Quote Originally Posted by Fengzi
kidcharlemane is 100% correct about Asian schools. Little room is left for individual creative thought. My wife, a product of the Chinese school system, was amazed when she first came to the U.S. and learned that public schools offered classes like art and music. It is the focus on strict education, however, that could just propel them ahead of us technologically within the next 10-15 years. Especially considering the state of our own educational system and the exact opposite value of education many Americans seem to have now.

I live in the Silicon Valley and I can tell you that the average employee roster for a high tech company reads like a Chinese phone book. Who do you think is coming up with all of the new high tech gadgets that China is copying? It's Asians living here in the U.S.. Again,take my wife, someone who has never seen the inside of an Ameican school or college, as an example. She is an expert in speech recognition and natural language processing. A few years ago she developed a revolutionary new system for speech recognition which is now patent pending. Currently she's designing software that allows computers to understand language. Not just recognize words and commands but actually understand the meaning of what's been said. Real artificial intelligence. The point is, even if the Asian educational system develops little robots who aren't prone to coming up with radical new inventions, they will perfect the shit out of them.

There is a town in the Silcon Valley called Cupertino. Cupertino is about 60% Asian and about 85% of high school kids in the town are Asian. As a school district Cupertino has the highest scores in the country. And guess which high school is #1 in the U.S.? The one in Cupertino whose student body is about 90% Chinese!

In the 15th or 16th century China was far more advanced than the rest of the world. They were the ones who invented gunpowder, the compass, moveable type, and paper. They also perfected ocean going ships and had an enormous navy which the Emporer sent out to the rest of the world to see what was out there. When they came back several years later they reported that the rest of the world was primitive and had nothing to offer. They shut out the rest of the world and became complacent.

Yes, now China, and the rest of Asia, are playing catch up. But for how long? China's high tech industry has advanced as much in the last ten years as ours has in the last 30. Plus, as living conditions in China improve, at least for the educated and wealthy, many of the Chinese engineers who have been living in the U.S are heading back. Before long they will have learned all they can from our inventions and start coming up with their own.

What worries me the most is that I think we have become complacent. Our educational system is deplorable. Kids aren't held back or given failing grades because it may be bad for their self esteem. A paper that would have gotten me a grade of C- when I was in school 19 years ago now gets an A. 30%+ of students entering the California State University system need remedial Math and English. And yet, they all had good grades in these subjects in high school. The big fight over high school exit exams shows where our values are. The argument was that kids had a right to get their high school diploma and exit exams would prevent a lot of them from getting them. But don't the exams just test the knowledge that the kids should be getting? If they can't pass the test they don't have the knowledge and shouldn't get the diploma. We place such a high value on the diploma, a fucking sheet of paper. Asians, however, value the knowledge.

If China does take over the world its not going to be with their military, its going to be with their brains. And, it's going to be our own fault.
Quote Originally Posted by nicholasstanko
yo, excellent post man.
:thumbsup:

Yup, what he said!! :thumbsup: