When did you go to the US? I dare say that your schooling experience in China was instrumental in you doing well in the US. I remember that I never listened to a single math class from elementary school to secondary school. What I learned in grade 2 in China was enough to get me past grade 6 math in Canada, and what I learned in Chinese school every saturday was enough to keep me ahead of the class to the end of high school.
Family values and society also plays a big part. In China, competition is much fiercer, and typically a much greater emphasis is put on language and literature in general education than in North America. Chinese families also tend to push their children a lot more strictly on education than other American or Canadian families.
When I was a freshman in high school...
I agree 120% that my experience in China helped me tremendously in schools in the States. However, again, the more flexible style in the States helped me greatly also. Like I said in my 1st post, I would not be able to get into college if I stayed in China and kept the same kind of biased focus on certain subjects. Again, I'm not saying either China's or the US' education is better. All I'm saying is that the system in the US allowed people like me to thrive. One of my wife's cousins is a lot like me. She had a heavy bias toward math and science when she was in junior high in China and all her teachers predicted that she would NOT be able to go to college. And now? She got her Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton and is a senior engineer at Intel.
I'm not questioning family value and tradition in China, but only that China's education system only allows certain types of people to thrive and is not designed to maximize the potentials of as many people as possible. In fact, this has been going on for millenia in China. We read about this many times in history books about some talented individuals who cannot pass the govn't-sanctioned official-entry test and were not considered as worthy.
I'm also aware of the heavy pressure that most Chinese families are putting on their kids nowadays, even in the US. Many of my friends make their kids take so many classes, piano, chess, dancing, etc. on top of heavy class load. These kids also have to take tutorial classes and take even heavier load. In the end, these kids are seriously burned out and get nothing left when things begin to matter, like in college and grad school. I went to college with many Chinese kids and many of them either started partying heavily once out of their parents' grip, or simply got so tired of studying and gave up. What does this mean? Vast majority of them simply take a job once finishing college. Many of my buddies actually thought I was so dumb to go to grad school. They think it would be so much easier to simply get a job and sit back and finally relax. Obviously, this is not what their parents had hoped for when they spent so much money on tutoring and so much time taking their kids to various kinds of classes.
I also had many Chinese as classmates in grad school. Many of them were able to get high scores in tests, as this is how they had been molded. And the evolutionary process in China's education system determines that those who can get high scores thrive. So many of them do extremely well in classes while in grad school. However, once we started doing research, they tend to become more and more stagnant. One of them actually told me that he felt more like a technician than a grad student because he couldn't think of anything creative to do and depended on our adviser to tell him what to do. While he can do his experiments well, the actual research depends on creative thinking, which is not what he and many Chinese students had been trained to do.
I can tell that the things are getting better now with the Chinese students. Many of the Chinese students who come to the States nowadays are more creative and tend to challenge the authority more often.
