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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

If you look more closely at the eastern model you find they cover a lot of completely useless material. Which is the core issue we could have people say memorize the first 4 digits of the square and cube roots of every number from 1 to 100. And yes it's more useful than you might think. However, not enough that students are going to remember it in 15 years.

Quick, what year did the french revolution start and end?

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Basically. I remember talking to a younger cousin in China, and he asked if I ever had to recite texts in language class. As in, memorize a passage verbatim and regurgitate it on the exam.

I said "No, what would even be the point of that? You'll just forget it afterwards."

Then I asked him if they ever discussed the meaning of the text in class. He said they did not.

The East Asian system gets a few things right. We definitely could give students more challenging material (especially in math and science), but the focus on rote learning and endless drudgery (they get soooo much homework) is not something I'm too keen on being introduced here.

I wouldn't say that about a comparison between math problems in textbooks in China and math problems in textbooks in the United States. (I have math textbooks in English, and math textbooks in Chinese, a language that I read well as a second language.) The focus on deep conceptual understanding and open-ended problem-solving in math is actually much better in east Asia than in the United States.

http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf

(I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history. Critical thinking about history is bad for dictators. Taiwan thoroughly revised the history textbooks after it had its peaceful transition to democracy.)

> I can well believe, however, that any current with a current one-party dictatorial government, something Taiwan had the first time I lived there and something China still has today, will lag in teaching history.

Multiparty liberal democracies allow much more scope for debating and interpreting history, but they still commonly encourage a teleological interpretation that glorifies the nation and its current political system.

I also get the feeling that understanding history in a meaningful way is hard, and that educational systems generally aren't making much headway against this problem, maybe somewhat independently of how much debate or criticism they permit. One difficulty is the conscious and semiconscious propagandization of many historical issues by many parties, together with the desire to see historical figures or groups we identify with in a positive light and those we don't identify with in a negative light. Another thing is the truth of the "past is a foreign country" observation:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._P._Hartley

Getting inside of the minds and cultures of people from the past is really difficult!

I remember a lot of US centric hate in my public US education. "Trail of tears" is not exactly nationalistic propaganda. Handing out diseased blankets to conduct large scale germ warfare. Only nation to use nuclear weapons, conducting disease experiments on prisoners. Corruption, racism, etc etc.

I could go on, but I don't think most people got US #1 outside of being an economic powerhouse.

Well, i think US people are the only one to chant USA on a slightest chance and more...

Maybe people from elsewhere would instead chant the names of their own countries? ;-)

Part of this is how well U, S, A works as a chant. People don't say Canada, Canada, Canada, or America, America, America.

I had a lot of friends during college who went to school in China. And I had a lot of Chinese CS/Math professors who would often say things like "We teach this to 12 year olds in China".

My Chinese friends would laugh when i asked them if that was true. They said that sure they covered it, but they just memorized algorithms, and no one really understood the concepts.

I don't think that looking at math textbooks is going to tell you all that much about the way math is actually taught. You're not going to see any of the official and unofficial performance incentives that can alter the way material is taught.

...the French revolution? Didn't they have two big ones, launching the 1st and 2nd republics?

I want to say the 1790s and the 1850s. But I can't get more precise than that. In my mind, they're sort of just after the American Revolution and just before the USA-CSA Civil War. And then there was the little failed rebellion in between that was in Les Miserables.

There was also a bunch of Napoleon in there, somewhere. But knowing any of that has had no use for me, other than keeping the plot straight in novels set in that era.

1789, arguably fall of Napoleon in 1805.

Sorry, I have a compulsion to answer questions that start with "Quick"

Edit: Wikipedia says 1789 to 1799. I was close on the dates but wrong about Napoleon (whom ultimately lost in 1814).

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