How is it that East Asian education wastes too many lives?

Shuji Nakamura, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 20 14 for developing blue LED, held a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Association in Japan in 20 15 10 to criticize Japan's patent system and the whole East Asian education system. He criticized the Japanese education system, saying that the college entrance examination system is very bad, as are China and South Korea. The educational goal of all high school students is to be admitted to a famous university. He thinks that the education system in Asia is a waste of time, and young people should learn different things.

He is an atypical Japanese scientist, born in an ordinary fisherman's family, and his test ability is also average. He went to Tokushima University, a third-rate university in Japan, with strong hands-on ability and self-study ability. He has a deep understanding of physics, but he is completely self-taught. He doesn't even have a physics department at Tokushima University. People like him are oppressed in Japan, and his criticism of the Japanese education system is justified.

Shuji Nakamura, winner of the 20 14 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Such people are oppressed in Japan, and his criticism of the Japanese education system is also justified.

First, East Asian education: low efficiency, everyone suffers.

The education system in East Asia is quite special, which is often appreciated by outsiders and criticized by insiders. Japan's education system is relatively loose among the three countries, not to mention some countries, and teachers, students and parents suffer greatly.

As for South Korea, it is also famous for its extreme exams and academic qualifications. Seoul National University, KoreaUniversity and Yonsei University are collectively called "Sky". 70% of the presidents of the largest enterprises in Korea are graduates of these three universities, and 80% of the civil servants in the judicial department come from these three universities.

Almost all Korean children go to cram schools. In 2009, the total profit of Korean cram schools was about $7.3 billion, more than that of Samsung Electronics. The huge education expenditure is the biggest reason why Koreans dare not have more children. In 20 12, OECD launched the "international student ability assessment program", and Korean students ranked first in all member countries in mathematics and reading projects. However, this achievement was achieved at a rather low efficiency. Some critics say: "These children have achieved this result by redoubling their efforts and spending." ....

Why does East Asia have such an education system? I think it's because of the Prussian gene in the modern education system of East Asian countries, plus the Confucian and imperial examination traditions in East Asia. For some countries, it can be said that the practical and rapid guidance and ideological indoctrination functions of Soviet-style education have been increased.

Second, East Asian education has a "Prussian gene" that follows the rules.

Before19th century, education was actually an apprenticeship system similar to handicraft industry, whether it was a private school in the East or a tutor in the West. However, with the increase of subjects and the demand for the working population with basic education, the so-called K- 12 (that is, our ordinary primary and secondary schools in Asia) education system has emerged.

The standard education model in modern countries is some basic elements that we take for granted:

Walk into the teaching building at seven or eight in the morning;

Sit and listen for 40-60 minutes. In class, the teacher is responsible for speaking and the students are responsible for listening.

Lunch and physical education class time are interspersed between courses;

After school, students go home to do their homework.

Under the bondage of standardized curriculum, the vast and beautiful field of human thinking has been artificially cut into pieces that are easy to manage and called "disciplines". Similarly, the original concepts of mobility, integration and mastery are all divided into "curriculum units".

This model was first realized by Prussians in18th century. It was they who first invented our present classroom teaching mode. The original intention of the Prussians is not to educate students who can think independently, but to churn out a large number of loyal and manageable citizens. The values they learn in school make them obey the authority including parents, teachers and churches, and of course, ultimately obey the king.

Of course, the education system in Prussia at that time was innovative in many aspects. Such an education system has turned thousands of people into the middle class and provided a vital impetus for Germany to become an industrial power. Based on the technical level at that time, the most economical way for Prussia to achieve the goal of universal education was probably to adopt the Prussian education system.

However, this system hinders students' further exploration and is not conducive to their independent thinking ability. However, in the19th century, high-level creative logical thinking ability may not be as important as obeying orders in thought and mastering basic skills in action.

/kloc-In the first half of the 9th century, the United States basically copied the education system of Prussia, just like in Prussia, which can greatly promote the construction of the middle class and enable them to get a job in the booming industrial field. Except the United States, this system was imitated by other European countries in the19th century and extended to other countries outside Europe and America.

However, today's economic situation no longer needs a submissive and disciplined working class. On the contrary, it requires more and more workers' reading ability, mathematical literacy and humanistic background.

Today's society needs creative, curious and self-directed lifelong learners, who need the ability to put forward novel ideas and put them into practice. Unfortunately, the goal of Prussian education runs counter to this social demand. Today's education completely ignores the extraordinary diversity and subtle differences between people, which make people different in intelligence, imagination and talent.

Third, in addition to the Prussian gene, East Asian education is also deeply influenced by Confucian tradition and imperial examination system.

/kloc-At the end of 0/9, when the three East Asian countries began to introduce this modern education system in order to catch up with western powers, due to their Confucian tradition and imperial examination system, they inevitably distorted and attached importance to this system subconsciously.

1, confusion about the college entrance examination and the imperial examination system

East Asian countries always confuse the college entrance examination with their long tradition of imperial examination. There was no great demand for creativity in ancient society, so the imperial examination was a good system, which completed the selection of social managers with minimal conflict and established the criterion of "Zhi Dai Gate".

If we want to simulate the imperial examination, the counterpart now should be the civil service examination or the entrance examination of some big companies. Because these exams, like imperial examinations, need to select well-trained adults who can engage in certain jobs immediately.

The goal of the college entrance examination is to select those who are plastic and ambitious for further study. Such a person should be like liquid glass taken out of a melting furnace, which can be rotated and elongated and highly plastic. Those who pass the imperial examination will come out of the kiln like glazed porcelain and can be used immediately, but if you make a slight change, it will either be broken or scratched.

Besides, examination is a very limited tool. As we all know, the ancient imperial examination neglected talents, but in modern times, no matter what kind of examination, what can test candidates' interest, ambition, imagination and practical ability? Even the most objective and measurable math exam will lose a lot.

Salman khan, the founder of Khan Academy, cited algebra as an example. When studying algebra, most students only focus on getting high marks, and the content of the exam is only the most important part of each unit. Candidates only remember a lot of x and y, and they can get their values by substituting x and y into rote formulas. X and y in the exam do not reflect the power and importance of algebra. The importance and charm of algebra lies in that all these x and y represent infinite phenomena and opinions.

The equation used to calculate the production cost of listed companies can also be used to calculate the momentum of objects in space; The same equation can be used not only to calculate the best path of parabola, but also to determine the most suitable price of new products.

The calculation method of the prevalence rate of hereditary diseases can also be used in football matches to judge whether to attack in the fourth quarter. In the exam, most students do not regard algebra as a simple, convenient and omnipotent tool to explore the world, but as an obstacle to be overcome urgently.

Therefore, although the examination is very important, the society must realize the great limitations of the examination and weaken its position in material selection.

The American education system restricts students from wasting too much energy on exams by means of double insurance: first, the score of SAT is only one of the factors considered in admission, and it is unwise to pay too much attention to SAT; Second, the SAT has six opportunities to apply for the exam every year.

The education systems in Taiwan Province Province and Chinese mainland, China, encourage students to waste their youth in two ways: first, the score of the entrance examination is the decisive factor for admission or not; Second, the joint exam is held once a year.

2. East Asian countries pay too much attention to review.

The Comparative Research Report on the Rights and Interests of Senior High School Students in China, Japan, Korea and the United States released in 2009 shows that 78.3% of ordinary senior high school students in China spend more than 8 hours in school every day (excluding weekends and holidays), and 57.2% in South Korea, but this situation hardly exists in Japan and the United States. Students in China spend the longest time studying every day. What students from different countries learn is not very different, so what does it mean to study for too long? Explain that the proportion of review time is too large. This is the biggest means to stifle students' imagination and creativity.

Speaking of the importance of review, people often quote "learning while learning", and this "learning" is review. But there is a huge difference between the Confucius era and today's society, that is, the content of learning. The main content of learning in Confucius era is "ceremony", and actors can only achieve the effect by repeated drills.

However, human social life has evolved to modern times, and the main content of learning has changed from "courtesy" to cognition. Cognition is expanding and changing, and its essence is to create or learn new things. If education excessively strengthens review, innovative talents will not be produced.

In addition, as Paul GlaxoSmithKline said, "even the knowledge learned in the best high school is insignificant compared with the university." Take the liberal arts as an example. How does the knowledge in history textbooks that need to be read repeatedly in high school compare with that required by any university history department? As for mathematics, even middle school mathematics is well mastered, but calculus, which appeared in the seventeenth century, has not yet been learned.

What's more, with the explosion of knowledge, all the mathematical knowledge of 1900 can be crammed into 1000 books, and 10 books will be needed by 2000 (Devlin's mathematics is still being talked about). It can be seen that it is an inefficient learning method to spend the most energetic years in one's life on learning this limited knowledge repeatedly.

In recent years, the theory of 10 thousand hours has become popular, which seems to be the theoretical support of repeated practice. But this kind of discussion mostly focuses on activities with low cognitive complexity, such as chess, piano, basketball, taxi driving, spelling and so on. For activities with high cognitive complexity, such as creation and management, it is difficult to find enough evidence. In fact, this can explain why the training of piano and violin skills has declined in the west, but it has flourished in East Asian countries.

This technique, which achieved great success in the19th century, is characterized by relatively fixed difficulty training steps and limited total knowledge. It only needs more practice, and the progress of learning can be measured by the difficulty of tracks or test scores. This is just in line with the preferred learning method in East Asia.

Therefore, most parents of these piano children in East Asian countries have neither musical hobbies nor background knowledge of classical music, but let their children spend a lot of time practicing. The inner starting point is like the fool in the famous joke who only looks for the key under the street lamp, because the street lamp is on.

3. The influence of egalitarianism and scarcity mentality.

Many excuses for the entrance examination are not satisfactory, but they are the fairest. This is the influence of the Confucian tradition of "not suffering from widowhood but suffering from inequality". There is nothing wrong with fairness, but it would be sad if different types of talent development channels were suppressed across the board for fairness. With such a large population base in East Asian countries, the opportunity cost of this talent waste is incalculable.

Give an example of other countries. There is a comparison in European academic circles, such as Britain and Germany, which are considered to be countries where classical learning is dominant, but the talents in Britain are much better. The reason is that the education system in Britain is not fair enough. There are some middle schools in Britain that have a very high possibility of being admitted to a good university for traditional reasons, so that students in them are immersed in huge classical academics very early.

On the other hand, Germany is fairer, and all students have to pass the exam when they go to college. In this way, students have to spend more energy on general preparation subjects. As a result, this superficial unfairness in Britain may produce high-quality talents.

Like Peter? The business examples cited in Thiel's From 0 to 1 seem fair on the surface, but in fact, the profits of enterprises participating in this competition will become as thin as the blade, and they can only take care of immediate interests and cannot make long-term plans for the future.

Monopoly enterprises like Google can care about their own products and have greater autonomy to make various long-term plans because they don't have to compete with other enterprises. Therefore, if students are under the competitive pressure of exams for a long time, it is naturally impossible to have a long-term self-growth plan, and they can only concentrate on the exams that determine their own life path.

On the other hand, it is not unreasonable for East Asian countries to compete for limited high-quality educational resources from kindergartens to universities. But why is the competition in this area so fierce? That may be because of the scarcity mentality caused by long-term material shortage.

Last year's hot economics of scarcity: Why do you always meet deadlines? Why do you always feel that time and money are not enough? It is pointed out that when people are in a state of scarcity (material or time), scarcity will capture the brain, and capturing people's attention will not only affect the speed at which we see things, but also affect our understanding of the world around us. And when we are extremely focused on solving the problems of the present, we cannot plan the future effectively.

I think scarcity is a unique situation in East Asian countries. Because these countries have been rice-intensive planting economies for thousands of years, on the one hand, they can feed more people under the same cultivated land, on the other hand, they certainly need to pay more labor and endure more congestion. /kloc-after the 0/7th century, they all fell into the trap of involution.

Take Japan as an example. From 15 to 19, the population of Japan fluctuated between100000 and 20 million, about four times that of Britain in the same period. The cultivated land on which the huge population depends is only equivalent to a county in Britain, but its productivity is not as good as that of a county in Britain. Therefore, in the Tokugawa period, in order to survive, the Japanese not only brought industry and economy to the extreme, but even appeared two incredible phenomena.

One is that the Japanese government came forward to encourage babies to drown, so that the population grew at zero in 300 years. In addition, because precious land can't be used to provide feed for livestock, the Japanese systematically canceled the use of two basic agricultural technologies: wheels and livestock. As a result, to use an image metaphor, they keep their noses on the water, and as long as there are unexpected disasters or unexpected expenses, they may be drowned. This unique lack and anxiety of East Asians cannot be understood by the natives of Southeast Asia, Europeans and Americans, or even Africans.

Therefore, if educational resources are narrowly understood as well-equipped classrooms and high-level teachers, it is indeed limited. For East Asians who have been in a state of scarcity for a long time, they must participate in the competition.

But in fact, the more important educational resources for children to become talents are actually the cultural background, values, aspirations and vision of their families, which has nothing to do with the zero-sum game of "You can't go to this school".

Moreover, if parents, driven by the scarcity mentality, let their children immerse themselves in cram schools and the sea of questions since childhood, hoping to grab the seemingly scarce school resources first, perhaps in the long run, they will waste their children's greatest resources-unlimited juvenile time and natural curiosity, that is, love is enough to harm them.

4. Catch up with the mentality brought by industrialization.

The origin of modern industrialization is in Western Europe, so their economic, social and educational systems have a relatively slow period of natural evolution and development. However, East Asian countries are trapped in modern society. In order to catch up with other countries, the industrial system has been developed under the guidance of national plans without exception. Japanese industrialization is attributed to the bureaucrats of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, while South Korea is supported by several chaebol to coordinate the whole development plan, while China has such a five-year plan to guide it.

This national plan is based on the rationalism of19th century, and its idea is that there are no unsolvable problems in the world, and the accurate development direction of things in the future can be predicted through scientific investigation.

When this idea is applied to the education system, it is assumed that an institution can accurately predict what kind of knowledge children of a certain age need to master, what kind of talents can be selected for an exam, and so on. This confidence is extremely terrible.

As for the specific operation of schools and learning, the East Asian education system established specifically to meet the needs of industrialized talents pursues efficiency more crazily than the naturally developed western system. In this way, the education system of these backward industrial countries is more like a factory assembly line than the education system of the predecessor industrial countries.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Taylor doctrine prevailed in American industry. Taylor believes that the fundamental purpose of management is to improve efficiency. To this end, he adopted a "spiritual revolution" of setting labor quota, selecting the best workers, implementing standardized management, implementing incentive compensation system and emphasizing labor-capital cooperation.

This will give full play to the potential of workers. Some people describe that in Taylor-style factories, there are no redundant workers, and every worker works like a machine all the time. The premise of Taylor's theory is to regard "people" as management objects as "economic people", and interest-driven is the main magic weapon used by schools to improve efficiency. The most famous Taylor factory in modern times is Foxconn. From the report, we can also guess the psychological impact of this high-pressure environment on workers.

If we compare the education system in East Asia with the factory made by Taylor, we will find that it is almost one-to-one, such as formulating high learning volume and a large number of knowledge points that need to be assessed, selecting students with good grades to form key schools, unified national assessment standards, incentives and punishments formed by a large number of examinations, and various chicken blood activities within schools. The goal of the school is to give full play to students' potential and devote every minute to get the best results.

Therefore, critics of this education system often say that children seem to be industrial products that flow online, or that students are child laborers of teachers, and their achievements become teachers' achievements, so the interests of teachers and students are often inconsistent, but opposite. This is not simple angry words, but has certain internal logic.

Of course, because of the hard-working tradition of East Asian countries, it is not unacceptable for children to work so hard, if it really works. But the problem lies in this effectiveness.

The Taylor system in this kind of education essentially regards students as manual workers. For manual workers, because the working state is visible, factory management is easier, and the requirement for them is to "do things right" rather than "do things right".

As for modern students, I think they are more like "knowledge workers" defined by Drucker (knowledge workers do not produce tangible things, but produce knowledge, creativity and information, and no one can see what they are thinking). Most of them want to be knowledge workers for the purpose of training. The real achievement of students' time is not their homework and papers, but what they have really learned and thought about. These are technically impossible to strictly supervise.

Therefore, being a good student should not be as faithful as a manual worker to finish a teacher's homework, but as effective as a knowledge worker, that is, "doing the right thing". A good student must decide the focus of his study, measure his mastery of knowledge and manage his study time. This requires great initiative and freedom.

So, sadly, due to the genes of the industrial age in the East Asian education system, they train their future scholars and entrepreneurs by training manual workers, which is bound to be the opposite.

Fourth, East Asian education is in urgent need of reform, but it is becoming more and more rigid.

For a long time, the advantages of the education system in East Asia outweigh the disadvantages. In the period of industrialization, a large number of useful workers and junior engineers can be created for newly established industries in a short time. Therefore, with the rapid development of East Asian countries in the 20th century, this educational system has made great contributions. However, with the development of technology and economy, this system has become more and more outdated.

This can be simulated as heavy industry in the Soviet era. Under this system, coal mining is for iron and steel smelting and iron and steel smelting is for the machinery industry, which is devoted to the production of mining and smelting machines, thus forming an internal self-circulation, ignoring the actual needs of the market and competition. During the industrialization of the Soviet Union, this heavy industry did produce a large number of industrial products that were originally lacking, which was very useful. But when it reaches a certain stage, its weakness of lack of efficiency and international competitiveness is exposed. Today, the Soviet Union, once the second industrial power, what is the value of its automobile industry and machinery industry? Similarly, a large number of standardization talent mass-produced by the East Asian education system will not become less and less valuable in the new era?

What's more, in order to get rid of this system, many East Asian families send their children to study in Europe and America, but unless they stay abroad, if they return to China for employment, returnees still have to use the schools they graduated as job-hunting weights and fall into the whirlpool of comparative school fame. Just like in the Middle Ages, many lower castes in India converted to foreign Islam in order to get rid of the oppression of the caste system, but under the ubiquitous caste thought, Muslims were also regarded as a surname and still fell into this hierarchy. Therefore, TOEFL, SAT and other American examination systems have been invisibly integrated into the examination and academic system with oriental style in East Asia.

This system is difficult to shake, because it has created many vested interests, and it will even be as "terminally ill" as the above-mentioned Soviet heavy industry complex or Indian caste system. During the Soviet period, heavy industry constantly produced weapons that were not beneficial to society, formed the power of stakeholders, and wasted a lot of social resources until the whole state system collapsed. India's caste system, which has been criticized since the Buddha's time, has been bothering India for thousands of years, and it is still a huge obstacle on India's way forward today, because there are a lot of high caste vested interests behind it.

The education system in East Asia, on the one hand, supports a large number of inefficient and outdated public and private educational institutions (similar to the Soviet industrial group), on the other hand, by attaching importance to academic qualifications, most people who occupy the middle and upper classes of society are most suitable for this system, and this class ensures that their next generation can stand out in this examination system by investing more in exam-oriented education, thus passing on their advantages in social status to the next generation.

This system, which is in urgent need of reform, has become more and more rigid with the help of various social groups.