Comment by pc86
6 hours ago
> such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.
It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?
If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.
Yeah, here [1] are the PISA outcomes. PISA is an international test that's generally the gold standard for comparison of educational outcomes on an international level. [1] Over the last testing year China was #2, the test prior #1. Singapore was #1 in the most recent period, and is around 75% ethnic Chinese.
Whether the differences are genetic or cultural is interesting but doesn't really matter. The reality is that they exist and are relatively immutable. For a very basic example, in China failing students fail. In American schools, failing students tend to be passed along. And such things are difficult to change, even if you could prove beyond any doubt that doing so would yield better outcomes for everybody.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...