Neoliberals on one side, technocratic oligarchs on the other, and Evangelical anti-intellectualism on the flanks. It's an actual fucking conspiracy.
Neoliberals on one side, technocratic oligarchs on the other, and Evangelical anti-intellectualism on the flanks. It's an actual fucking conspiracy.
The PISA test is an attempt to measure the academic performance of 15 year old students in 79 relatively developed countries. In the latest study the US got a slightly above average score in reading skills and ranked 24th, just below Taiwan, the UK and Portugal. The highest ranking countries were Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada, Finland and Ireland.
You should be careful about these kinds of tests as they don't measure things like critical thinking or creativity but clearly, the US is far from being number one.
PISA sucks. All versions focus on producing a ranking, maybe because that's how university administrators think. The test may produce some usable results (oh schools that do X are better at Y) but iin the end all of that is flattened in arbitrary lists and that is all the public really is told.
Some 20 years ago, the first round of PISA tests caused a big media kerfuffle in Germany, because German students scored pretty badly, even lower than some developing countries (oh no). The technocrats of course used this to fuel "reforms" that amounted to cutting a year off the Gymnasium track and some other "economy-friendly" anti-intellectualist measures, most of which had nothing to do with "Literacy and Numeracy". Turned out the incentive structure was extremely uneven across countries, there were problems with the methodology, some governments apparently just cheated... but nothing of this was very big in the media. The ratchet only works one way.
I remember when one of the first big rankings came out, and Denmark also apparently scored lower than we would have liked. In particular, there was a lot of focus on China, and the chinese system. My mom was a teacher at the time and flat out said that the reason why China was scoring was better, was because the schools that were sampled were private schools, who could just kick students out if they underperformed, or didn't have the ressources to get their grades "back" up. In general there was a lot of anxiety at the time about China taking over, which died down for almost a decade before roaring back to life in the mid 2010's.
I don't remember much China focus during the years after the PISA debacle, when I was old enough to really remember. There was a lot of talk about Finland and South Korea, and there have been since some attempts to copy some elements of the Finnish system, a little.
Apparently South Koreans were primed with the national hymn and speeches telling them to be patriotic brain athletes for the fatherland before taking the test. And Finns are in their system trained to take apparently ungraded tests very seriously. And both of them fell and rose in subsequent PISA rankings, because uh PISA sucks
At least in Denmark there was a documentary made about how the Chinese school system worked. I'm not entirely sure about the reach of it, but it was released over a couple of weeks, and supposedly pitted the students at an ordinary school in Shanghai up against the students of an ordinary danish school in a series of tests. Danish kids obviously failed quite badly in most areas, except for "world news" since that was mostly based around western history, which is already taught here, and english language tests, since we are taught english from like 3rd grade, and english is significantly closer to danish than to Mandarin.
I really don't know enough about the Chinese school system. I half remember some articles that were mostly "China different(bad)" or "Authoritarian factory-like education actually good!"(...that's what I get for reading the haute-burgeois reactionary/neolib newspaper FAZ sometimes). I would presume Chinese schools are good, but that's because I'm a socialist.
I imagine it's a very differentiated picture overall.
I don't know a whole lot about the chinese educational system either, and after watching the danish documentary, you'd also not be terribly clever either. Supposedly after the documentary aired, it was revealed that the school in Shanghai was in fact an elite private school, and that somehow none of the documentary makers had been informed about this. Anyway, it was a really dumb time in Danish media, and thankfully they stopped talking about china for the next 5 years, which was a blissful time of quiet.
Critical thinking and creativity are often brought up in this context, especially when it comes to high scores received by East Asian countries and I always wonder how much of this is just Westoid cope.
I've heard a lot of white people claim that Asian education system is too focused on rote learning and doesn't teach critical thinking or creativity but you only have to look at Facebook and Twitter to see the general state of Western "critical thinking". As for creativity, obviously that's really hard to quantify, but an absolute fuckload of popular entertainment comes out of Japan, South Korea, and (more recently) China.
And I'm not accusing you of being racist at all, but the whole thing with creativity and critical thinking really mirrors the "goldilocks" theory of racism where white supremacists claim that black people are stronger physically and Asians are smarter but Whites are the goldilocks blend of strength, intelligence, and creativity.
I love this because of how this belief manifests through history. Like, the Romans thought that western Europeans were stronger physically and Africans were smarter, but that they were the golidlocks.
It'll be around as long as racists need to cope for being inferior in some perceived way to a race they hate.
More than once in my life, I have heard white Americans say that "we'd score higher" if only white kids in America were tested.
:amerikkka: , of course