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I think there are good aspects to Asian schools that we could bring in, though perhaps not to the extreme that those schools go to.
I think first of all, as a culture, we must start taking academic achievement much more seriously. America doesn’t take education seriously, and instead tends to be rather casual about tge project. And the result is that almost half of all American adults cannot read on an eighth grade level. Mathematics and science fair no better. Because of this, we’re generally stuck when it comes to innovative ideas and deep thinking in philosophy or the arts. If we took school and education as seriously as we take sports, with high achievement being celebrated and rewarded.
But the other thing that makes it work is the tracking. Not every kid who graduates goes to tge same “university to office job” track. If you haven’t earned the grades and done the work, you will go to lower colleges, trade schools, or vocational programs. This not only reduces the competition for entry level positions for college graduates, but ensures that every group ends up with a skil they can use to support themselves.
Most of the actual problems come from taking the system to extremes. Over competing in sports leads to 13 year old kids needing Tommy John’s surgery. To much competition in academics makes people miserable. Neither is an indictment of those activities or those who take them seriously. If rules are put in place to keep the competition sane, competition is generally good for people and drives them to do better. The alternative is underachieving with all the problems that come from that.
‘Half of Americans can’t read on an eighth grade level’ is one of those statistics which sounds bad, but using the same definition how does it compare to other countries with ‘deep’ orthographies such as Australia, France, etc.
English is legitimately harder to read than Finnish, Spanish, and in fact most of the rest of the world’s languages. Add to that that the American education system just absolutely loves terrible teaching methods. An oriental grindset probably isn’t the solution compared to phonics and maybe spelling reform.
‘But the US has lower reading scores than Italy’ is just not a fair comparison. I would guess that, keeping the standard constant, the USA teaches reading about as well as Australia and France and only slightly worse than China and Japan. I could be wrong. But ‘making everyone so miserable that we have a .7 TFR’ isn’t the solution.
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The US is anything but stuck when it comes to innovative ideas. And no, they're not ALL from immigrants (and some of the immigrants were educated here). As for deep thinking in philosophy, if that means we have neither Foucault nor Derrida.... uh, good? The arts (assuming you mean non-commercial) everywhere in the First World seem to have disappeared into either pure self-referential naval-gazing or been eaten by lefty activism.
We definitely don't need more Asian-style schooling. We don't need to break intelligent kids and turn mediocre kids into grinds.
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Most of this doesn't sound right.
I'm not completely sure what this is supposed to mean. PMC Americans and aspirants take it very seriously. Others take it pretty seriously, but from what I've heard there are a lot more PhD graduates or MA graduates than positions that really need that level of education. The government takes it seriously and pours enormous amounts of money into the project. Teachers generally take it pretty seriously, roughly proportional to how much they can get their students to do. Perhaps lower class blacks and hispanics and trailer type whites don't take it seriously enough. America and the various states keeps trying to push at these groups, inspire them, prod them into loving books and whatnot, but it mostly doesn't take. There have been a lot of educational reform movements. It is perhaps not very effective in terms of value for money.
What would greater seriousness look like? Perhaps more removal of disruptive children from classrooms? That is, of course, very political.
It is. People are very happy when their kids do well in school. They get awards, congratulations, eventually scholarships. Lots of kids are not involved in sports.
That is a description of current reality.
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