and tense life of research. He was notified to receive the prize, but he laughed it off and refused to receive the prize. He was not rich, but with a professor's salary, it was enough to survive and research.
Everyone should have their own noble personality and backbone, but it cannot be exactly like this. For example, when an official is an official, his subordinates must obey his superiors, and when an official treats the wise and humble, he should show his demeanor of "handling in the underworld" and must not be arrogant.In addition, in order to consolidate and improve his status, he has to (omit it); for example, a beggar begging others, he must be humble...
But intellectuals must have independent personality and noble character, especially backbone.
Society should also respect and maintain the independent personality and noble character of intellectuals. At least it cannot cultivate the "low personality" of intellectuals. Many regulations now are to cultivate people's low personality. , for example, if you give a prize, you will first send a notice, ask someone to read the notice, and then submit your own works or collection according to the notice, then fill out the form, and think that your work can win how many prizes you can win, and tell me the advantages of your work, which is better than other people's works. An intellectual who uses his own works to ask for awards, tells himself how good his works are, and must also belittle the works of others in his peers. His character will not be too high. What style can he have? But it is not okay not to ask for awards, because a large number of works and collections are published every year. When you evaluate professional titles, work, and join the association, you must win the award to count.
This is not counting. You have to do activities when evaluating awards. Ask who is the judge, and come to visit and say hello one by one. It is unknown whether you will give gifts. A friend told me that he held a calligraphy exhibition in a city. He originally planned to invite a celebrity to speak and cut the ribbon. The celebrity also agreed to "respond to come", but the day before the exhibition, the celebrity told him: "No, there is an urgent matter. My works are to be evaluated in the ×××× Award. I am about to be evaluated in the past few days, so I have to go to the event." "There is hope for going to the event, and there will be no chance if I don't go!" He went to the event for more than a week, and the award was awarded.
is striving to be a judge, whoever has the right is the judge director and deputy director, and then he will select a few judges whom he has gotten to. When discussing the awards, first rate your work as a high award, then rate a few relatives or students of your friends...
is really a shame!
I suggest that the awards in will be evaluated in the future, just like the Nobel Prize. The relevant departments will find a group of authoritative experts to participate, and the authoritative experts will recommend it and then evaluate it. If the authoritative expert's own works are also recommended by another authoritatively, the author must avoid it when evaluating his works. After the review is completed, it will be announced. can reduce the trouble with the authors, and do not let them sell themselves everywhere for awards and build relationships everywhere. In the long run, intellectuals will lose their personality without knowing it and think it is the right thing to do. In fact, there are many books and picture albums every year, but there are very few really good works, which you will know as soon as you mention them. Now, good book reviews cannot be awarded, and very bad books can be awarded. The problem lies in the fact that people with noble personality are unwilling to lower their personality to ask for awards. People with low personality cannot write good books or draw good paintings, so they ask for relationships everywhere, or they have the right to give them the prize, not the award, but the relationship and power.
Intellectuals are examples of social elites and people, and their personality levels determine the quality of social quality. So I hope not to cultivate intellectuals and cultural people with low personality. should cultivate their noble character and personality. Poverty and humbleness cannot be moved, mighty and mighty cannot be betrayed, and wealth cannot be lustful. Isn’t this a person who holds my work and asks someone to give me a prize?
Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang was an emperor who cultivated intellectuals with low personality. He had always been "unsanctioned". Zhu Yuanzhang used intellectuals with noble personality, either slapped the cheeks, arrested, slashed, slashed, or beheaded after insulting them, and beheaded the heads. From the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the personality of intellectuals decreased collectively, and it was not until the May Fourth Movement that the personality of intellectuals rose. By the "Anti-Rightist Movement" in 1957, intellectuals had no personality.
Intellectuals have low personalities, and the quality of people in the entire society must be collectively reduced. It is long time since the low quality of Chinese people is paid attention to. We do not want to cultivate intellectuals with low personality anymore, so we should pay attention to details.
Source: Niche Bookstore (xiaozhongshufang)
Expansion reading:
Nobel Prize winner: East Asian education wastes too much life
Source of this article: public account "Thought to think about it".
Nakamura Shuji believes that the education system in Asia is a waste of time and young people should learn different things. The modern Prussian education system in East Asian countries has hindered students from conducting more in-depth research and is harmful to their ability to think independently.
Driven by the scarcity mentality, parents let their children immerse themselves in cram school and questions from an early age, hoping to grab the school resources that seem scarce in front of them first. Perhaps in the long run, they will waste their children's greatest resources - youth time with infinite possibilities and natural curiosity.
To be a good student, it is not to complete the teacher's homework faithfully like a physical worker, but to be effective like a knowledge worker, that is, "do what you should do". Good students must do: decide the focus of learning, measure the mastery of their knowledge, and manage their study time. This requires great initiative and freedom.
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. Shuji Nakamura, who won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of blue light LEDs, held a press conference at the Japan Foreign Press Association in Tokyo in January 2015, criticizing Japan's patent system and the entire East Asian education system. He criticized Japan's education system, saying that the university entrance examination system is very bad, as is the case in China and South Korea. The educational goal of all high school students is to be admitted to famous universities. He believes that the education system in Asia is a waste of time and young people should learn different things.
Shuji Nakamura is an atypical Japanese scientist:
Born from an ordinary fisherman family, his examination ability is mediocre, and he went to Tokushima University, a third-rate university in Japan;
He has a very strong hands-on ability: adjust the instruments in the morning and do experiments in the afternoon;
Self-study ability is very strong: Nakamura has a deep understanding of physics, but he comes from self-study. The Tokushima University he attended didn't even have a physics department.
People like this are suppressed in Japan, and their criticism of Japan's education system is also a reason for it.
1. East Asian education: Inefficient, everyone suffers deeply
East Asian education system is relatively special and is often praised by outsiders and criticized by insiders. Japan's education system is relatively loose among these three countries. Let's not mention some countries, teachers, students, and parents are suffering deeply.
As for South Korea, it is also famous for its extreme test-oriented and educationalism. Seoul National University, Korea University and Yonsei University are collectively called "SKY". 70% of the presidents of South Korea's largest enterprises are graduates of these three universities, while 80% of the civil servants of the judicial institutions come from these three universities.
Almost all Korean children have to attend cram school. In 2009, the total profit of South Korean cram school is about US$7.3 billion, which is more than Samsung Electronics' profit. The huge education expenditure is the biggest reason why Koreans dare not have more children. In 2012, the OECD conducted the "International Student Competency Assessment Program", and Korean students ranked first among all member states in mathematics and reading projects. However, this achievement was achieved with a very low efficiency. Some commented: "These children achieved such results by double hard work and double spending...."
Why does East Asia have such an education system? I think it is because East Asian countries already have Prussian genes in the modern education system, plus East Asian Confucianism and Imperial Examination traditions. For some countries, it can be said that it has added the practical quick-reach and ideological indoctrination functions of Soviet education.
2. East Asian education has a regular "Prussian gene"
Before the 19th century, education was actually an apprenticeship system similar to handicrafts, whether it was an Eastern private school or a Western tutor. But with the increase in subjects and the demand for a basic education working population, the so-called K-12 (that is, our ordinary primary and secondary schools in Asia) education system emerged.
The standard education model of modern countries is several basic elements that we already think are natural:
Walk into the teaching building at seven or eight o'clock in the morning;
sat and listened to the class throughout the 40-60-minute course. In the classroom, the teacher is responsible for speaking and the students are responsible for listening;
interspersed between the courses include lunch and physical education class time;
After school, students go home to do their homework.
Under the confinement of standardized courses, the originally vast and beautiful field of human thought has been artificially cut into pieces, easy-to-management parts, and is called "discipline". Similarly, the original concepts of smooth flow, integration and integration are divided into separate "course units". The
model was first implemented by the Prussians in the 18th century. They were the first to invent our current classroom teaching model. The original intention of the Prussians was not to educate students who could think independently, but to concoct a large number of loyal and easy-to-manage citizens. The values they learned in school made them obey the authority of their parents, teachers and churches, and of course, they must ultimately obey the king.
Of course, the Prussian education system was of innovative significance in many aspects at that time. Such an education system has made tens of thousands of people a middle class and provided a crucial impetus for Germany to become an industrial power. Based on the technical level at that time, the most economical way to achieve the goal of everyone receiving education in the Kingdom of Prussia may be to adopt the Prussian education system.
However, the system of prevents students from exploring more deeply and is harmful to their ability to think independently. However, in the 19th century, a high level of creativity, logical thinking ability may not be as important as obeying command in thought and mastering basic skills in action.
In the first half of the 19th century, the United States basically copied the Prussian education system. Just like in Prussia, this move was able to vigorously promote the construction of the middle class and enable them to get a job in the booming industrial field. In addition to the United States, this system was also imitated by other European countries in the 19th century and was promoted to other countries outside Europe and the United States.
However, the current economic situation of no longer requires the obedient and disciplined working class. On the contrary, it has increasingly demanded on workers' reading ability, mathematical literacy and humanistic background.
What society today needs is lifelong learners who are creative, curious and self-guided, who need to be able to come up with novel ideas and put them into practice. Unfortunately, the goals of the Prussian education system are exactly the opposite of this social need. Today’s education completely ignores the extraordinary wonderful diversity and nuances between people, and it is these diversity and nuances that make people different in terms of intelligence, imagination and talent.
3. In addition to the Prussian gene, East Asian education is also deeply influenced by the Confucian tradition and the imperial examination system
When the three East Asian countries began to introduce this modern education system in order to catch up with the Western powers at the end of the 19th century, they inevitably made subconscious distortions and emphasis on this system due to their own Confucian tradition and the imperial examination system.
1. Confusion between university entrance examinations and the imperial examination system
East Asian countries always mix with their long-term imperial examination traditions. Ancient society did not have such a great demand for creativity, so the imperial examination was a good system. The selection of social managers was completed with the smallest conflict and the establishment of a criterion for replacing the clan with intelligence.
If you want to simulate the imperial examination, the current counterpart should be the civil service examination or the entry examination for some large companies. Because these exams, like the imperial examinations, require selecting well-trained adults and can immediately engage in certain jobs.
The goal of the university entrance examination is to select strong plasticity and aspiring people for the next step of education. Such people should be like the liquid glass taken out of the furnace, which can be rotated and lengthened, and has extremely strong plasticity.The person who obtained the imperial examination should be like a kiln-out-cut porcelain with glazed color, which can be used immediately, but if you make any changes, they will either break or scratch.
In addition, the exam is a very limited tool. The ancient imperial examinations were well known to everyone. No matter which kind of examination in modern times, what are the interests, ambitions, imagination and practical operation abilities of candidates? even the most objective and measurable math test will lose a lot.
Khan Academy founder Salman Khan cited algebra as an example. When studying algebra, most students focus on getting high scores in the exam, and the content of the exam is only the most important part of the learning in each unit. The candidates only remember a lot of X and y, and just substitute X and y into rote formulas to get their values. X and y in the exam cannot reflect the power of algebra and its importance. The importance and charm of algebra is that all these X and y represent infinite phenomena and perspectives.
The equation used by calculating the production costs of listed companies can also be used to calculate the momentum of an object in space; the same equation can not only be used to calculate the optimal path of the object line, but also determine the most suitable price for the new product.
The method of calculating the prevalence of genetic diseases can also be used in rugby games to determine whether an attack should be launched in the fourth quarter. In the exam, most students do not regard algebra as a simple, convenient and versatile tool when exploring the world, but instead regard it as an obstacle to overcome.
So, although exams are very important, society must be able to recognize the great limitations of exams and weaken its position in the selection of materials.
The US education system uses double insurance to curb students' excessive waste of energy on exams: First, the score of SAT is only one of the factors considered for admission, and it is unwise to pay too much attention to SAT; second, SAT has 6 opportunities to apply for the exam every year.
Taiwan and China's education systems have doubled their efforts to encourage students to waste their youth: First, the joint examination score is the decisive factor for admission; second, the joint examination is once a year.
2. East Asian countries attach too much importance to review
The "Comparative Research Report on the Rights and Interests of High School Students in China, Japan, South Korea and the United States" released in 2009 shows that 78.3% of Chinese ordinary high school students study at school more than 8 hours a day (excluding weekends and holidays), while South Korea is 57.2%, while Japan and the United States almost do not have such a situation. Chinese students study for the longest time every day. The amount of content learned by students from different countries will not be too different. So what does it mean if the study time is too long? It means that the proportion of review time accounts for too much. This is the biggest means to kill students' imagination and creativity.
Speaking of the importance of review, people often quote "learning and practicing it from time to time", and this "practice" is review. However, there is a huge difference between the era of Confucius and today's society and it is the content of learning. The main learning content in Confucius' era was "ritual", and the actors could achieve the effect only after repeated practice.
However, human social life has evolved to modern times, and the main content of learning has changed from "ritual" to cognition. Cognition is expanded and changed, and its essence is to create or learn something new. If education is overly intensively reviewed, innovative talents will not be produced.
And, as Paul Glaxo said, "even the knowledge learned in the best high school is insignificant compared to colleges." Taking liberal arts as an example, how do the knowledge in the history textbooks that need to be read repeatedly in high schools compared to any number of must-read books in the history department of universities? As for mathematics, even middle school mathematics is well mastered, and calculus that appeared before learning the seventeenth century.
What's more, with the explosion of knowledge, all mathematical knowledge in 1900 could be stuffed into 1,000 books, and by 2000, 100,000 books were needed (Devlin's "Mathematics Still Chat"). It can be seen that it is such an inefficient way to study such limited knowledge after spending the most energetic years in a person's life.
There has been a popular 10,000-hour theory in recent years, which seems to be a theoretical support for repeated practice.However, this kind of discussion is mostly in activities with lower cognitive complexity, such as chess, piano, basketball, taxi driving, and spelling. However, it is difficult to find sufficient evidence for activities with higher cognitive complexity, such as creation and management. In fact, this point can be used to illustrate why the training of piano and violin skills has declined in the West, but has flourished in East Asian countries.
, a skill that has been a master of the 19th century, is characterized by a relatively fixed level of difficulty training and a limited amount of knowledge. It only requires more practice, and the progress of learning can be measured by the difficulty of the repertoire or the grading exam. This is exactly in line with East Asia's preferred learning method.
Therefore, most of these piano children's parents in East Asian countries have neither a music hobby nor aware of classical music background knowledge, but they have spent a lot of time practicing. Their internal starting point is just like the fool in the famous joke who only looks for keys under the street lights because the street lights are brighter.
3. The influence of egalitarianism and lack of mentality
Many of the defenses of joint examinations are all said that although the joint examination is not satisfactory, it is the fairest. This is the influence of Confucianism's traditional idea of "not worrying about lack of fear but not equality". There is nothing wrong with fairness, but it would be sad if it suppresses different types of talent development paths for fairness in order to achieve fairness. With such a large population base in East Asian countries, the opportunity cost of this kind of talent wasted is difficult to estimate.
Give an example from other countries. There is a comparison in the European academic circles. For example, the United Kingdom and Germany are both considered top academic countries in classical academics, but the UK has a lot of outstanding talents in this area. The reason is that the UK's education system is not fair enough. There are some middle schools in the UK that have a very high possibility of going to a good university due to traditional reasons, so that the students in it can immerse themselves in the huge classical academics very early.
On the other hand, Germany is fairer, and all students must pass the assessment when going to college. In this way, students will have to spend more energy on general exam preparation subjects. As a result, such superficial injustice in the UK may instead create high-quality talents.
This is like the commercial example given in Peter Tyre's "From 0 to 1". On the surface, seems to be fair in total competition. In fact, the profits of companies participating in such competition will become as thin as a knife. They are in danger of being safe. They can only care about their immediate interests and cannot make long-term plans for the future.
, and monopoly companies like Google , because they don’t have to worry about competing with other companies, they can instead care about their products and make various plans that are simply unreliable in the long run. Therefore, if students are under the competitive pressure of exams for a long time, they will naturally not be able to have long-term self-growth plans, but can only focus on exams that will determine the path of their lives.
On the other hand, the East Asian countries’ learning position war and battle from kindergarten to university are essentially a battle for limited high-quality educational resources, which is not without certain reasons. But why is the competition in this area so hot? That may be attributed to the scarcity mentality caused by long-term material scarcity.
Last year's popular "Economics of Scarce: Why are you always rushing to Deadline? Why do you always feel that time and money are not enough?" pointed out that when people fall into a state of scarcity (matter or time), scarcity will capture the brain. The capture of human attention will not only affect the speed of what we see, but also affect our understanding of the world around us. And when we are extremely focused on solving the current problems, we cannot effectively plan the future.
I think scarcity is a unique situation for the East Asian nation. Because these countries have been rice-intensive cultivation economies for thousands of years. On the one hand, they can feed more people under the same arable land, and on the other hand, they naturally need to pay more labor and endure greater crowding. After the seventeenth century, they all fell into the trap of involuntization.
Take Japan as an example. From the 15th to the 19th century, Japan's population fluctuated between 10 million and 20 million, about four times that of the UK's population during the same period.The land that the huge population relies on for survival is only equivalent to one county in England, but its productivity is not as good as that of one county in England. Therefore, in the Tokugawa period, in order to maintain survival, the Japanese not only took their hard work and saving to the extreme, but even had two incredible phenomena.
One is the Japanese government came forward to encourage drowning of infants, which has led to zero population growth in 300 years. In addition, because precious land cannot be used to provide feed to livestock, the Japanese systematically canceled the two basic agricultural technologies of wheels and livestock use. As a result, a vivid metaphor is that they keep their noses above water, and they may drown if an accidental disaster or accidental expenditure occurs. This lack and anxiety mentality unique to the East Asian nation cannot be understood by indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, Europeans and Americans, or even Africans.
So if educational resources are narrowly understood as well-equipped classrooms, high-level teachers, etc., it is indeed limited. For East Asians who have been in a scarce psychological state for a long time, they must participate in the competition.
However, in fact, for children to become talents, the more important educational resources are actually the teaching by words and deeds of their respective families, ambitions and vision. It has nothing to do with the zero-sum game like "if you go to this school, I can't go to this school."
Moreover, if parents are driven by a scarcity mentality, let their children immerse themselves in cram school and questions from an early age, hoping to grab the school resources that seem scarce in front of them first, perhaps in the long run, they will waste their children's greatest resources - youth time with infinite possibilities and natural curiosity , that is, the appropriateness of love is enough to harm it.
4. The mentality brought by industrialization catching up
affects the origin of modern industrialization in Western Europe, so they have a relatively gentle period of natural evolution and development, both in the economy and society and the education system. East Asian countries were entangled into modern society. In order to catch up with other countries, they adopted planned development at the national level without exception in the industrial system. Japan's industrialization is attributed to the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, while South Korea's government supports several chaebols to cooperate with the entire development plan, while China still has a five-year plan to guide it.
This national plan is based on rationalism in the 19th century. Its idea is that there is no problem in the world that cannot be solved, so it can predict the accurate development direction of things in the future through scientific investigation.
This idea is applied to the education system, which is to assume that a certain institution can accurately predict what kind of knowledge a child of a certain age needs to master, what kind of talents can be selected for a certain exam, etc. This confidence is extremely terrifying.
. In terms of the specific operations of schools and learning, the East Asian education system specially established to adapt to the needs of industrialized talents is more crazy about efficiency than the Western system with natural development. In this way, the education system of these backward industrial countries is more like the factory assembly line than the predecessor industrial countries.
In the early twentieth century, Taylorism made (Taylorism) was popular in the American industry. Taylor believes that the fundamental purpose of management is to improve efficiency. To this end, he adopted the "spiritual revolution" that sets work quotas, selects the best workers, implements standardized management, implements a stimulating payment system, and emphasizes the cooperation between employers and workers.
This brings the potential of workers to an unrivalled level. Some people described that in the factory that implements the Taylor system, there is no extra worker, and each worker works like a machine and keeps working. The premise of Taylor's theory is to regard the "people" as management objects as "economic people", and interest-driven is the main magic weapon used by this school to improve efficiency. The most famous Taylor factory in modern times is Foxconn. From the reports, you can also guess the impact of this high-pressure environment on workers' psychology.
If we compare the East Asian education system with the Taylor factory, we will find that there is almost a one-to-one correspondence, setting a very high amount of learning and a large number of knowledge points that need to be assessed, selecting students with good grades to form key schools, unified national assessment standards, stimulating rewards and punishments formed by a large number of examinations, and various internal activities of the school. The school’s goal is to realize the potential of students and strive to achieve the best results every minute.
So people who criticize this education system often say that children seem to be industrial products that flow online, or that students are the teachers' child laborers, and their grades become the teachers' performance, so the interests of teachers and students are often not consistent, but the opposite. This is not a simple word of anger, but has a certain internal logic.
Of course, because of the hard work tradition of East Asian countries, children work so hard, if it is indeed effective, it is not unacceptable. But the problem lies in this effectiveness.
This educational Taylor system essentially treats students as physical workers. For manual workers, because their working status is visible, factory management is easier, and the requirement for them is to "do things right" rather than "do the right thing".
. As for modern students, I think it is more like the "knowledge workers" defined by Drucker (knowledge workers do not produce tangible things, but produce knowledge, creativity and information, and no one can see what they are thinking), and in terms of training purposes, most of them must become knowledge workers. The real result of the student days is not the homework and test papers they handed in, but the content they really learned and thought about. These are technically impossible to conduct strict supervision.
So should be a good student, not to complete the teacher's homework faithfully like a manual laborer, but to be effective like a knowledge worker, that is, to "do what you should do well". Good students must do it: decide on their own focus on learning, measure their mastery of knowledge, and manage their study time. This requires great initiative and freedom.
So, tragically, due to the industrial age genes of the East Asian education system, they use the practice of training manual workers to cultivate future scholars and entrepreneurs in their minds, which is bound to go in the opposite direction.
4. East Asian education urgently needs reform, but it is becoming increasingly rigid
East Asian education system has long had more benefits than disadvantages. During the industrialization period, a large number of useful workers and junior engineers can be created for the newly established industry in the short term. Therefore, the rapid development of East Asian countries in the 20th century has made great contributions to this education system. But as technology and economy evolve, this system becomes increasingly out of place.
This point can be simulated as heavy industry in the Soviet era. Under this system, the coal mining industry is for steel smelting, and steel smelting is for the machinery industry, and the machinery industry is committed to producing mining and smelting machines, which forms an internal self-circulation and ignores the actual needs of the market and competition. This heavy industry did produce a large number of industrial products that were originally missing during the industrialization period of the Soviet Union, which was very useful. However, at a certain stage of development, its weaknesses in lack of efficiency and international competitiveness are exposed. To this day, what value does the Soviet Union, the second industrial power, have its automobile industry and machinery industry? Similarly, the large number of standardized talents that the East Asian education system once cultivated in batches will become less and less valuable in the new era? What's more, in order to break away from this system, many East Asian families sent their children to study in Europe and the United States, but unless they stay abroad, if they return to China to find employment, the returnees still have to use the various schools they graduated as job hunting weight, which is falling into the whirlpool of relatively high school reputation. It is like in the Middle Ages that many low-level castes in India converted to foreign Islam in order to get rid of the oppression of the caste system. However, under the ubiquitous caste thinking, Muslims were also regarded as a caste and were also trapped in this hierarchy.Therefore, the American examination systems such as TOEFL and SAT are also invisibly integrated into the oriental-style examination-oriented and academic-oriented systems in East Asia.
This system is difficult to shake because it has created multiple vested interest classes. It will even be like the Soviet heavy industrial complex or Indian caste system mentioned above, "it will not stop until death." During the Soviet period, heavy industry continued to manufacture weapons that were not beneficial to society, forming a stakeholder force, wasting a large amount of social resources until the entire national system collapsed. The Indian caste system has been criticized since the time of Buddha, but has been a disaster for thousands of years. Until today, it is still a huge obstacle to India's path forward, because there are a large number of vested interests of high castes behind it.
The education system in East Asia, on the one hand, feeds a huge inefficient and outdated public and private education institutions (this point is similar to the Soviet industrial group). On the other hand, by paying attention to education, most of the middle and high-level social classes are the ones who are most suitable for this system. By spending more on exam-oriented education, this class ensures that their next generation can stand out in this examination system, thus passing on their social advantages to the next generation (this is a bit like the caste system).
, a system that urgently needs reform, has become increasingly stiff under the joint efforts of various social groups.
