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Comment by yzard | Hacker News Reader

As a Chinese, Chinese culture think taking the education is the best way to be success. Honestly, most think that's the only way to do it, no matter they are poor/rich, or even under educated. if they(including me) want their kids to live better in the future, the fundamental thing is education.

I attended a very competitive high school in China, and under pretty high peer pressure, books were stacking up on my desk. The final goal is getting high score in "SAT" like test(also much harder) and attending good university. Some of my classmates get medal from International Olympiad and have higher chance to get in to good universities.

I think the historical reason for putting education in such high level is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination.

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> books were stacking up on my desk

That's a common situation in Chinese high school. I'd say most Chinese high school are equally competitive. I am in a not so high-ranked school in Shanxi. And I literally have less than 1 day of rest each week. Each day it's from 6am to 9pm. Early self-study, day lecture, and night self-study, all in classroom...

Serious question from a concerned American..

How much are you learning and more importantly, are you retaining this information? What subjects / topics are you studying?

The reason that I ask, is that I work in IT. If you spent this amount of time devoted to learning a programming language, web design, etc... you would be in an excellent position to work remotely for a company like mine. If you spend 6-9 learning everything under the sun, I think it is kind of a waste.

Whatever it is they learn/how they learn/etc it seems to be grossly inefficient.

I noticed literally no difference between my Canadian students and Chinese/Korean students as a TA at a top university here, other than the international students being more likely to plagiarize/copy work. Also, the international students were way more likely to be smokers - not sure if that's a cultural thing, or if it's caused by being stressed the fuck out because of the ridiculous education system there.

While I agree with your observations, there is also some element of selection bias. Most Chinese students that are able to make it to the US come from rich families since most internationals don't get financial aid (so maybe they're more likely to be spoiled/entitled).

Also, depending on how "top" your university, it may have been easier for these students to get into your university than the top universities in China (e.g. they have lower test scores than their peers at the top unis in China).

The one and only goal of any and all pre-university education in China is NCEE[1].

NCEE is an exam, which means you get one shot, offline, off books.

Now imagine you need to write a website, with pen and paper, without internet or reference books.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Higher_Education_Entr...

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