OC Soldiers - China's Vision for the Future
China,
I admire the Chinese.
They are entreprenurial, capitalistic, and parctical. Simultaneously, some of the best poetry I have read was from Chinese authors. The Chinese seem impassioned about life, learning, and moving forward. This great dragon is waking up, just as the rest of the world is going to sleep. If they take Tiawan there will be no challengers.
I worry about how the rest of the world will compete with China. Poorly is the current answer.
The US economy is probably a bit more finely tuned but this will not be a differentiator for long as knowledge is being transferred.
I wonder about their long-term vision capability. For example, the Koreans built an 11 $B city for constructing LC-TVs. This takes some serious vision but once this engine is running it is unstoppable. Do the Chinese have a long-term vision? What are their research interests? Who are the intellectual leaders and what problems do they want to solve?
JS
Believe it or not, I've been working full-tilt-bozo for weeks and not taking any breaks to do spurious things. However, yesterday I couldn't take all that focus anymore and wrote a blog entry while some files were transferring,
You may be interested since I touch upon the chinese educational system.
Mark,
I, for one, do not believe that scores on standardized test tell much about an individuals abillty to contribute meaningfully.
The history of standardized tests dreives from the U.S.S.R.'s Sputnik program (Oct. 4, 1957) and the US finding itself behind technologically. So, rather than model a system after the Russian one, JF Kennedy and the teachers union responded with standardized testing. Since then standardized testing has been an industry growing at 20% annually, a big business for teachers union friendly test developers - i.e., more teachers making more work for themselves.
What are the results? Difficult to tell but it probably did some good. The 1998 high school graduation rate in the US was 71% and increased to 85% in 2003. (Most of this under Clinton but a few years under Bush).
I certainly don't see how any hypothetical "right-wing establishment" could be responsible for standardized testing - it is an industry owned by teachers who are largely in the liberal camp.
In a funny twist of events, teachers are now complaining about "skills tests for teachers". Reg Weaver comments on the fact that teachers are now having to live their own standardized world.
Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the 2.8-million-member teachers union. "Just because you're the brightest doesn't mean you're going to be the best."
JS
Amazing.
Considering that standardized testing is the centerpiece of George Bush's educational plan and every teacher I know dislikes the standardized testing because people start teaching to the metric rather than the material, I'm surprised to learn that the teacher unions are the driving force. Testing is big business; unfortunately, I don't have time to explore where the campaign contributions were directed. Since the biggest adoptors have been in red states, I do have my suspicions about the results of such an investigation.
Even though you being quite creative in your credit attribution, I'm glad to know that you at least agree that one-size-fits-all metrics are not necessarily the best at creating creativity.
Mark,
FYI, I "googled" all that in about 10 min. Actually, did not make it up. Albeit, there was some synthesis. . . It was easy to see where your error was and similarly easy to find the data to show it. Yes, this is how I like to have fun.
js
nothing else. whenever you reduce a human being to a scalar (or vector), you lose most of the interesting information. and i don't care whether the testing is run by democrats or republicans.
in my everyday work environment, IQ and other measurements seem to count less than intangible values, e.g. emotional self-control, the ability to take one's head out of one's butthole, being honest etc.
Peter,
I had dinner with a middle school teacher this weekend and asked about this.
He mentioned that the largest number of inquiries about standardized test scores come from parents who want to know how well their children are doing.
This is presumably from the set of disengaged parents who depend upon the school system to foster their children to adulthood.
FYI,
JS