How Canada became an education superpower
bbc.com
bbc.com
> Prof Jerrim says these families have an immigrant "hunger" to succeed, and their high expectations are likely to boost school results for their children.
Speaking from personal experience as a native Canadian, this can also motivate non-immigrant children to work harder. When half of your peers have an immigrant's work ethic it can be a real positive influence.
Disclaimer: this is an anecdote, my personal experience may not generalize, etc.
Now immigrant and expat to me means overlapping national and ethnic and national backgrounds. It is an issue of the intended period of their residency.
I think govt policy was hoping for the later in institutions like the one I worked at, and it made me sad.
My guess is that Canada is careful about selecting those allowed to migrate for education which helps a lot here.
That said, the opposite is true for refugees. The only thing you need is to somehow get inside the country. If you can convince some judge that you have a moderately believable story about why you will be in danger if you go back to your country you can get refugee status.
So there's basically two classes of immigrants. Those that are selected with very high standards, and those who just get in with almost no standards.
I'm guessing the latter group does not even send their kids to Universities.
Immigrants also have to restart from scratch. Everything in Canada is completely different from what we're used to in our countries of origin. Often, parents who were engineers in their home countries have to work blue collar jobs to make ends meet.
I think the actual difference is in average IQ and other desirable traits like industriousness.
Immigrants tend to be at the higher end while refugees tend to be at the lower end.
Why would people fleeing war zones be on average less industrious or less intelligent? That doesn't make any sense.
However, being a refugee means going through a much more traumatic process than being an immigrant. You are literally thrown from your home with little left and have gone through a difficult process to get out and resettled in a new country. So drug abuse, gang activity, crime, not doing well in school, depression, etc...were problems for that community even though given normal circumstances they would have been similar to other Chinese immigrants.
I'm not sure about your explanation though. Chinese people are not magical people. IQ is still distributed on a bell curve in China as well. If a chunk of people from a country exhibit characteristics that indicate they might be on the lower end of the bell curve, they might just be on the lower end.
The Boat People had traumatic experiences, so why wouldn't you expect them to have issues when arriving in their new host country? War, rape, murder, starvation, that shit will screw with your head for maybe the rest of your life. There is no point in comparing refugee and non-refugee immigrant experiences.
Ethnic Chinese were successful in Vietnam, just like the rest of southeast asia, many of them were rich, college educated and so on, and still got messed up for a generation upon being kicked out during the Sino Vietnam war. We aren't talking about soso people who weren't successful in their previous countries. Heck, today, many of the refugees that make it to the west were relatively successful, or they simply wouldn't have had the resources to make it to the west.
People are not all equally intelligent or hard working.
This is very different from US where you have a green card lottery and your typical immigrant is just an average population because everyone has the same chance of winning lottery, it doesn't matter if you are a farmer or aircraft engineer.
The refugee system in Canada is frequently abused. I hear anecdotes from my friends about kids from rich families in safe Easter European countries, that pay thousands to immigration lawyers and apply for refugee status simply because the partied too much and didn't manage to get enough points to go through the point based system. Such "refugees" can be safely compared with immigrants.
"These immigrants, coming over here, getting better grades than the rest of us"?
That just becomes an admission of stupidity.
Common is sense is not common.
Edit: Just to be clear, my first comment was really a compliment. No sarcasm intended.
Speaking from the perspective of an immigrant with tons of immigrant friends and whose friends around the world tend to be travelers by nature, I have noticed a lot of commonality in migrants and travelers that locals would do well to mirror if they want to succeed:
More often than not, if the immigrants didn't use the facilities, they would go unused and close and people would lose jobs, hurting the economy. Nobody would benefit from this. Indeed, frequently immigrants don't even use the facilities that you as locals are afforded. We're not allowed to claim welfare, we work hard, we pay taxes, we create jobs, we make friends, we integrate, we are neighbours, we laugh, we joke, we add richness to your lives just as you do with ours.
There is a pervasive mentality that we come over and hog your resources and take your jobs. Immigrants don't come and take anything, they come and do whatever it takes to succeed. They do the shit jobs that nobody else wants while they endlessly scour the economy for opportunities to succeed. If locals had that same hunger, they wouldn't be blaming their lot in life on external forces and they too would be successful.
Immigrants by and large are immigrants because they took charge of their situation and moved to where they can get a better life. Residents who relocate for work have the same take charge attitude, going where they can make a difference and leveraging opportunity.
People that complain about "people coming and doing or using what we deserve to use" by and large want opportunities handed to them, and when they're not blame the world around them for that.
People with a strong external locus of control tend to blame others for their problems in life. People with a strong internal locus of control tend to just get on with leveraging the opportunities they find. They are in charge of their own destiny instead of allowing their destiny to be controlled by others.
If I were to make a broad sweeping statement, which we all know are flawed for many reasons, but I will make it anyway:
Immigrants tend to have a strong internal locus of control.
People complaining about immigrants tend to have a strong external locus of control.
If you change your locus of control and be in charge of your own destiny, you'll care far less about immigrants. Indeed, you will become much more like us, you will identify with us and you too will succeed.
Lack of prejudice is and should be the norm. Having prejudice should be detestable, you shouldn't get a pat on the back for not being prejudice no more than you should for being a polite normal person who treats people with common decency and respect.
Residential segregation rates might not have changed much since the 1960s in the US (when there was a political push to reduce it) but I'm not convinced that's purely the result of prejudice rather than a natural human instinct to congregate in culturally homogenous groups. That doesn't mean various groups can't peacefully coexist and thrive together. Culture can still transfer across neighbourhoods and there will always be public/private places where each group mixes.
Canada is known for our multi-culturalism but cities such as Toronto are highly segregated into various ethnic enclaves. And it's a great feature of the city that I've never heard people complain about. I've only heard people say how much it contributes to a great and varied restaurant scene and plenty of unique festivals (for ex: Taste of Little Italy street fair, Chinese new year parade, etc).
The poster is "speaking from personal experience", so it's not really surprising.
Mind you, I also know high school graduates who never bothered to learn English. They find a way to make their living in Chinatown (which is slowly expanding across the city).
That many?
> More than 45 per cent of Metro Vancouver residents are foreign born, according to the 2011 census. There are only three major cities on the globe that have a higher percentage of foreign-born residents.
> They are Dubai, Brussels and Toronto.
http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/vancouver-fourth-fo...
Canada draws strength from diversity.
I could see an American conservative looking at this list and shudder in fear from the "loss of white culture", and how immigrants couldn't possibly love their second country as much as native-borns.
Yet we do. And Vancouver is proof. Source: Am Immigrant Vancouverite (presently living in Europe)
* Obligatory footnote acknowledging our dark past with Japanese internment, and dark past and present with dealing with social problems that affect first nations communities disproportionately.
Research shows that as diversity increases, so do political difficulties. Homogeneity is credited for a lot of policy successes in Scandinavia. Canada is simply another example of this, plus it is one of the earth's biggest petro-states.
It is less a cosmopolitain melting pot and more like Minnesota with the oil wealth of Texas. Vancouver and Toronto are admirable exceptions.
I now live in the most diverse part of Toronto. My building probably has speakers of a least a dozen languages. I love it here.
> plus it is one of the earth's biggest petro-states.
This is killing us economically. Ten years of Harper's policies pushing us harder into economic reliance on oil, now oil is way down in price and our economy is going with it.
This is why we need immigration and education: to build a stronger economy that isn't reliant on natural resources.
You're vision of "a stronger economy that isn't reliant on natural resources" is one of the main points of the Alberta Heritage Fund [0]. Even Albertans recognize that you can't rely on natural resources forever. However, it is naive to think you can't use them to help you change the future. In terms of education, the article states that Alberta as a sovereign state would be in the top 5 in science education on the PISA international test.
Also, "now oil is way down in price and our economy is going with it" is completely fallacious as the only reason why our economy could fall is because our oil industry was propping it up. Here is a nice graphic to show the parity between the two [1].
At the end of the day, it takes time to convert your entire country to clean energy sources. Even in Canada where we have 2/3 already renewable, the amount of time it would take to make that 100% is going to take decades. Until then, my main argument for the oilsands is that I'd rather have people earning honest wages in a country where the companies are held liable to environmental destruction instead of the Middle East.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust... [1] - http://news.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/diagram770.jpg
Heh. It used to be sold as the 'melting pot'.
Because I'm an immigrant living in Toronto. The diversity here, while "nice", seems to be a significant weakness if anything - a highly fractured, multi-cultural society simply tolerating one another's existence with no real united identity, goals or vision for Canada's future.
Transitioning from a bi-cultural society to a multi-cultural society is actually an improvement, because it reduces the power of English and French cultures to simply strong minorities among many. It's resulted in a balance-of-power arrangement, where neither has any hope any longer of dominating the whole of Canada.
It means it's unlikely that either English Canada or French Canada will try to go to civil war with the other, because they have nothing to gain and everything to lose. That's a remarkable achievement all on its own.
NYC and Toronto are success stories in multiculturalism, where people come, become educated, and integrate into the local culture, but ethnic/cultural enclaves that have been forming in cities overseas are not (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9r6ZCwQxZk).
How's that different from your average major metro area in the USA? Or, for that matter, anywhere else in the First World right now?
I think they're more worried that immigrants won't love whites as much as other whites do.
I'm not saying non-whites hate the whites or anything. I'm suggesting that's not the primary motivation for immigrants. For refugees... they literally just want to escape their hometown to escape death, so I think survival comes before anything else really.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Vancouver [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Toronto
It's been record levels since the beginning of Obama's term in 2008 and climbing every year. Reason is immigration laws since then are incredibly lax for foreign students. If you want Canadian citizenship show up here for ESL private school, a hair academy, a university, any accredited course and you can obtain a temporary work permit while attending classes (and for a period afterwards). This allows a local company to offer to sponsor you for full time employment, which eventually leads to citizenship. Vancouver is filled with Brazilian accountants who got in this way, they came here to take ESL, and went to go work for some accounting firm like KPMG with their degrees they have from Brazil.
Edit: they changed the laws in 2014 to make this a little more difficult, but temporary work permits are still available for any student esp somebody going to university/college. These always lead to full-time offer and citizenship.
Friends in Toronto pay around $2000 for two bedrooms in the middle of downtown. Haven't checked in a while but fairly certain Montreal is somewhere in between. Those same friends were paying more than $3000 for less space in the far end of Brooklyn.
Vancouver is crazy but sort of a special case especially when compared to nearby Seattle, but it's the only major city that is so close to an American metropolis.
And that's leaving out the free healthcare and abundant green space which is a huge boost to my QoL.
The "free" health insurance - which your taxes pay for - is great for some things but non-existent for others (e.g. routine oral care, routine optical care, physiotherapy required by something other than work, etc). Realistically, you need extended health insurance if you're not elderly, disabled, or on some sort of social care.
Now the nice thing about taxes in Canada is that you won't be taxed at anywhere near the highest bracket. As a Canadian software developer you're looking at around 50% of the salary as your US counterparts [1] which means you'll be in one of the medium tax brackets.
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Major hit to your quality of life? I'm sorry, you may potentially have a little less money in your pocket, but you're trading direct cash for better social services (read healthcare and education).
You make it sound like we're living in a 3rd world country.
What if "little less money in your pocket" means 50% (or more) pay cut? For software engineers you are easily looking at a substantial reduction in salary.
I think most people are willing to take a pay cut in exchange for better social services and free healthcare & education. But there is a breaking point where the comp. is too low for the extra services to make up the difference.
Postsecondary education is not free* in Canada. It's certainly cheaper than in the US, but nowhere near free.
I paid around $10k/year for my B.Eng program (as a domestic student in the late 00's).
Also healthcare in Canada, while covering regular doctors visits and any emergency hospitalisation, is not entirely free. You still have to pay for dental/optical (unless your employer offers additional insurance) and you still pay for prescriptions (which can add up).
* maybe this is just your phrasing and you meant "better education and free healthcare"
Being from Eastern Europe my education has been completely free so I assumed it's the same in Canada as it is seen as a more socialist/liberal version of US (at least that's the impression I get about Canada from here).
The argument expressed in my comment still makes sense though, actually it's even stronger since education is not free in Canada.
You want an education in computer science at the University of Waterloo? If you're a Canadian or permanent resident, that's $7,278.48 per term for a total of roughly $58K plus living costs.
https://uwaterloo.ca/finance/student-financial-services/tuit...
And Canada doesn't even have an excuse of being the world policeman. At least US can say we have to pay tons of money for military and hundreds of our army bases around the world so there is no left over money for public education. But what's the reason for Canada?
I mean if you have rich parents who will pay it for you then you don't care but if you are normal and have to pay it yourself that means you probably need to take a loan, going into debt right at the beginning of your adult life.
That's bit unfair, you should have a clean starting slate and equal opportunity with others, not be forced to go into debt immediately.
Also, I'm very much pro-environment and everything, but the reality is that regulations have a real cost. e.g. fire safety, parking space etc. Not to mention taxes for local, state and federal level... it adds up to make shit expensive.
Average salary is 12k euro per year. So if you are collecting 20% of that as income tax, that's a small amount of revenue to work with and it is still enough to cover free healthcare and education.
My point being that everything is cheaper but in proportion to that salaries and tax revenues from those salaries are also much smaller compared to a first world country like Canada.
Unless all countries are underdeveloped, education is a hygiene factor and doesn't as such provide any benefits.
In Europe, Switzerland is one of the countries with the fewest academics. Instead they focused on technical educations (starting from something akin to trade school up to university level knowledge). The results while most European countries first now a waking up the the realization that academic education isn't the only education of value and is scrambling to make their tradeschools/technical schools working better, Switzerland is one of the few countries doing very specialized production that can't be outsourced (for now)
In other words education is important but the focusing on education especially higher but also on the elementary level as some sort of indication of how well a country is fairing is not really a useful metric.
Why is education important? Can I suggest we compare two countries singled out in the article as 'could do better's - the USA and UK, and their recent democratic decisions. Compare that to Canada's cabinet, who, for example, has appointed someone with a PhD as minister for science [2], a doctor as minister for health [3] etc etc. I don't think I need to give examples of Scandinavian countries which regularly top the rankings for both wealth and pay equality.
Maybe a population where the country has valued education are less likely to say they "have had enough of experts" [4], more likely to respect the knowledge of a specialist, and more likely to have skills which are capable of transferring to the changing work market.
The problem is that investing in education has its pay-offs 20-30 years down the line, which is why, even if we believe in education, governments are reluctant to actually spend the money on it.
[1] http://www.oecd.org/edu/bycountry/switzerland/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsty_Duncan
As long as people (especially educated liberal leaning people) keep framing recent elections as "dumb people elected Trump cause they're dumb," we're going to keep getting Trumps in the elected office. One of the loudest things communicated in the last election in America is that people who don't vote like you are tired of the patronizing, condescending and presumptuous tone. Rather than characterizing the outcome of the last election as "uneducated people elected an asshole", it might do well to understand the concerns of the people who elected him, rather than dismissing them offhand.
Improving education allows people to develop skills for a changing job market, as well as recognise that some promises [2] were suspect from the start. My opinion is that these were two contributing factors to vote result.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38762034
[2] https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.indy100.com/article/7-brexi...
Having a university degree is no guarantee against a stupid electorate.
So I don't think being a college educated Republican/Conservative is a contradiction. The difference is the college educated person is more likely to believe in facts and reasoned arguments than appeals to passion, or native tribalism. They are more likely to have more faith in institutions, including democracy.
I think its hard for someone who went to college to relate to a person who hasn't been in terms of what kind of effect college has on their lives.
There is a much magical thinking going on at university level as many other places in society. Further more critical thinking is often mistaken for constructive thinking which is another rather big issue with universities. Universities are mostly about analysis not about creating which leaves a gaping hole in the real world.
I have worked with my share of academics and non-academics. There is no noticeable difference between them generally speaking. Only when it comes to subject matters do we differ in our naivety and hasty conclusions but the ability to think critical is IMO something very different.
Unless you have a different definition of "academics", this doesn't seem to me like you're arguing for anything. By "non-academics", are you talking about "not-gone-to-college"?
And I'm not going to continue this discussion either way, since we seem to be operating on anecdotes. Perhaps your experience has been different than mine. I would add though that I'm not asserting that a University automatically imbibes critical thinking, just that it exposes students to it, whether it be their professors or peers. A college education expands your worldview, but certainly it can be achieved in other ways (travel, reading etc.)
There is anecdotal evidence and then there are anecdotes. I am simply questioning the idea that university are somehow turning people into critical thinkers if they weren't before.
Critical thinking is a skill. You have to practice it like you practice music. And just like music simply being exposed to piano playing doesn't make you a piano player.
Actually, this is a good point. Yes, I agree 100% it doesn't automatically make you a piano player. But it might make you appreciate piano music and pianists more. It might make you interested in how piano music evolved over time etc.
The very idea that better educated people make better decisions in politics is simply wrong as far as I can see. Canada isn't benefitting anymore than Finland is. There are bigger factors that count.
"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government" --Thomas Jefferson
But also a country that values education is more likely to value the opinion of an expert, more likely to question a promise or political sound bite.
E2E encryption is a good example of the divide between politics and the science. I'm not saying that the computer scientists have the answer here, but ignoring what they say is not the way to come to a policy that will benefit the country.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Point being, you'll need more than a Jefferson quote to establish your point that information is sufficient for a competent electorate.
I agree though that there are cultural differences of opinion on this.
I'm not sure Brexit or Trump are going to do any good for the poorly educated and poor, however. Both were protest / anti-establishment votes, which fell nicely into the hands of the privileged.[1]
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b3d62bcc-7713-11e7-90c0-90a9d1bc9...
Wow, you know, I've heard a lot of "lets burn it down", "lets put an outsider in there!", "lets shake it up!" from a lot of different places, but this is basically their thinking, isn't it? They don't see any tangible differences to their own lives with either candidate, but would love to "stick it in the face of those damn liberal snowflakes".
EDIT: however, I tend to imagine if those who are suffering so much were a little bit more educated, they would proactively seek better opportunities, or at least not let their quality of life get eroded so much and just sit there.
I'm NOT saying that being more educated == being an academic. Getting an education trains you for more than just a career in academia. How many times do I need to say it out explicitly for you to understand this simple point?
[1]https://www.nas.org/articles/Estimated_40_Percent_of_Scienti...
> for example, has appointed someone with a PhD as minister for science [2], a doctor as minister for health [3] etc etc.
You elect ministers in direct elections? Otherwise it's like watching prime minister in a restaurant and announcing "Democracy has decided! We are having chicken risotto tonight!"
Education, good health and, in general, a happy life for all should be the goal, not the means.
Also, in this age, the most important asset is knowledge, because almost anything else can be compensated for with knowledge.
And I disagree that knowledge is important in the way you seem to talk about it. Knowledge is applying solution to problems yet many problems humans aren't capable of solving alone and thus will need to trust machines to do but that's a whole other discussion :)
To ponder that assertion, I would also add that you have some of the two best ranked engineering universities in continental Europe (EPFL and ETHZ), the best hotel school in the world (EHL) and one of the best business school in the world (St-Gallen).
Nothing is ever all good or all bad.
> In other words education is important but the focusing on education especially higher but also on the elementary level as some sort of indication of how well a country is fairing is not really a useful metric.
It isn't even a good metric for determining a nation's education status. The number of quality universities is a far better indicator.
Canada has a handful of quality universities. The US has hundreds. So how much sense does it make to call canada an education superpower?
I had a Chinese friend tell me that in China it doesn't matter which Canadian school you went to, just that you went to a Canadian school. Nice to have that reputation but it is ultimately self-destructing.
Actually, the federal government did make one critical mandate[1]. It effectively ensures that we are all exposed to two languages in school, and creates a much more rigorous French immersion stream in the school system.
That immersion into another culture and language, at a very early age, has paid huge dividends in my ability to travel, to assemble and work in multinational teams, and to form constructive, even loving, relationships with people who are at first very alien to me. I believe that it is also to be credited for enabling several of us, all from the French immersion stream, to begin playing with algebra somewhere around Grade 3, by deeply reinforcing our awareness of multiple representations for single concepts or entities. This then segued into my first programming language, QBasic, a year later.
If you have kids, then based on my own experience and observation of my cohorts, I strongly recommend that you find a way to ensure that they learn a second language, while they are still learning their first. Throw them in the deep end, you can always pull them out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_23_of_the_Canadian_Cha...
The best parts of it can, and should be replicated across the general student population, without creating a taxpayer-funded charter school system.
"Academically-minded families"? What do you mean? Families that care about education vs families that don't?
In practice the French immersion programs have become a sort of private school within the public system where rich people try to put their kids in it to try to give them an edge over anyone else.
A main issue is that there's seems to not be enough French teachers to expand the French immersion program to make it more accessible to everyone.
So apparently OP is finding fault with the fact that some parents care enough about their kids' education (specifically knowledge of French) to put them in a french immersion school. Given that both are public schools open to all, what are is OP actually complaining about?
In the first few years of your education, yes they are open to all. However, once a child has gone through several years of french immersion, they have the ability to choose between continuing in french, or dropping into english. A child who has done only english has a similar option, but it will require considerable extra work on their part to switch to french. So a public french immersion high school cannot be considered open to all.
>care enough about their kids' education (specifically knowledge of French)
Not specifically. Certain public schools can be more well funded, or specialize in different areas than others. A school which has a french immersion program might also have a heavier focus on academics than other schools. Once it gains a better reputation, it might become attractive even to those who aren't interested in having a better education. A french immersion program is a way of limiting such peoples access to these schools.
Yeah ... No.
Are you just looking for things to complain? If there's some school with a good reputation is it automatically 'limiting access' to those kids who don't live in that neighborhood? Jeez.
Bad paper summary of an study but I think there's been a few studies
French education is a complete joke in large parts of the country.
I was also going to say that French Canadian culture is pretty dam similar to Anglophone culture when put on the cultural spectrum of the world. Not super exotic.
In Québec, where I live, the drop-out rate is abysmal compared to other provinces, especially in french-speaking school boards [1] (which are much more numerous in Québec):
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/dismal-dropout-rates-...
> It makes Canada one of the few countries where migrant children achieve at a level similar to their non-migrant counterparts.
The high performance of migrant children probably comes from their motivated and educated parents due to Canada's immigration policy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/opinion/canada-immigratio...
Quite the opposite, I think. I don't have the data to back it up, but it always seemed like the migrant kids excelled far more often in STEM courses (to the point where our classes were considered trivial or elementary) than their Canadian-born peers.
The explanation is quite evident: the immigration policies put in place promote such that only the best come in.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/canada-s-15-year-old-stude...
For more info from OECD on results: http://www.oecd.org/education/Singapore-tops-latest-OECD-PIS...
If considered a market, I'd say these three things combined make it a likely bubble and an oportunity to start looking for what will come after.
If you carry this out you see its implications everywhere in the system. The food production does not serve any goals of society, instead food production is focused on optimizing for costs and yield. What this leads to is intensive farming which then leads to depletion and fragility which leads to disease. In terms of actually producing the food to eat, i.e, processed food, again self-interest produces highly addictive foods that increase profit, the cost of that is paid by the other side of the bargain.
When that self-interest of corporations aligns with academia or even the self-interest of academia itself, it then starts focusing on profit and educating students for the needs of corporations. Which then feeds into this sort of cycle of people who serve corporations, and corporations who serve themselves. And society pays the price.
Everybody is above average.
Funny how this makes education level better, huh?
Are you listening, France?
I'd say that the fact that France is better than OECD average with relatively low teacher pay (though higher than the average salary in the country) seems to indicate that salary isn't everything, on the contrary.
The differences regarding immigration to Canada and France might be a far more important factor though.
Higher salary for teachers harm, higher salaries for programmers are common sense measure to attract better quality more passionate programmers.
I did well in my AP calculus, 98/100 or something like that, but I still felt the pressure in all the tests and exams, as there were just so many questions crammed in a single test. I had to keep writing, non stop, and barely had time to double check any of my answers. Contrast to my school experience before I went to Canada, I could usually use way less than half of the exam time to finish and double check every problem.
The same pattern continued in U of T. The class average of courses like algorithms often went below 40/100. I usually had to keep writing until the last minute to finish every single question in an exam. Assignments were usually time consuming and required lots of thinking. I still remember the tremendous satisfaction when I finally proved a theorem about universal hashing (an exercise from CLRS, IIRC). And past success on assignments and tests didn't guarantee good grades in the final exam. I was actually dumbfounded when I did poorly in my AI course, even though I did extremely well except for my final exam.
Looking back though, I am very grateful for the struggles my professors put me through. They made me. What I learned then carried me a long way, even today. Without the high standards imposed by the schools, an ordinary student like me would not be able to do as well. As I kept telling friends, schools MUST keep their students in discomfort zones to help them learn and improve - the very thing that US schools, in particular SF bay area public schools, have been failing miserably.
In this context: Let smaller education decision making groups decide what is important for their local area. Any failure is of benefit to all, while the negative impacts of the actual failure are localised.
Looking at the charts in [1], Canadian performance seems to be slightly declining (esp. Maths).
Note too that we haven't just done well on the most recent PISA tests, we've been a consistent top level finisher across the three subject tests since PISA started over a decade ago.
You know what I think the problem is? Americans on the whole just don't care about public education. Either in terms of quality or equity.
Public education, public healthcare, public transportation, public libraries, public lands.
Decades of the Republican party screaming that government is the enemy while gutting every public institution that it can get its hands on has led to a real, tangible decline in the quality of public services.
Then from here you get into a vicious cycle of "Wow, our train system is horrible. But I'm already paying for my car; I don't want to have to pay for that chump who can't afford a car to get to work." Or "What a shame about the state of our local school. But I'm already paying for little Billy to go to Catholic school. Why should I pay for the neighbor's education as well?"
Not sure about how we get ourselves out of this mess. But I feel like just generally giving a shit about our neighbors and communities would be a good start. Seems like we're heading in the wrong direction for the time being though.
The public school I went to offered 100+ elective courses on different topics from law, and philosophy to computer science, industrial design, and even hairstyling. We had access to great teachers who took on project-based approaches to teaching that made the lessons more enjoyable. For example, when my Physics teacher wanted to teach us about vectors, he put us into groups and gave each group a sheet of vectors and a tape meter. We had to travel in the direction of each vector on the sheet until we got to a point in the school where he had hidden a sheet of paper and when we took that back to him, he would mark our assignment as completed. After that assignment, everyone in my class had a much better understanding of vector arithmetics.
Students who will attend a post-secondary in other countries will end-up redoing most of the advanced math and science they did in high school in the first-year of university anyway. For the rest of the students, those extra science and math courses will just be a waste of valuable time that they could have spent learning more useful skills.
Tracking happens late, at entry to high school (grade 9), where they split you up into academic, regular, and vocational tracks. From there on things move at a more respectable pace, at least in the academic track. But at that point the top-track students are already years behind their peers in other systems that moved faster and tracked sooner. I would guess the top students coming out of high school are about two years behind students in academic tracks in other countries, like the UK or Germany.
No there won't. Paradoxically the opposite will happen and differences (even small differences) will be maximized. A simple example, two kids are in the same high-school, with similar marks and similar ability - fast-forward 10 years and they are in wildly different careers, possibly making wildly different incomes. Maybe one chooses to pursue their interest in a STEM field, while the other focuses on Humanities. In our world it just so happens there is an shortage of engineers and a glut of humanities majors. Plenty engineers make six figures, whereas humanities majors will struggle to hit that income milestone. So one of the kids could be in SV making $160k/year, while the other is in Minnesota working at Starbucks making $30k/year. Same opportunity, different outcomes.
>at least on average.
On average you would expect a gradient of outcomes across a possible spectrum. I suspect it would resemble a bell curve with most outcome concentrated in some standard deviation from the mean but with tails on either side.
Also, even if you have an "average" equality of outcome, you'll still find a small fraction of those left out screaming about inequality and how unfair the system has been to them.
There's lots of evidence that the successful in our society are largely deluded in how much they downplay the significance of their privileges and luck.
The worse-off people aren't any smarter, but when everyone is mainly aware only of headwinds and not tailwinds, those who happen to have less tailwinds inherently are aware of a greater percentage of their context.
Is that the best framing? Are you sure it isn't a seriously flawed analogy since it is based on one factor explaining a very simple outcome? In reality, a typical person will have hundreds of factors associated with them some of which give them a competitive advantage when compared to the average and some of which will be detrimental to them in some way. A tall handsome straight white male with a crippling social anxiety will struggle in life in ways that an outgoing, short, stocky, gay black man may not. A middle-class black woman from a two person household in NY will have advantages that a poor white male from a single-parent household in rural Alabama will not. Even some specific combination of particular skills (none of which the individual excels in) can infer privilege. Being an average developer with average technical ability, with average business development instinct, average personability and people skills, and average level of leadership skills and some particular career choices - may lend you a Director or C-level executive at a technical corporation.
Leftists and more specifically, leftists that subscribe to the ideology of intersectionality, tend to only identify one or two of factors (usually sexual orientation, skin color, and/or gender) as defining success or failure. It's lazy and wrong.
>There's lots of evidence that the successful in our society are largely deluded in how much they downplay the significance of their privileges and luck.
I'll spin this around. Even if you are a victim in some way, deluding yourself that you're not is much more preferable than accepting reality. Once you internalize that your lot in life is due to factors outside of your control it really does kill your incentive to try and change it.
The analogy of headwind/tailwind is merely a visceral way to recognize that privileges are typically taken for granted and unnoticed while challenges and obstacles are very much noticed.
That works both to recognize why people constantly complain about their obstacles (i.e. members of minorities focusing on their minority status and the challenges they face) and privileged folks downplaying their privilege.
The socially-anxious otherwise privileged character will give more weight and awareness to their anxiety than to all their privileges, and the outgoing minority member may give excessive weight to their minority status and how they overcame their challenges and ignore their luck in being naturally outgoing.
So, yes, this is the most useful framing.
Your understanding of intersectionality amounts to asserting that most other people get it wrong. The concept is that people are actually an intersection of all the factors, including even whether they are naturally anxious or outgoing or whatever else. Indeed, far too many people these days treat it as a limited Venn diagram sort of way to label the most and least privileged, but that simplistic approach is in opposition to the nuanced concept that intersectionality is supposed to be about. That many people are lazy and get it wrong is both true and troubling.
As to your point about delusional optimism becoming self-fulfilling, that is totally valid. And yet, it's one thing to discuss the facts about inequities and injustices in our society and another thing to talk about the attitude people should have for success.
Yes, underprivileged people focusing on their lot in life can lead to self-fulfilling pessimism and lack of ambition. But there's a balance here. If everyone remains deluded in believing that we actually all have equal opportunities, then we won't be motivated to fix the injustices.
I know it's tragically awful how the "left" has now tended to overemphasize the victim issue. It's become a boy-cried-wolf situation. It lets people like you focus on the problems with that narrative. At the same time, there are real extreme injustices and inequities happening in our world.
The starting point for the whole issue is to realize how BAD we are at being objective. We DO experience headwinds and tailwinds with a totally different degree of awareness. Recognizing this fact does not lead us directly to answers, it leads us to productive conversation.
Yes it is. I disagree with your fundamental characterization of privilege. There is no privilege, that was my point.
Here I defined two individuals to serve as a counter-example to what you argued and you still went ahead and identified one as inherently privileged solely due to their skin color - even if they struggle through life due to a social disorder. To me, that's an illustration of how not only useless your concept of 'privilege' is, it's also dangerous because of how easy it is to misuse.
>The concept is that people are actually an intersection of all the factors
Not all factors. Very specific factors are emphasized and that's the problem. A person is nothing but a set of stereotypes of specific set of identities, based on nothing more than genetics. There is no room for ideas or 'content of character'. You are your skin color, gender, and a sexual orientation.
>At the same time, there are real extreme injustices and inequities happening in our world
Inequities are a result of a free world. People make different decision which end in different outcomes. Raising a family with a spouse will produce a different outcome for your children, then raising children without a spouse. Studying to be an engineer will yield a different (and unequal) outcome versus studying History.
As for injustices - no. In the West the vast vast majority of all people don't live in the a world of extreme injustices.
>It lets people like you focus on the problems with that narrative.
When you abuse the language as a shortcut to supporting an argument you shouldn't complain when you called out on it. When you call someone a loaded word like 'privileged' without knowing anything about them other than the color of their skin expect push-back. And then when they refuse to accept your ugly characterization of them, you simply close yourself off and label them as people who simply are too privileged to see it. Thanks.
>Recognizing this fact does not lead us directly to answers, it leads us to productive conversation.
Does it? I viscerally disagree with everything you argued. Do you accept that perspective as valid? Or am I just too privileged to see my privilege?
If you literally mean that the concept of privilege doesn't show up in reality (as in how supernatural miracles are pure fiction), then you'd be just flat-out wrong.
> identified one as inherently privileged
You clearly don't understand the concept of privilege. If I happen to get a job that includes vacation pay, that is a privilege compared to the reality for many people who don't have that. It's all relative. And acknowledging that something is a privilege doesn't mean it's inherently undeserved or something you shouldn't have.
I didn't say the white character in your case was privileged and the black character wasn't. It's not black and white or even a single dimension on a continuum. You don't just have quantifiable more or less privilege. It's far more complex.
White men in our society do, in general and vast majority of situations, have some privileges over the experience they would have with darker skin or being labeled female. There are also privileges to being female or having darker skin, although there's some valid comparing where male privileges generally outweigh female privileges.
In your example, the black character has the privileges that come with being naturally outgoing.
"Privilege" is nothing more than a general term for recognizing advantages you have over others in some regard. You can enjoy the privilege of loving stable parents and loyal friends without the privilege of wealth and vice versa or you could have both or neither. Framing these things as "privileges" simply means acknowledging that these are far from universal and many others do not have them.
> Very specific factors are emphasized and that's the problem
But that's not a problem with the concept of intersectionality, it's a problem with the people (mis)use the concept in practice.
> In the West the vast vast majority of all people don't live in the a world of extreme injustices.
If you define "the West" as those places without extreme injustice, it's just circular logic. But specifically, we can be thrilled that today there are lots of systems in place to promote real justice and rule of law. "Extreme" is all relative. Of course, the folks in Flint with kids suffering major lead poisoning because of incompetent political decisions that would never have been made for richer communities… they think extreme injustice exists here.
> When you abuse the language as a shortcut to supporting an argument you shouldn't complain when you called out on it
Well, I agree completely. There's a ton of such abuse going on right now, and it's fair to call it out.
> ugly characterization of them
Are you saying that merely mentioning a concept like "white privilege" is an ugly characterization of someone?
> I viscerally disagree with everything you argued
Well, I really had no idea in this plain text conversation that I was interacting with someone who was so emotional and defensive about this situation.
> am I just too privileged to see my privilege?
I have no idea, I wasn't judging you personally. I have no idea who you are at all. My best guess is that you have the typical headwind/tailwind issue where you are viscerally aware of the headwinds (challenges) that you've faced, you've worked hard to overcome them, and you're quite aware that there are others with far more advantages that you never enjoyed. You probably have seen the absurdly ridiculous identity-politics that the "left" has gotten obsessed with and are viscerally offended at the simplistic stereotyping and political-correctness and other bullshit those folks are doing.
Let's consider an analogy. Imagine a context in which you happen to be surrounded by Scientologists. You sometimes try to argue with them about scientific reasoning and point out how exploitive and absurd their "religion" is. But they keep using illogical bullshit that their dogma teaches them. When you get out of that milieu, you commiserate with your friends who talk with you about how absurd the Scientologists are. One day, you interact with someone who happens to be into Buddhist-style meditation even though they aren't really into any supernatural claims about reincarnation or anything, but they use the Buddhist language to talk about their quest for Nirvana. Instead of having an interesting conversation, you talk to them like they are obviously a ridiculous cult-follower comparable to the Scientologists. It's an understandable reaction, but quite unfortunate.
Yeah, I get that certain online mob-mentality identity-politics young folks are making words like "privilege" toxic to many because they have an aggressive and simplistic ideology around it. But your reaction is just assuming anyone who uses the term or talks about equity and injustice as real issues are automatically those people.
You're probably not "too privileged to see my privilege", you're probably just too pissed off at some things that are understandable to be pissed off about to be open minded to reasonable discussion.
You're purposely equivocating on the the concept. At one end you're giving me the dictionary definition to argue the point. But then you're simply falling back on the ideological definition - the one that I actually argued against and the one that is used in practice to push policy and browbeat those who disagree with you (this includes your responses and arguments).
>If you define "the West" as those places without extreme injustice, it's just circular logic
I define the West as however it is commonly understood. What circular logic?
>White men in our society do, in general and vast majority of situations, have some privileges over the experience they would have with darker skin or being labeled female.
Like what? Asians have the highest personal and house-hold income in America. When controlled for the difference in single vs two-parent households in black and white populations, the income disparity between blacks and whites disappears as well. There are more whites in prison and in poverty than all other groups combined. Race makes for great politics, but it isn't a factor to success. Nobody gets breaks. You have to go to work, bust your ass, and pay rent. If you don't pay rent, you get evicted. Bill Gates doesn't hand out stipends because you match his skin tone.
>Are you saying that merely mentioning a concept like "white privilege" is an ugly characterization of someone?
Yes. It is a loaded, ideological term that isn't based on reality. It is exclusively used by those who want to push a particular extreme ideology and dehumanize 'THOSE OTHERS'. If I get a group of people with varying skin colors, give you no other information, and I ask you to tell me about their life, their struggles, about what they believe, and if they are a good person, or an evil person or a criminal, or intelligent - you would be able to say nothing. And yet, here we are, you tell me how much 'headwind' the whites in the group got and how much easier their life is due to all their white privilege. Urgh.
>Yeah, I get that certain online mob-mentality identity-politics young folks are making words like "privilege" toxic to many because they have an aggressive and simplistic ideology around it.
I don't know about those 'young folks', but everything you've written thus far is on about the same level of toxicity.
>Imagine a context in which you happen to be surrounded by Scientologists. You sometimes try to argue with them about scientific reasoning and point out how exploitative and absurd their "religion" is. But they keep using illogical bullshit that their dogma teaches them. When you get out of that milieu, you commiserate with your friends who talk with you about how absurd the Scientologists are. One day, you interact with someone who happens to be into Buddhist-style
Consider that you're the Scientologist in your analogy.
>But your reaction is just assuming anyone who uses the term or talks about equity and injustice as real issues are automatically those people.
I'm just going by what you said.
Come on. At least make an attempt at fair statistics. The percentage of blacks in prison and poverty is far higher than whites. That's what matters, not absolute numbers.
> Race makes for great politics, but it isn't a factor to success.
Race is totally unrelated to success in terms of causation, but it is correlated to success on a statistical basis such that it can be used to predict things with better-than-average success. In other words, we do not live in an ideal color-blind world where race isn't predictive of anything outside of basic genetics-related factors.
If you want to argue that the causation behind the correlation is something like a counter-productive victim-hood culture, that's a legitimate hypothesis to discuss. But there's no room given facts on the ground to deny the correlations between race and various factors like education, success, wealth etc.
Thankfully, we indeed live in a world with far less racism and race-based privilege than historic times, and there are definitely cases where other privileges outweigh the issues in race. But if you believe we actually are in a world where there's no privilege to being white or Asian versus being black, you really aren't making a sincere effort to study the evidence.
You can point all day to the non-straw-men who actually make ludicrous arguments about race and privilege. That doesn't disprove reasonable arguments. As an analogy, Piltdown Man was a hoax, but it doesn't disprove the facts of evolution.
> It is exclusively used by those who want to push a particular extreme ideology and dehumanize 'THOSE OTHERS'.
Well, now you're just wrong. I used the term "white privilege" and I don't believe the extreme ideology and don't aim to dehumanize anyone. I also know many others who use that term without the extreme ideology.
Your claims that I could say nothing about a group of people based on race is also wrong. I can't honestly just apply stereotypes to an individual, but you can make guesses and be statistically right more often than chance. I can guess a bunch of things about experience based on someone's race. I can guess that a black guy has experienced things like white folks crossing the street when they are out walking or other subtle things like that. I can guess that they at least know many people who have single parents and that they know people who have spent time in jail or prison. Those guesses can be wrong, but they will be right more often than chance.
> you tell me how much 'headwind' the whites in the group got and how much easier their life is due to all their white privilege
You seem to even misunderstand the terms. Having privilege is like having a tailwind. And you're putting a lot of assumptions and words-in-my-mouth that I never said. I never said anything like a claim that whites all have easier lives.
> Consider that you're the Scientologist in your analogy.
That's ludicrous. That's like saying to the Buddhist that they are a Scientologist and refusing to listen to anything they actually claim about their beliefs. You seem totally convinced that anyone who even uses the language that so viscerally offends you necessarily believes a bunch of nonsense. You're not even willing to consider the possibility that my beliefs are different from your assertions.
What you're doing is a good job of validating the crazy people's views. You're so willing to jump to conclusions about my beliefs, this conversation will be read by any of the extreme P.C. folks as proof that people like you are just racists at that core. I don't believe that. I don't really know what you think. I just am reading that you are willing to make emotionally-based and incorrect assumptions about my views, so that leads me to discount whether you might be an intellectually reasonable person generally.
> I'm just going by what you said.
No, you're going by imagining a bunch of stuff behind what I wrote that isn't there. From the beginning, you made assumptions, and you aren't (re)considering how I could write the things I did without believing the things you assume I believed.
No, outcome would be highly correlated to effort and persistence.
Anyway, "social mobility" generally just means there's no caste system or effective caste system. If the inequity in the system means that a small percent of people hold most of the wealth and power, what difference does it make if anyone has a chance to join that elite?
In a zero-sum game, social mobility is better to exist than not but it isn't going to actually change anything fundamental.
Why shouldn't these variables affect outcomes? To assert that any two groups should have identical economic outcomes, one first has to prove that those two groups are identical with regard to all preferences and genetic factors that can affect economic outcomes.
For example, sex may correlate with career choice, and career choice correlates with economic outcomes. Race has been found in some studies to correlate with results on IQ tests, which have been found to correlate with economic outcomes. To assert that such factors shouldn't affect economic outcomes, one hence first has to rule out all such potential correlations.
* A correlation between career choice and economic outcomes.
* A correlation between sex and career preferences.
* A correlation between race and IQ test results.
* A correlation between IQ test results and economic outcomes.
Am I correct ?
"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
So would you please not take threads in that direction, whence they never return?
That is, two grade A student may end up in totally different outcome, skewing statistics which would limit themselves to phenotypical attributes.
More on this point at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14912821 if anyone's interested.
Canada isn't an education superpower. The silly international ranking of kids' test taking abilities is meaningless.
Real education superpowers are those with top universities which in turn produce economic gains/growth/etc.
If canada was a true economic superpower, we'd see them producing Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
Frankly, there is only 1 education superpower - the US. Go check a list of top 100 universities. It's almost entirely US colleges. Britain is the next far distant competitor. The only other nation who may challenge the US to become an education superpower in the future is china as they are building tons of universities. This is something we did in the US in the 1800s. Build a incredible number of universities as our economy grew. The only question is whether china will be able to match our quality because they are going to surpass our quantity by a large margin.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35776555
Also, if the BBC journalist did any bit of research, they would know that Canada's "150th anniversary" is fake propaganda itself. Canada isn't 150 years old. They gained their independence in 1983.
Why is your metric considered more apt than the article's? Good student performance consistently correlates with higher-paying jobs and higher quality of life. At the nation level, this correlates to higher Human-Development Index, which is generally considered a pretty good thing to have...
> If canada was a true economic superpower, we'd see them producing Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
That is utter nonsense. What does this have to do with education at all? Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Steve Jobs were all college dropouts. They simply had the right idea at the right time. Their economic success has very little to do with the U.S. education system.
Because that's the more sensible definition for superpower?
> Good student performance consistently correlates with higher-paying jobs and higher quality of life. At the nation level, this correlates to higher Human-Development Index, which is generally considered a pretty good thing to have...
Great. I agree. Did I disagree anywhere? My issue is with the usage of the word superpower. And americans on average earn more than canadians.
> Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Steve Jobs were all college dropouts.
And? They did go to college.
> They simply had the right idea at the right time.
Right.
> Their economic success has very little to do with the U.S. education system.
Ah I see. When the US education creates successes, it has nothing to do with the US education system. When canada's education system produces successes, canada is a superpower.
As I said, my only issue is with the BBC blatant propagandistic article. Their use of "superpower" and their perpetuating the lie of Canada's 150th year.
I'm for education. But canada is no more an education superpower than north korea is a nuclear superpower.
And I love your logic. Bill Gates, Zuckerburg, etc don't count. But kids taking silly tests count. Okay.
And how is 150 years of forming the Dominion of Canada not something to celebrate? "150 years ago, Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia – united to create the Canadian Confederation, called the Dominion of Canada. On account of the British North America Act that became law July 1st 1867, these British colonies would be recognized as an independent nation."
http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/france/150Canada150.asp...
I agree. I didn't deny that. Now compare how many top universities we have in the US? If the US has hundreds of top universities and Canada has a handful, how does that make canada an education superpower? If canada is an education superpower, then is north korea a nuclear superpower? Isn't the word superpower supposed to mean something?
> We're home to top-tier companies like Shopify.
Shopify is top-tier? It has revenues of $151 million/year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify
>On account of the British North America Act that became law July 1st 1867, these British colonies would be recognized as an independent nation."
But they weren't an independent nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Act_1982
Canada became "independent" in 1983. Canada celebrated its first Canada Day in 1983.
To claim canada is 150 years old is a verifiable lie.
Listen, canada is a wonderful nation. I have nothing against canada. My complaint is about the article. Its assertions don't make any sense.
Comparing raw numbers like that makes no sense considering Canada has a population of 35 million against the U.S.'s 323 million.
> Canada became "independent" in 1983. Canada celebrated its first Canada Day in 1983. To claim canada is 150 years old is a verifiable lie.
Only if you measure the "start" of a country as the time of its declaration of independence. It makes sense for the U.S. considering its specific history, but in fact, there are very few countries in the world for which this makes sense.
A better way to look at it would be to mark the beginning of a country as the time its formal constitution was written. For Canada, that's 1867, which a major politically significant event. By comparison, the Canada Act of 1983 was a formality.
Even on a per capita basis, we outstrip canada easily. But raw numbers doesn't count? So the US has 7000 nukes and north korea has 5. So calling the US a nuclear superpower doesn't matter? The US has an $18 trillion economy. So it's wrong to call the US an economic superpower? Using your logic, north korea is a nuclear superpower and norway is an economic superpower?
So what's your definition of the word superpower? Just use it in a way that suits your agenda regardless of raw numbers?
I can't believe anyone on HN is advocating for the rejections of numbers and data on HN.
> Only if you measure the "start" of a country as the time of its declaration of independence.
No. If you measure when a nation became independent. Canada can't claim to be independent when their laws/government/etc was controlled by britain until 1983. You can't claim to be an independent nation when the final say rested with britain.
> For Canada, that's 1867, which a major politically significant event.
You mean when britain consolidated its territory? Canada was still ruled and controlled by britain. If that is independence, then once again, we have a difference on what words mean.
> By comparison, the Canada Act of 1983 was a formality.
Oh was it? When canada finally took control over its constitution?
Hong kong is more independent from china than canada was. Under whose rule did canada fight in ww1? Oh that's right. "Independent" canada fought under british rule. But certainly canada was "independent" by ww2 right? Nope. All the canadian soldiers fought under british commanders.
Instead of accepting reality, you are just changing the definition of words to suit your agenda. If you want to make up your own definition of superpower or independence, then so be it.
The valley would not exist without quality schools, but those schools are no better than Canada's. Evidence for that is the significant number of Canadians recruited to work in the valley. Google and others hire Canadians because their schools put out top performers.
I'm not saying canada doesn't have good schools. I'm saying the US has hundreds of top universities while canada has a handful.
In that respect, if you call canada an education superpower, you are making a mockery of the word superpower.
That's my point.
And a significant number of indians, chinese, etc also work in silicon valley. Wouldn't call india or china an education superpower either.
For you, the most important result might be economic gains/growth and for others, it might be scientific/academic achievements such as Nobel prizes, research papers, major scientific breakthroughs, etc.
If that's the case then the US is not the only education superpower.
I agree.
> If that's the case then the US is not the only education superpower.
The US is easily the only education superpower.
Go check the nobel prizes of US vs Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_uni...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_lau...
Per capita doesn't matter when it comes to being a superpower.
The US is an economic superpower and norway isn't even though norway's per capita GDP is larger than the US.
People are so interested in pushing their agenda that they refuse to address my point.
My point was that canada isn't an education "SUPERPOWER". I'm not saying canada is a bad country. I'm not saying other nations don't produce nobel prize winners. My point was solely about the article's propagandistic use of term "superpower".
You can twist data/stats any way you want. Under no definition is canada a superpower of anything, let alone education.
I'm just pointing out what a absurd "article" BBC pushed out.
Education together with freedom and tolerance always gives the best return for the money you invest. These days its a given that most Indian students who originally opted to go for US to do their MS degrees are now flocking to Canada. Also a whole range of working professionals are going to Canada to work, start companies and contribute to the economy of Canada.
Your economy and overall national ecosystem always benefits when you get highly trained, hard working people with a strong work ethic as immigrants. Not only do these people contribute to the economy disproportionately in return for a good life, they also impart similar values to their kids.
At the same time its sad to see US take such a protectionist and anti-immigrant stance, totally forgetting the important role immigrants have played in the rich and success journey so far.
More dangerous than all these awesome immigrants not coming to your country is they going else where. There is no infinite supply of great talent in the world, and given how priorities align not everybody can be trained to be good enough among your existing citizen-pool. The only real way of having a disproportionate set of awesome people in your country, is to create an environment where you can attract them from outside. Without these awesome people no country can last a long time in front of a competition.
The U.S. still has ten times our population. With a population of just over 35 million, Canada is the world's 38th most populous country. That's a little over two Mumbai's. Perhaps Canada will become more influential in the years to come, but a superpower?
If you were simply referring to education, again, Canada is unlikely to compete with the U.S.'s ivy league in the near future. Our universities have higher standards than U.S. universities on average, but we lack both low-end crapiversities and truly elite institutions that can generate the kind of funding a U.S. ivy league university can. If you can't make it into the ivy league than a Canadian university is a great option, but if you can...
Our government isn't investing significantly more than the U.S. on research on a per capita basis, so the bulk of grant money in North America is still in the U.S.. Also, our tech sector is sluggish and poorly paid as compared to that of the U.S.. Lots of people like the idea of moving from the U.S. to Canada... until they find out they'll be making half as much for the same work!
No, Canada isn't poised to become a superpower anytime soon. The best we can hope for is improvement. We're going to see a lot of articles like this from U.S. authors because they're really not happy with their politics right now, nor should they be. However, the reality is that Canada is still a bit of a backwater. We're North America's Sweden. A nice place to live, but too small to really make a huge impact.
Isn't most of Canada just a snowy wasteland
India has four times the population of the US. Yet the economic output is no where comparable.
More important than masses is quality trained population. Human ingenuity and talent can't be matched through scale.
The new super powers are way more likely to be China and India, as their huge populations go through the generational shift of people moving out of the lower class into the middle class.
Huge populations means nothing in the context of India. Unfortunately our politicians have repeated this tripe enough number of times to make it look like its some kind of inevitable economic dividend which we will reap.
The only known purpose masses of population have in a knowledge driven era like we live in is to compete with machine automation as meat robots, until the machine automation gets cheaper.
Beyond this having a huge population without good education, training and lack of a general progressive culture is a net negative. To sustain these people you get a huge defense bill and a range of social security spending thatlargely taxes productive people in a disproportionate way.
You also have to deal with a huge population scale with weird political and religious beliefs. Its a net negative.
At a rate of growth of 7%, from which India was not far off in the last 10 years, your economy doubles in 10 years. Let's say that it's a bit slower and it takes 12 years. This still means that India will double its economy by 2030. And unless they mess it up really badly their growth should keep going. Following more or less the Chinese model of using their huge scale to draw foreign investment.
This process has been gradually unfolding over the past two decades, as we invite foreign direct investments and do away with many pointless regulations.
This sort of a growth has a upper limit which will be breached sooner or later.
a) not proven scientifically
b) around the point where Mexico or Brazil are (Mexico: $10k GDP per capita, Brazil: $8k, India: $2k)
India just by reaching Brazil's level can still grow its economy 4 times or more. At that point its economy would be something like 80% of the US one, based on sheer population volume.
And this is only one scenario, one where they fall into this "middle income trap".
With all due respect, I think that is a very far fetched assumption. Canada is not one of the premier auto manufacturing nations like US, Germany, Japan, S. Korea. Auto manufacturing is a good indicator of a nation's industrial power imho because it requires a balanced combination of design, engineering, manufacturing, logistics, and marketing.
Also, it annoys me that US is getting so much flack for the seemingly anti-negative immigration policy. Let's not forget US has been accepting more legal AND illegal immigrants than any other nation, since 1970s. I may be wrong and would really welcome any correction on this.
To avoid flame war, I will just stop there.
Respectfully.
According to my extensive wikipedia research, you've missed China off that list, and it produces more than double the USA (2nd largest producer). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_motor_veh...
And then there was a guide that talked about Thomas Alva Edison and how the American populace of those time felt and had a sense of pride in Edison. They couldn't match the Universities and post-Industrial revolution/renaissance intellectual capital of Europe, but they were happy that people were building the same intellectual capital in their private enterprises.
But in the mean time Germany bled away its best to the US. Ivy leagues happened in the US. The rest is known history.
The same compounding forces that can cause run away success, when applied in a negative sense, the compounding way, can cause run away destruction.
Um no, it's the place where late European immigrants landed. Everyone one of my ancestors were here before the Statue of Liberty was even put up.
It's not poised at all in fact. It has no chance of becoming a superpower or replacing the US. That's a very, very far fetched premise (might as well say Sweden).
Canada has 36 million people with a very slow population growth rate. They've added a mere 10 million in three decades. Their GDP hasn't net expanded since 2008 in dollar terms ($1.55t in 2008; $1.53t in 2016). By comparison, since 2008, the US has added annual economic output the size of three Canadas (~$4.5 trillion).
Unless you're projecting Canada will have a one million dollar GDP per capita equivalent in the future - ~20 years out - while the US somehow completely languishes (despite there being no evidence to support such an outcome). That's what it will take for Canada to become a superpower. It's impossible.
Everything you say now about Canada, could have once been told about the US.
Superpowers are very powerful, but they are to an extent fragile. Affluence is good, but it also softens your bones and makes you believe you are the best because you are in some way special.
No doubt the US is still a very great country, with great culture and great people and there has hardly been country in Human history that has been this awesome. But its wrong to say this will last forever.
Things get reversed very quickly. Look at the middle east, look at the USSR. It takes a lot of effort to keep a super power intact. Things go down rather too quickly if you are not careful.
I don't think you understand the scale at which the US has to absolutely continuously fail over the next century to lose its lead.
But there is no such thing called as a permanent super power, nor there ever will be.
Everything that you wrote about US, could have been written about any super power in History. The Romans, The Mongols, The Greeks they all were super powers with similar traits. And yet none of them are a super power today.
You underestimate how decadence works. There are a lot of Chinese and Indians who no longer want to come to US. And it takes a very few companies to change the economic momentum of the world. If past is any indication, you could even alter the very direction of the human race with a few inventions/enterprises, and you can do it quickly.
Right now the only contender is China. They have money and they have been throwing it around in Africa like nobody's business. They are also flexing in the SCS to impress their neighbors in PH, VN, MY, JP, etc.
Germany will only ever be a regional power, but not global. They don't have the reach.
However, there is no chance Canada can be a global power on all scales, as what US is now. They don't have big enough of population, not that important as a market, much of its land is not inhabitable or farmable, and it surely cannot catch up with US as regards to the military power.
Mind you that Canada have its own conservative power, it is just a different cycle, and it surely gets a lot of inspiration from Trump's takeover. So, let's be a little realistic and don't let your emotion triumphs over your rationale.
For example, If southern Ontario were a state then it would be the 6th most populous state [2] [3] (between Illinois and Pennsylvania in population) and also more dense than Illinois.
I feel like Americans don't really appreciate how most Canadian cities are so close to the border.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Anyway, Americans will say "How can Canada become an education superpower when California has the same population?" to which I say, that's a disingenuous comparison. How can Boston become an education superpower if China has 500x the population? To which Americans will say "MIT and Harvard", To which I will say "Waterloo, Toronto, and McGill."
Obviously I'm being slightly facetious, I'm just trying to illustrate how population != educational excellence.
California is a very typical example of how immigrants and why immigrants are so important. Pretty much bulk of California's riches come from start ups and companies founded by Immigrants.
Also California is an exception that so much good talent shows up every single year, year after year. Its not that hard for a state to match the economy of other powerful nations if the best students, from the best universities of every single country on earth show up with aim of doing good work. Progress happens so rapidly and at such scale because of disproportionate concentration of best of human race in a small place.
If the same goes to some other place in an another country, same results will happen there. And this can happen pretty quickly. Start ups are not that hard to do these days.
California has way higher talent density of awesome people in a small place for a state.
OOTH, being an immigrant in an unbuilt country where winter will kill you in 6 month if you do not get to work 24/7 building a shelter is different that being an immigrant in a fully developed country and collect welfare (which a lot of current "refugee" are doing).