Why Are Asian Youths More Academically Advanced?

[jhungary]

A very balanced view on educational system between the West and Asia

 

[fitpOsitive]

No childhood, study study, and more study. And we die soon too.

 

[jhungary]

No childhood, study study, and more study. And we die soon too.

Tell me about it. I did Middle School in Hong Kong, and High School in both China and Hong Kong.

If you watch it til the end, when they interview the Wales head teacher in South Korea, he said right about one thing. The Asian education is about learning, the western, or Wales's system as he put it, is about deep thinking.

There are subject that depends on learning, and there are subject depends upon on deep thinking, and the right approach is to strike a balance on both.

 

[retaxis]

The world is ever becoming a globalised world.

What is best for a child is becoming what makes them most competitive in the future. Sure white kids can do no homework and play video games all day like a fun childhood but don't complain when Indians/Chinese etc get all the good paying/condition jobs in the future because they sacrificed and work hard since an early age. Plus early age hard work and sacrifice teaches a human being to have greater self control and coping skills throughout life. Asians able to be better financially off, lesser drug abusers, lesser criminals, lesser criminals on average compared to other races is mostly because they learn at a young age ingrained into their psyche how to sacrifice and wait.

 

[beijingwalker]

You can't convince your teachers by saying that you spent more time on "deep thinking" if you get a bad score in China.

 

[jhungary]

The world is ever becoming a globalised world.

What is best for a child is becoming what makes them most competitive in the future. Sure white kids can do no homework and play video games all day like a fun childhood but don't complain when Indians/Chinese etc get all the good paying/condition jobs in the future because they sacrificed and work hard since an early age. Plus early age hard work and sacrifice teaches a human being to have greater self control and coping skills throughout life. Asians able to be better financially off, lesser drug abusers, lesser criminals, lesser criminals on average compared to other races is mostly because they learn at a young age ingrained into their psyche how to sacrifice and wait.

I am wondering how much you earn a year here in Australia. I have 2 master's degree, 1 from ANU, and 1 from International School of Management, 2 bachelor's degree, 1 from CU Boulder and one from the prestigious University of New South Wales. I earn 84k before tax my last job, let me tell you something, that's the same amount of a Unionised Traffic Controller (those people who stood by the side of the road holding a stop sign) earn. Uinon rep earn $40/hr (40 hours a week, means $1600 a week, 52 week means $83200 a year), non-Union earn $34/hr,

Well, the question is not whether someone do homework or play video games. The issue here is whether or not actual education is that important? I mean look at that program, the student in Seoul study their arse off to try to get into an university that wasn't even top 50 world wide, and once they were there, they lost the idea and direction. On the other hand, most Western University uses an more open approach on student life vs academic achievement, people know why and what they get in their university for, instead going in blind and hope you can find a job in the market like many Asian student do.

When I was in Hong Kong studying HKALE, People don't really know why or what that is for, the only thing they care is to get 2 C and 3 D so they can get a university place thru JUPAS. For what? 10 hours school a day and 3 hours private tuition, and come out earning $5000 HKD a month.

Study is good, so did education, but when you over do it like a zombie. That's is when things go wrong. Like the student in the video said, you have Asian student that are high achiever and do good in exam, but then so did the people in Wales. And what you don't know is if you don't know the life outside studying or extra cirrcular option, the Korean can smash their exam, and if they smash their own, they will win, because University is not just for studying.

 

[retaxis]

A

I am wondering how much you earn a year here in Australia. I have 2 master's degree, 1 from ANU, and 1 from International School of Management, 2 bachelor's degree, 1 from CU Boulder and one from the prestigious University of New South Wales. I earn 84k before tax my last job, let me tell you something, that's the same amount of a Unionised Traffic Controller (those people who stood by the side of the road holding a stop sign) earn. Uinon rep earn $40/hr (40 hours a week, means $1600 a week, 52 week means $83200 a year), non-Union earn $34/hr,

Well, the question is not whether someone do homework or play video games. The issue here is whether or not actual education is that important? I mean look at that program, the student in Seoul study their arse off to try to get into an university that wasn't even top 50 world wide, and once they were there, they lost the idea and direction. On the other hand, most Western University uses an more open approach on student life vs academic achievement, people know why and what they get in their university for, instead going in blind and hope you can find a job in the market like many Asian student do.

When I was in Hong Kong studying HKALE, People don't really know why or what that is for, the only thing they care is to get 2 C and 3 D so they can get a university place thru JUPAS. For what? 10 hours school a day and 3 hours private tuition, and come out earning $5000 HKD a month.

Study is good, so did education, but when you over do it like a zombie. That's is when things go wrong. Like the student in the video said, you have Asian student that are high achiever and do good in exam, but then so did the people in Wales. And what you don't know is if you don't know the life outside studying or extra cirrcular option, the Korean can smash their exam, and if they smash their own, they will win, because University is not just for studying.

I am wondering how much you earn a year here in Australia. I have 2 master's degree, 1 from ANU, and 1 from International School of Management, 2 bachelor's degree, 1 from CU Boulder and one from the prestigious University of New South Wales. I earn 84k before tax my last job, let me tell you something, that's the same amount of a Unionised Traffic Controller (those people who stood by the side of the road holding a stop sign) earn. Uinon rep earn $40/hr (40 hours a week, means $1600 a week, 52 week means $83200 a year), non-Union earn $34/hr,

Well, the question is not whether someone do homework or play video games. The issue here is whether or not actual education is that important? I mean look at that program, the student in Seoul study their arse off to try to get into an university that wasn't even top 50 world wide, and once they were there, they lost the idea and direction. On the other hand, most Western University uses an more open approach on student life vs academic achievement, people know why and what they get in their university for, instead going in blind and hope you can find a job in the market like many Asian student do.

When I was in Hong Kong studying HKALE, People don't really know why or what that is for, the only thing they care is to get 2 C and 3 D so they can get a university place thru JUPAS. For what? 10 hours school a day and 3 hours private tuition, and come out earning $5000 HKD a month.

Study is good, so did education, but when you over do it like a zombie. That's is when things go wrong. Like the student in the video said, you have Asian student that are high achiever and do good in exam, but then so did the people in Wales. And what you don't know is if you don't know the life outside studying or extra cirrcular option, the Korean can smash their exam, and if they smash their own, they will win, because University is not just for studying.

Asian people study the system and beat the system by studying hard. They of course miss out on other things but they are focused on winning the system and the big picture. In a globalised world, your not just competing with each other but also with people overseas as well which is why its more important than ever to get started early.

Whereas how much people earn is directly affected by socieoeconomic status. My parents divorced when i was very young and we were very poor for most of my childhood. I ended up doing masters and have been working in occupational therapy for last 15 yrs and only make 110k a year. Ndis pays more but i like the company i work for

Also another benefit is salary packaging because its non profit but no i didnt go to private schools or have tutoring or any money growing up with divorced poor parents so i did good enough for my circumstances.

 

[jhungary]

A



Asian people study the system and beat the system by studying hard. They of course miss out on other things but they are focused on winning the system and the big picture. In a globalised world, your not just competing with each other but also with people overseas as well which is why its more important than ever to get started early.

Whereas how much people earn is directly affected by socieoeconomic status. My parents divorced when i was very young and we were very poor for most of my childhood. I ended up doing masters and have been working in occupational therapy for last 15 yrs and only make 110k a year. Ndis pays more but i like the company i work for

Also another benefit is salary packaging because its non profit but no i didnt go to private schools or have tutoring or any money growing up with divorced poor parents so i did good enough for my circumstances.

Problem is, not all local job competed around the world, and not all the people can reach that high bar. That is the issue here. Case in point, that traffic controller job would mostly be secure from "globalisation" and it isn't that bad either, I mean 84K base pay, probably earn more than yours if they do overtime.

Most college in the West don't just need good grades, you also need a certain social achievement, and those colleges tends to be of higher standing than those just require good grade. And you are talking about that 1% of all the graduates going after that 1% cushy job. That's where the problem is, because the world is more than just being a CEO of big IT company or big Pharma, that can only be one on every one of those job. Otherwise, you are taking into social engineering, and stuff like that, or even jobs that do not even need a degree that wouldn't be much of an issue here.

As for socioeconomical status, while those are related but usually independent. I mean as a cop, I saw enough people who come from broken family succeed, running for mayor or having a white-collar job working for some company, but equally, if not more, a lot of those people ended up being arrested. It really depends on individual thinking, some endure hardship would think they would work harder to solve that problem, some, if not most, will just say "the world owes me" and give up, and that is true whether it come from the West or China.

 

[Mista]

There are subject that depends on learning, and there are subject depends upon on deep thinking, and the right approach is to strike a balance on both.

Agreed. I think what is more important for schools is to imbue a culture of inquisitiveness and life-long learning to better adapt to a rapidly changing world. The world is changing rapidly, and whatever you learn in school may not be relevant for the rest of your working life. With the internet, information much richer than your textbooks are available at one's fingertips.

The calculator made manual arithmetic skills obsolete. Who knows? Maybe in the future ChatGPT or some other AI will act as a 'calculator' and make calculus skills obsolete. You just have to understand the logic behind it.

 

[jhungary]

Agreed. I think what is more important for schools is to imbue a culture of inquisitiveness and life-long learning to better adapt to a rapidly changing world. The world is changing rapidly, and whatever you learn in school may not be relevant for the rest of your working life. With the internet, information much richer than your textbooks are available at one's fingertips.

The calculator made manual arithmetic skills obsolete. Who knows? Maybe in the future ChatGPT or some other AI will act as a 'calculator' and make calculus skills obsolete. You just have to understand the logic behind it.

The highlighted part of your word is the key.

Especially it was widely considered Singaporean Education system are the best in Asia (Hong Kong is second best in Asia) the point as I already mentioned, pupil in Hong Kong (not sure about your country, but hearing the same thing to a lot of my classmate came from Singapore) mostly set their aim at the big test, called Hong Kong Advanced Level Examination or HKALE, their goal is simple, get at least 2 C and 3 D grade so they can get to a uni spot in Hong Kong (There were only 7 when I was studying in Hong Kong) There are no life aim, no life goal no nothing other than that. and most likely once they reach that point, they will start question why they were there, that same question was supposed to answer BEFORE that exam.

Not sure if you have the same Chinese Phase in Singapore, in Hong Kong, the phase is "死讀書 讀書死" which mean when you only care about studying you will study til you die" (I think you know what that mean even if they weren't use in Singapore, the translation is for non-Chinese speaker) That is so true, and with advance science coming in, the point of memorise everything is basically a thing in the past, I mean why would I not just go google when I need to, the critical thinking skill is always more important than dead weight knowledge

 

[KediKesenFare3]

I live in Germany and I went through the German education system.

So, I'm not just a random idiot on the internet with no insights or knowledge when I explain that the Northern European education systems are much, much more effective than ANY Asian setup.

It's a myth that Eastern Asian pupils are academically more successful than their North European counterparts.

It's simply and factually wrong. The European data is skewed by many children of first-gen-immigrants who are usually underachieving in comparison to the children of the native population.

If you look at the data of ethnic German children only, you'll easily recognise that this particular group is as academically successful as Eastern Asian children. In fact, they don't even invest half the time, energy and money as their Asian rivals, yet, they easily show similar advances.

Also, please, do NOT mix up the continental Western European education programs and the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American systems. There's not ONE universal Western model of education.

 

[Mista]

Especially it was widely considered Singaporean Education system are the best in Asia (Hong Kong is second best in Asia) the point as I already mentioned, pupil in Hong Kong (not sure about your country, but hearing the same thing to a lot of my classmate came from Singapore) mostly set their aim at the big test

Well, the government for many years has been de-emphasising the over-importance on grades. I think we are slowly shifting away but it takes time to have a fundamental change in mindset and societal expectations. It's not just about changing the education system and our culture will shift.

Conversation with the Education ministers:

Helping Singapore's students to learn for life

To help Singapore’s students meet the challenges of an uncertain, fluid future, the school system here must help them embrace the attitude and skill of learning for life, said Education Minister Ong Ye Kung. This is fundamental in ensuring that education remains an uplifting force in society, he...

www.todayonline.com

...
We know that students derive more joy in learning, when they move away from memorisation, rote learning, drilling and taking high stakes exams. Very few students enjoy that.

It is not to say that these are undesirable in learning; quite the contrary, they help form the building blocks for more advanced concepts and learning, and can inculcate discipline and resilience, and get students used to doing difficult and overcome those difficulties.

But there needs to be a balance between rigour and joy, and there is a fairly strong consensus that we have tilted too much to the former.
Our students clearly do well and the outcomes are reflected in our leading PISA scores over the years.

So look at this chart.

The red diamonds show the 2015 PISA scores for Science. Singapore is the biggest red diamond. We scored the highest amongst OECD countries. Well done to all our Principals and educators!

However, if we normalise the scores by hours of study, we get the blue diamonds. So these are scores but divided by hours of study and Singapore is actually below the OECD average if we normalise the scores, behind countries like Finland, Germany, France, UK and Japan.

OECD data also shows that there is actually a negative relationship between academic outcomes and the total time spent on learning.

So in this chart (above), the vertical axis is PISA Science score, horizontal axis is total learning hours per week. Strangely enough it’s actually a downward trend. So the more you study, up to about 44 hours. Results are more or less the same, but going beyond that you start to see a drop.

For the country that studies up to 60 hours per week, the results became quite bad. They fell below the average.

Fortunately, if you look at the red dot which is Singapore, we are an outlier – our students study more than their peers in many other countries but we score exceptionally well, which is the Singapore DNA.

I think there is a fairly strong case that we can cut back on unnecessary inflation of effort yet achieve equal or better outcomes.

Our students will benefit when some of their time and energy devoted to drilling and preparing for examinations is instead allocated to preparing them for what matters to their future.

In doing so, we have a few considerations.

First, there is little room for further cut in curriculum. We have already done two significant rounds of reduction, in 1998 and then in 2005, and today our curriculum coverage at all levels are comparable to other education systems around the world.

Further reduction will risk under-teaching. What we should focus on is to curb effort inflation and review our assessment load and tuition load – both of which add to the repetitive and unnecessary effort of studying the same, or even less material, for the sake of scoring well in examinations.

Second, whatever time we may free up for the students, we must avoid the tendency to fill it up with extra practice and drill. Instead, treat this as curriculum time that we return to the schools, return to the principals and teachers, for better teaching and learning.

Finally, we must be careful not to overdo the correction, and inadvertently undermine the rigour in our system.

Japan offers us a very useful experience that we can learn from. In the 1990s, they implemented in their school system an initiative called Yutori. For those who know Japanese, Yutori means ‘relax’.

The objective was to reduce rote learning and memory work, and redirect students to learning creativity and soft skills. But the move backfired – as PISA scores of Japanese students deteriorated, parents’ anxieties went up, and students start to worry that they can’t do well in the university entrance examinations.

Hence the Yutori policy had to be unwound, and five years later, the Government had to increase the curriculum content back and teaching hours back again.

While well-intentioned, Yutori’s objective was ahead of its time, and its implementation, not helped by a rather inappropriate name, was perceived as too drastic a move.

We can learn from Japan’s experience. It is an instructive example, demonstrating the challenge we might face as we re-calibrate the balance between joy and rigour within our system.

...

 

[BHAN85]

Tell me about it. I did Middle School in Hong Kong, and High School in both China and Hong Kong.

If you watch it til the end, when they interview the Wales head teacher in South Korea, he said right about one thing. The Asian education is about learning, the western, or Wales's system as he put it, is about deep thinking.

There are subject that depends on learning, and there are subject depends upon on deep thinking, and the right approach is to strike a balance on both.

Spanish until high school is about have fun in classroom .

Things only get a little bit serious in university, in some degrees like engineering, and even in another is about have fun too and get drunk.