Quality of Education in China? Overnationalism?

vesicles said:

Critical thinking is a training, a skill, not a genetic trait. Just like any other trainable skills, someone can be good at it while others are less good at it. Most students in any nation start out without any training on critical thinking because their top priority is learning, not doubting whatever they are being taught. Since most people go to work immediately after college, they are stuck with the whatever-in-the-writing-must-be-correct mode. Of course, there are people who are born suspicious of everything. They have difficulty with authority and have difficulty accepting anything. However, this is NOT critical thinking.

Critical thinking has to be trained. You can't simply doubt any thing written without any reason. Those crazy nuts who doubt moon landing are not critical thinkers. You have to learn to look at the right places and ask the right questions. People spend a lot of time learning how to put on the critical thinking hat. I still remember first year in grad school, we were grilled so hard in those seminar classes. At first, we thought it would be the easiest class since it's simply reading a few papers and no tests, just some oral presentation discussing the papers. Yet, it became so hard. The professors kept asking "how do you know?" "Why do you think that is the case?" "What do you think they did wrong?" We always felt like a bunch of dumba$$$ after the class. We had a hard time understanding why we had to do all this. I mean these papers have been published in high impact peer reviewed journals. These are experts in the field. How can they do anything wrong??? They wouldn't allow it to be published if they found something wrong. But the truth is everybody makes mistakes, either out of carelessness, wrong hypothesis/theory, or lack of data.

I remember talking with my dad about all the scientific theories when i was in grad school. My dad was so frusated whenever I kept saying how great Newton and Eimstein were. He kept telling me that while it is OK to admire these great scientists, it is NOT OK to believe in their theories as if they are fact/truth. All their theories are only theories confirmed by experiments that could be performed at the time and limited by the knowledge known at the time. The only way to advance science is to believe in your heart that any theory can be wrong. Otherwise, we will be kept in this box and never be able to actually advance.

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ahadicow said:

Just watched. In my opinion, it's another reflection on the polar seperation of chinese education system's ideal and reality. My biggest impression was with a elementratry school that engrave onto their staircase, five tranditional chinese virtues : 仁(mercy) 义(compassion) 礼(modesty) 智(intelligence) 信(credibility).

How do you teach those things to 12yr old children in a ultilitarian society that is incresingly obsessed with material gain?

I have no idea.

But I do know grand school buildings with profound symbolism and making young kids dress in tranditional chinese attires would not help.

ps: forgot to say, good job translating and posting. It is sadly from CCTV that can't help but to propagandize. I watched a NHK documentry about chinese education that I think rather stirkes at heart(acturally chinese and japanese education have similar problems), I would try to dig it up.

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balance said:

An interesting article on China's academic scientific environment, especially Peking University. This guy said that Peking Uni. lab is better than prestigious univ. in England and US. He also said that all researchers have equal opportunities to apply for funding. He also stated that he enjoyed the research freedom there.

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I am more inclined to believe that what he said was true. What do you guys think?

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ahadicow said:

I don't think chinese university would suck, seeing how much money Chinese gov sunk into those. It should be assumed they had the good labs/faculty/funding. What you cannot ignore is that:

a. Scientific journalism is dominated by English, and is biased against Chinese academies
b. Chinese is not a creative economy, so economy does not fund research directy.
c. China don't have a trandition that is very supportive of scholarly interest.


Point (a), I agree wholeheartedly. Chinese scientific articles have values, but they are somewhat ignored by the mainstream academicians.

Point (b), I agree, and my explanation for the apparent lack of creativity is that it is more interested in stability than in progress. Of course, if progress is required to maintain stability, they will go that route, otherwise, they are happy with stable society (or, harmonious society, borrowing Hu Jintao's phrase).

Point (c), I don't know what to say. It is debatable. Like other human beings, Chinese scholars have interest in venturing into various fields of research, but the environment discourages absolute free thinking. Freedom of thought is suspected to threaten tradition.

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solarz said:

Humans are physically weak. We may be smart, but a wooden spear doesn't help much against a sabre-tooth unless you have a few buddies backing you up.

It doesn't matter that society does not share common genes, the human mind was shaped by millennia of tribe-based socialization. A successful tribe can only have one (or a few) leaders, while all the rest have to follow orders. This evolutionary pressure is why most people are "sheep".



People believe what they *want* to believe. That's what you are missing from your hypothesis. You are assuming that people prefer knowing the "truth", when really all they want is to feel good about themselves.

Humans have an innate desire to feel a part of something bigger, and to find purpose and meaning in their lives. People don't like to feel ignorant, and they don't like admitting their ignorance. They are also lazy. All this combined explains why most people are so ready to believe in simple answers about the purpose of life.



Faith and honesty have only the faintest relation to each other. Trust is not built on honesty, it's built own relationships. A child trusts his mother because she is his caretaker, not because she is honest. School kids trust their teachers because they are also caretakers. People trust policemen and doctors because they're authority figures.

Moral education, religious or patriotic, fail not because they're simplistic, but because the students stop at the simple answers. You can't become a successful scientist by just reading textbooks. You have to go out and do your own experiments and draw your own conclusions. The same principle applies for morality.

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solarz said:

To take ahadicow's example, if we simply showed kids the horrors of war, it is not at all certain that they will be repulsed by it. Definitely, some children will be, but there will be others who think it's really cool. There still needs to be someone in a position of trust to tell those kids that people dying is a bad thing.

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ahadicow said:

If children are not naturally repulsed by death and war then maybe they are not so terrible. What I don't get from this "moral education" concept is what do we possess in the department of morality that our children don't so we can pretend to teach them. Morality isn't science that has a body of emperical data to support it. We didn't learn that "Raping is wrong" after we conducted some experiment of raping then examine the result. So why do we bother to teach our children raping is wrong, they intuitively know that(if they know what raping is). We should be bothered to tell them raping is against law though, because we conduct wrong doings all the time that distinction between "wrong" and "illegally wrong" is useful(very) to us.

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When I was in elementry school, I couldn't feel better about wars. Wars produce heroes, things that I want to be. Wars are also exciting, dramatic and chaotic, what a farcry from the long, repetitive school days. I watch how PLA beat up stupid Japanese, Nationalists and Americans, no movies surpass war movies, they are plain awesome.

Then I read this piece out of a children's magzine. It was not about a war, it was about a young boy my age living in this nice place called Sarajevo. Oh man, his life was Harsh. He has to cook for himself, get food from depot, get water from well and take care of his mother and do another hundred of choirs. He gladly did them everyday and I thought he must be a very good child(way better than me).

One day, his mother wasn't feeling so well after drinking the water he bought. She started to fever. The dad took off and never returned. The child's mother forbid him to go to the hospital because it was "across the street". The boy (being the good child he was) obeyed. He continued to care for her, bring her food and water, wipe off her sweat and watched her grow weaker and paler. By the fourth day, the mother was unconcious and the boy consider the ban lifted. He ran "across the street" dodging gun fires and got lucky and made it to the hospital. When he came back with the medicine, however, she was no more, just a cold and pale body and the boy alone in the house.

I read this and thought: whose fault was this? Who was the bad guy here? and to my amazement I couldn't find the evil character that I'm familiar with in all my war movies and hero stories. So, I read the stroy again, and again. Couldn't find. It was then I realized, there was no bad guy. The boy's family happened to live in that place, the war happended to that place. It's that simple.

That's how I learned that war is a human tragedy. I can abstruct to you a bunch of ethics, reasons and philosophies, but this was how I learned.

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solarz said:

You're wrong. There is a large body of empirical data to support our understanding of morality. It's called history.




You felt bad about this story because you were brought up in a culture where losing one's mother to disease is a very sad event. If you were brought up in antiquity Sparta, you'd be thinking, "why is this boy living with his mother and obeying her orders? He should be studying with the warriors!"

My point is, children do *not* inherently know right from wrong. There are many cultures in history where seeing people die and suffer is a cause for joy, so long as those people are "enemies". In medieval Mongolian culture, killing and raping was routine and considered the normal activities of a warrior (so long as it was done to the enemy).


There *are* children who grow up with "moral studies" as you described. They're orphans and urchins who grow up on the streets. Nobody teaches them morality, everything they know, they learn from observing what happens around them.

Then there are kids who grow up in dysfunctional domestic abuse families. Seeing their father beating their mother daily does not make those kids averse to violence. On the contrary, chances are they are going to grow up into violent people themselves.

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ahadicow said:

No, I feel bad about that story because if conflicts with my being. I can't be brought up not feeling endearing to the being that have given me life and comfort whereever I go and decide to do with my life. Don't you think it's arrogent to explain away other person's feelings? I won't lay it upon you though, it is the desire to make sense of morality that often makes people arrogent, happened to great people too.

To correct you, Spartan and Mogolian culture do not enjoy "seeing people die and suffer", they enjoy "seeing lesser beings than people die and suffer", they do not consider their enemies and their slaves "people". I have a feeling that you know this. If you really think culture is the ultimate determinant of morality, then how do you explain all world culture arrive at a extremely similar set of moral codes? why there isn't a culture that consider theft honorable? why there isn't a culture that celebrate lying and delusion?

You want to make the point that children need to be taught morality. Your underlying thesis for that point is morality is knowledge, gathered by our forefathers to pass down to us. see if your thesis can survive the following test:

Science is knowledge, knowledge gathered by people before us and to be pass down to our chilren. There is a thing called science fiction. How (some)science fictions work is basically take a scientific knowledge, alter it, and imagine a universe where the altered truth is the reality. For example, we know dinosaures extinct about 60 million years ago. Imagine if they didn't, what the world would be like now? that's a topic for science fiction. We don't have problem reading science fictions, because what we take to be scientific truth, we can easily imagine not true in a alternative universe.

If morality is knowledge, it should also be possible to imagine alternatives to it. So, we should be able to construct a "morality fiction" where crime in our universe could be seen as legit in that fictional world. See if it is possible. Take a story that is clearly immoral and try to come up with a universe wherein the story would seem moral. If you succeed, you would just prove all our current philosophers and all fiction writers in history wrong. Good Luck on your endeavor.

Edit: While you at it, why not learn a bit about

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