Comment by DeathArrow
20 days ago
It's a Western problem. In China students work very hard because they had to beat a tough competion to even be able to attend the University. And they know that finishing the University with good grades will mean a difference between a good life and a hard one. In South Korea it's the same.
So, IMO, standards should be kept very high. There is no need that all people finish the University. There are plenty of jobs that can be done without attending an University. But the problem is that even for those jobs there's a degree of competence required and some willing to work. And there are people who fail at low qualification jobs. Solution? Bring some competition. Hire only well prepared people.
I'm going to say something really out of pocket about the average American student, so forgive me.
Americans aren't used to having to compete. When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.
I think a large part of it is an entitlement issue that's pretty common in our culture. But there are also cultural undercurrents from resentful Americans who failed to get ahead in life that actively denigrate the concept of education and the educated.
>When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.
I you even know how often I've heard students complain about "having my A taken away from me". It's insane, but it's also what to expect from a society just like you described who has been told that the point of school is to get good grades.
Now, a lot of students here are discovering that minmaxing to get a high GPA in a degree like compsci lands them firmly in jobless land if they failed to use those 4 years in an environment of learning to actually learn things. Doesn't even have to be from courses, things like student groups and competitions, research opportunities, etc.
Employers don't really want people whose sole interest is to do nothing and be rewarded for it.
Maybe I’m biased because I grew up in a family where my dad at one point was a musician and my siblings and I all pursued competitive careers at one point in our lives (academia, acting, business, music, sports), but I don’t know if Americans in general are averse to competition. In fact, I’d say Americans love competition. Americans generally love sports, for example.
I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”
>Americans generally love sports
That’s funny, since I think your sports leagues are the best example of fake competitiveness. Every major sports operates a closed league.
The greatest basketball talent ever from my country is playing for a team that’s tanking (see? it even has a word), which for those who don’t know is the act of purposefully losing games to be able to get better draft picks. Because of a closed league, the players and staff are not really punished for bad performance.
The reason for this (besides the obvious financial reasons) is the idea of losing completely. In football leagues around thw world, historical giants have faded away to irrelevancy due to bad performances year after year or mismanagement (for which there are rules for to have fewer incidents).
Fundamentally though the sports system is more enertainment than pure competition.
> Americans generally love sports
Americans spend more time watching sports more than exercising themselves:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/activity-leisur...
https://time2play.com/blog/americas-sports-watching-habits/
https://www.nwahomepage.com/news/study-1-in-4-americans-watc...
The only way to keep standards high is to cease using degrees solely as class indicators and stop requiring a bachelor's degree for the overwhelming majority of white collar jobs (that we all know don't need the specific knowledge from the degree or else the required degree would be more specific, and that we also know the degree doesn't indicate work ethic necessarily, go look at the people working much harder precisely because they don't have a degree, if anything the degree serves as a license to slack off like the upper class so).
Otherwise the potential downside of not graduating with at least a bachelor's degree is so devastating that the population (who don't want to be perpetually responsible for their adult children that have been made unemployable in any decent capacity for no reason other than to make certain email job people feel important) will accept nothing less than a pass rate approaching ever closer to 100%.
If you want to make education rigorous, you have to address that problem and then also try to address the K-12 education system that faces a similar but more extreme version of the same issue (because not being able to properly read and write are genuinely bad indicators for the majority of white collar jobs, and failing to graduate high school tends to indicate fundamental issues in that respect moreso than failing to graduate with a bachelor's, which usually just indicates immaturity / lack of money / boredom / a million other things that don't imply missing fundamental skills).
That difference in Asian societies as against Western ones doesn't come from "higher standards" or whatever; it comes from a much more mundane reason: not doing good in school here literally has immediate far-reaching consequences because everything is scarce and up for brutal competition.
In the West kids can randomly decide to drop entire years after high school, or even skip college altogether - because it's (apparently) easy to not be immediately destitute without a good job. In India and China children grow up witnessing how much of a divide that makes, and how thin the line seperating their fates from "respectable" to brutal poverty is. No kid growing in such an environment will take school lightly.
I wonder if, as inequality increases and the social safety net disappears in the USA, this will change. My parents told me “do what you love, as long as you work hard you’ll succeed and be fine.” I did what I loved (the arts), worked my ass off and succeeded, and wasn’t fine. Thank god I learned to code in the 20-teens, when competition was lower.
I most certainly will transmitting a different set of values to my kids. Not going to go full straight A’s psychopath because I’ve seen what that’s done to some peers, but unless I win the lottery my kids will not be being told to just “do what they love” (unless they happen to love applied math lol)
Anything I’ve read about how South Korea treats its students makes me doubt it’s the way to go.
>In China students work very hard because they had to beat a tough competion to even be able to attend the University
This is an unfair comparison. The equivalent of those chinese students do work as hard in America - they just wouldn't be found at OP's school, there would be in a Tier 1 school.
Who do you think worked harder in high school?
A) the median university student in the USA?
B) the median university student in China?
Hint: in China, university admissions is based in large part on students's performance on the 高考, a national entrance exam, taken at the end of high school.
My experience with Chinese universities is they work so hard to pass the gaokao to get in then relax through university. This is common throughout all of east Asia. Maybe at top universities it’s different.
From Hong Kong and it is tough to get in. Once you enter university you are free of reins and slack off.
When it comes to the ChatGPT-ification of cheating, I'd say it's an Anglosphere problem, as it's primarily trained on English-language material.