yqinyn

I went to high school in China, and the Math problems in the US from the same level are literal jokes to us. At the end of the semester, my teacher doesn't have anything else planned for the last class, so just for fun he would find these problems and share with the class :"Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with". I remember all of the problems are so dumb that the whole class would had a good laugh reading through them.

At that time I thought the whole Math education in the US is a joke, until I came here for graduate school and realized how brutally challenging the Math is in higher educations.

My 2 cents is that the majority demographics in the US don't give a damn about Math, or any kind of formal education. Most people, even the uneducated, are living a comfortable enough life, so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education. As a result, these type of education are only reserved by the elite. While in a lot of developing countries, education is the only way for a normal people to not end up being extremely poor for the rest of his/her lives.

Be careful when you use "自強不息" though. I have never seen any native speaker who is also a sane person use it in daily life without sounding sarcastic. This word does mean what you say, but it probably one of the overused, insincere, and meaningless words in government speeches. It's like people roll their eyes when tech giants says "make the world a better place" for the past 30 years. But instead of 30 years, this came from 《易经》,which was roughly from 5,000 year ago, and has been constantly used in a similar fashion since then. So imagine how a Chinese speaker will think of it.