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Originally Posted by tw
So what chanaged? The same thing that changed even in the Bell Labs. For example, why do we have communication satellites (ie Telstar), transistors, fiber optics, lasers, digital communication, mobile phones, the C programming language and its many variants, talking machines, fundamental knowledge of the entire universe, and Unix (now called Linux)? In every case, nobody in the Labs was concerned with results. Therefore the results were massive.
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You are hitting a different point than what I was getting at but I agree.
American schools need to dump the idea that standardized tests mean anything. We should still take them, to see what schools are failing at teaching basic skills, but realize that good test scores don't have any applicability to the working world.
The US economy is moving away from menial tasks so therefore it is even more important to produce confident, innovative students. Teaching to standardized tests does the opposite. That is why many companies don't want to hire the 4.0 Chinese student (to be stereotypical). They are insanely good at problems they have been taught to solve but tend to choke up on problems that don't have a right or wrong answer.
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Originally Posted by DanaC
That may be a factor in their success. Also a factor is, I think, the level of respect and cultural capital held by teachers in those countries. Teachers in our two cultures are not respected. They are paid very low when the level of education and qualification are taken into account. They appear in popular culture on a demonised and scapegoated manner and are the butt of derisive humour and mistrust.
We don't actually value schooling in its own right and teaching at anything below degree level is denigrated as crowd control or babysitting.
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Did I miss your point?