Nobel Prize winner: Our education is purely "seeking money and killing people"

Shuji Nakamura, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics)

Japanese physicist Shuji Nakamura won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of blue-light LED, January 2015 , he held a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Association in Japan in Tokyo and criticized Japan's patent system and the entire East Asian education system.

He criticized Japan's education system, saying that the university entrance examination system is very bad, as is the case in China and South Korea. The educational goal of all high school students is to be admitted to famous universities.

He believes that the education system in Asia is a waste of time and that young people should learn different things.

Our education is purely "seeking money and killing people"

Nakamura Shuji is an atypical Japanese scientist: he comes from an ordinary fisherman family, his examination ability is mediocre, and he went to a third-rate university in Japan. Tokushima University; He has very strong hands-on ability. He adjusts instruments in the morning and does experiments in the afternoon. He has very strong self-learning ability and has a deep understanding of physics, but he is completely self-taught.

The Tokushima University where he studied does not even have a physics department. Such people are suppressed in Japan, and his criticism of the Japanese education system is well-founded.

1

Everyone suffers from inefficiency

The education system in East Asia is relatively unique and is often praised by outsiders and praised by insiders. Criticize.

Japan’s education system is already relatively loose among the three countries, not to mention some countries. Teachers, students, and parents all suffer from it.

As for South Korea, it is also famous for its extreme examinationism and academicism.

Seoul National University, Korea University and Yonsei University are collectively called "SKY". 70% of the CEOs of South Korea's largest companies are graduates of these three universities, and 80% of civil servants in the judiciary are from these three universities. university.

Nearly all Korean children attend cram schools. In 2009, the total profit of Korean cram schools was approximately US$7.3 billion, which was more than the profit of Samsung Electronics. The huge expenditure on education prevents Koreans from having more children. The biggest reason.

In 2012, the OECD conducted the "International Student Proficiency Assessment Program" and Korean students ranked first among all member countries in mathematics and reading.

However, this achievement was achieved with a very low efficiency. Some comments said: "These children achieved such results with double the efforts and double the expenses..."

Why does East Asia have such an education system?

I think it’s because East Asian countries already have Prussian genes in their modern education systems, coupled with East Asian Confucianism and imperial examination traditions.

For some countries, it can be said that the practical quick-turn orientation and ideological indoctrination functions of Soviet-style education have been added.

2

The "Prussian Gene" of following the rules

Before the 19th century, education was actually an apprenticeship system similar to handicrafts, whether it was an Eastern private school or a Western one. tutor.

But with the increase in subjects and the demand for a working population with basic education, the so-called K-12 (that is, our ordinary primary and secondary schools in Asia) education system emerged. The standard education model in modern countries has several basic elements that we have taken for granted:

1. Walk into the teaching building at seven or eight o'clock in the morning;

2. -The 60-minute course is full of sitting and listening. In the classroom, the teacher is responsible for teaching and the students are responsible for listening;

3. There are lunch and physical education periods interspersed between the courses;

4. After school, students go home and do their homework. Under the constraints of standardized curriculum, the originally vast and beautiful field of human thought has been artificially cut into manageable parts, called "disciplines."

Similarly, the original concepts of smooth flow, integration, and mastery have been divided into individual "course units."

This model was first implemented by the Prussians in the 18th century. It was they who first invented the classroom teaching model we have today.

The original intention of the Prussians was not to educate students who could think independently, but to produce a large number of loyal and manageable citizens. The values ??they learned in school made them obedient, including parents, teachers and churches. Internal authority, of course, was ultimately subject to the king.

Of course, the Prussian education system was innovative in many aspects at the time.

This education system has helped tens of thousands of people become the middle class, providing a vital driving force for Germany to become an industrial power.

Based on the technological level at the time, perhaps the most economical way to achieve the goal of education for everyone in the Kingdom of Prussia was to adopt the Prussian education system.

However, this system prevents students from engaging in more in-depth inquiry and is harmful to their ability to think independently.

However, in the 19th century, high-level creativity and logical thinking ability may not be as important as obeying orders in thought and mastering basic skills in action.

In the first half of the 19th century, the United States basically copied the Prussian education system. Just like in Prussia, this move could greatly promote the construction of a middle class and enable them to work in the booming industrial field. Get a job.

In addition to the United States, this system was also imitated by other European countries in the 19th century and extended to other countries outside Europe and the United States.

However, today’s economic status quo no longer requires a compliant and disciplined working class. On the contrary, it has increasingly higher requirements for workers’ reading ability, mathematical literacy and humanistic background.

Today’s society needs lifelong learners who are creative, curious and self-directed. They need to be able to come up with novel ideas and implement them. Unfortunately, the goals of the Prussian education system Just the opposite of this social need.

Today’s education completely ignores the wonderful diversity and nuances among people that make them unique in their intelligence, imagination, and talents. .

3

Strongly influenced by Confucian tradition and the imperial examination system

When the three East Asian countries began to introduce this modern education system in order to catch up with Western powers at the end of the 19th century, they also Inevitably, due to their own Confucian tradition and imperial examination system, they subconsciously distorted and emphasized this system.

1. Confusion between the university entrance examination and the imperial examination system

East Asian countries always confuse university entrance examinations with their long-term imperial examination tradition.

Ancient society did not have such a big demand for creativity, so the imperial examination was a very good system. It completed the selection of social managers with minimal conflict and established a criterion that replaced the clan with intelligence. .

If we want to compare it with the imperial examination, the current counterpart should be the civil service examination or the entrance examination of some large companies.

Because these examinations, like the imperial examinations, need to select already well-trained adults who can immediately engage in certain jobs.

The goal of the college entrance examination is to select those who are malleable and ambitious for the next step of education. Such people should be like liquid glass taken out of the furnace, which can be rotated, elongated, and malleable. Extremely strong.

The personnel who have passed the imperial examination are like glazed porcelain from the kiln, which can be used immediately, but if you make any changes, it will either break or be scratched.

Furthermore, exams are a very limited tool.

Everyone knows that the ancient imperial examinations omitted talents, but in modern times, no matter what kind of examination, can the candidates' interests, ambitions, imagination and practical abilities be tested?

Even the most objective and measurable math exams out there are missing a lot.

Khan Academy founder Salman Khan gave algebra as an example.

When studying algebra, students are often focused solely on getting high scores on exams, which are only the most important parts of each unit of study.

The candidates only memorize a lot of X and y, and just plug X and y into the rote formula to get their values.

X and y on the exam do not reflect the power and importance of algebra.

The importance and charm of algebra is that all these X's and y's represent infinite phenomena and perspectives.

The same equation used to calculate the production costs of public companies can also be used to calculate the momentum of an object in space; the same equation can be used not only to calculate the optimal path of a parabola, but also to calculate the optimal path of a new parabola. Product determines the most appropriate price.

The same method used to calculate the prevalence of genetic diseases can be used in football games to determine whether the offense should be called in the fourth quarter.

On the test, most students do not view algebra as a simple, convenient and versatile tool for exploring the world, but rather as a hurdle that needs to be overcome.

So, although examinations are very important, society must be able to realize the great limitations of examinations and weaken its position in material selection.

The American education system uses double insurance to prevent students from wasting excessive energy on exams:

First, SAT test scores are only one of the factors considered for admission. It is unwise to attach too much importance to the SAT;

Secondly, there are 6 registration opportunities for the SAT every year.

China's education system encourages students to waste their youth in two ways: first, the college entrance examination score is the decisive factor in admission; second, the college entrance examination is held once a year.

2. East Asian countries attach too much importance to review

The "Comparative Research Report on the Rights and Interests of High School Students in China, Japan, South Korea and the United States" released in 2009 shows that: 78.3% of Chinese ordinary high school students On weekdays (excluding weekends and holidays), 57.2% of students in South Korea spend more than 8 hours studying at school every day. However, this situation is almost non-existent in Japan and the United States. Chinese students study the longest every day.

The amount of content students learn in different countries is not very different, so what does it mean if the learning time is too long?

It means that review time takes up too large a proportion.

This is the biggest way to stifle students’ imagination and creativity.

Speaking of the importance of review, people often quote "learn and practice from time to time", and this "practice" is review.

However, there is a huge difference between Confucius’ era and today’s society, which is the content of learning.

The main learning content in the Confucius era was "ritual", and actors could only achieve the effect by practicing it repeatedly.

However, as human social life has evolved into modern times, the main content of learning has changed from "rituals" to cognition.

Cognition is expansion and change, and its essence is to create or learn new things.

If education excessively strengthens review, it will not produce innovative talents.

Moreover, as Paul Glaxo said, "Even the knowledge learned in the best high school is negligible compared with college."

Take liberal arts as an example , how does the knowledge contained in those history textbooks that need to be read repeatedly in high school compare with a few required reading books for university history departments?

As for mathematics, even in middle school, I have a good grasp of mathematics, but I have not yet learned calculus, which appeared in the seventeenth century.

What’s more, with the explosion of knowledge, all mathematical knowledge could be crammed into 1,000 books in 1900, and 100,000 volumes would be needed by 2000 (Devlin’s “Mathematics Still Chatting”).

It can be seen that it is such an inefficient learning method to spend the most energetic years of a person's life repeatedly learning such limited knowledge.

In recent years, there has been a popular 10,000-hour theory, which seems to be a theoretical support for repeated practice.

However, this discussion is mostly related to activities with lower cognitive complexity, such as chess, piano, basketball, taxi driving, and spelling.

However, it is difficult to find sufficient evidence for activities with higher cognitive complexity, such as creation and management.

In fact, this point can be used to explain why the training of skills such as piano and violin has declined in the West, but has flourished in East Asian countries.

This kind of skill, which has been well-established in the 19th century, is characterized by a relatively fixed difficulty training ladder and a limited amount of knowledge. It only requires more practice, and the progress of learning can be passed. Measured by track difficulty or grade.

This is exactly in line with the preferred learning method in East Asia. Therefore, most of the parents of these children in East Asian countries have neither musical hobbies nor background knowledge about classical music, but they let their children spend a lot of time practicing. The underlying starting point is like the famous joke about the person who only plays under the street lights because the street lights are brighter. Like a fool looking for a key.

3. The influence of egalitarianism and scarcity mentality

Many defenses for the college entrance examination say that although the college entrance examination is not satisfactory, it is the fairest.

This is the influence of the traditional Confucian thought of "not worrying about scarcity but worrying about inequality".

There is nothing wrong with fairness, but it would be very sad if for the sake of fairness, different types of talent development paths are suppressed across the board.

With such a large population base in East Asian countries, the opportunity cost of this waste of talent is too high to estimate.

Give an example from another country. There is a comparison in European academic circles. The United Kingdom and Germany are both countries that excel in classical academics, but the United Kingdom has much better talents in this field.

The reason is that the British education system is not fair enough.

There are some middle schools in the UK that, due to traditional reasons, have a very high possibility of going to a good university. In this way, the students there can be immersed in the vast classical academics without haste at an early age.

On the other hand, Germany is relatively fair. All students must pass assessments to go to university. In this way, students have to spend more energy on general exam preparation subjects.

As a result, this superficial unfairness in the UK may actually produce high-quality talents. This is just like the business example in Peter Thiel's "From 0 to 1". On the surface, perfect competition seems fairer, but in fact, the profits of companies participating in such competition will become as thin as a knife blade. Considering immediate interests, it is impossible to make long-term plans for the future.

And monopolies like Google, because they don’t have to worry about competing with other companies, can instead have greater autonomy to care about their own products and make various long-term plans that are simply unreliable.

So if students are under the competitive pressure of exams for a long time, they will naturally not be able to have long-term self-growth plans, but can only focus on the exams that will determine the path of their lives.

On the other hand, the battle for places in East Asian countries from kindergarten to university is essentially a competition for limited high-quality educational resources. This is not unreasonable.

But why is the competition in this area so intense? That may be attributed to a scarcity mentality caused by chronic material deprivation.

Last year's popular "Scarcity: How We Got Poverty and Busy" pointed out that when people fall into a state of scarcity (material or time), scarcity will capture the brain and capture people's attention. , not only affects the speed of what we see, but also affects our understanding of the world around us.

And when we are extremely focused on solving current problems, we cannot effectively plan for the future.

I think scarcity is unique to East Asian peoples. Because these countries have been rice-intensive cultivation economies for thousands of years. On the one hand, they can feed more people with the same cultivated land. On the other hand, of course, they need to pay more labor and endure greater crowding.

After the seventeenth century, they all fell into the trap of involution.

Take Japan as an example. From the 15th to the 19th century, Japan’s population fluctuated between 10 million and 20 million, which was approximately four times the British population during the same period.

The arable land on which the huge population depends is only equivalent to a county in England, but its productivity is less than that of a county in England.

So during the Tokugawa period, in order to survive, the Japanese not only took diligence and frugality to the extreme, but even had two incredible phenomena. One is that the Japanese government came out to encourage infanticide, resulting in zero population growth in 300 years.

In addition, because precious land cannot be used to provide feed for livestock, the Japanese have systematically eliminated the use of wheels and livestock, two basic agricultural technologies. The result is a vivid metaphor. , they keep their noses above the water and risk drowning whenever an unexpected disaster or unexpected expense occurs.

This kind of lack and anxiety unique to East Asian peoples cannot be understood by indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, Europeans, Americans, or even Africans.

So educational resources, if understood in a narrow sense as well-equipped classrooms, senior teachers, etc., are indeed limited. For East Asians who have been in a state of scarcity for a long time, it is inevitable. To participate in the fight.

However, in fact, for children to become talented, the more important educational resources are actually the cultural background of their respective families, the words and deeds of values, the subtle influence of aspirations and vision, which is basically the same as the kind of "you are in this" I can’t go to school.” That zero-sum game has nothing to do with it.

Moreover, if parents, driven by a scarcity mentality, immerse their children in cram schools and a sea of ??questions from an early age, hoping to grab the seemingly scarce school resources first, perhaps in the long run, On the contrary, it is a waste of the child's greatest resource - youth time with unlimited possibilities and natural curiosity. That is, the amount of love can be harmful.

4. The mentality brought about by industrialization catch-up

The origin of modern industrialization is in Western Europe, so both their economic society and education system have a relatively gentle period of natural evolution and development. .

East Asian countries have been coerced into modern society. In order to catch up with other countries, their industrial systems have all adopted planned and guided development at the national level.

Japan’s industrialization is thanks to the bureaucrats of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, South Korea’s government supports several chaebols to cooperate with the entire development plan, and China still has a five-year plan to guide it.

This kind of national plan is based on the rationalism of the nineteenth century. It contains the idea that no problem in the world cannot be solved and can therefore be predicted through scientific investigation. Determine the precise direction of future development of things.

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 by a certain test, etc. This kind of confidence is terrifying to contemplate.

As for the specific operations of schools and learning, the East Asian education system specially established to adapt to the talent needs of industrialization is more responsive to the catch-up period of industrialization than the naturally developed Western system. The crazy pursuit of efficiency.

In this way, the education systems of these backward industrial countries are more like factory assembly lines than those of the early industrial countries. In the early 20th century, the Taylor system was popular in American industry.

Taylor believes that the fundamental purpose of management is to improve efficiency. To this end, he adopted the "spiritual revolution" of setting work quotas, selecting the best workers, implementing standardized management, implementing an stimulating payment system, and emphasizing cooperation between employers and workers.

This maximizes the potential of workers. Some people describe that in factories that implement the Taylor system, there is no redundant worker. Every worker is like a machine working non-stop. Work.

The premise of Taylor's theory is that "people" as management objects are regarded as "economic man", and profit-driven is the main magic weapon used by this school to improve efficiency.

The most famous Taylor manufacturing factory in modern times is Foxconn. From the reports, you can also guess the impact of this high-pressure environment on workers’ psychology.

If we compare the East Asian education system with the Taylor Manufacturing Factory, we will find that there is almost a one-to-one correspondence, with a high learning load and a large number of knowledge points that need to be assessed, and students with good grades selected. Students form key schools, unified national assessment standards, stimulating rewards and punishments from a large number of exams, and various exciting activities within the school.

The school's goal is also to bring out the potential of students and strive to get the best results every minute.

So people who criticize this education system often say that children seem to be industrial products on the assembly line, or that students are child laborers for teachers, and their grades become the performance of teachers, so the interests of teachers and students Relationships are often not consistent but opposite.

This is not a simple statement of anger, but has a certain internal logic.

Of course, because of the hard-working tradition of East Asian countries, it is not unacceptable if the children work so hard.

But the problem lies in this effectiveness. This Taylor system of education essentially treats students as manual workers. For manual workers, factory management is easier because their working status is visible, and the requirement for them is to "do things right" rather than "do the right thing."

As for modern students, I think they are more like the "knowledge workers" defined by Drucker (knowledge workers do not produce tangible things, but produce knowledge, ideas and information. No one can see to find out what they are thinking), and the purpose of training is to make most of them knowledge workers.

The real outcome of their student years is not the homework and test papers they handed in, but what they actually learned and thought about.

These are technically impossible to carry out strict supervision.

So to be a good student is not to faithfully complete the teacher's homework like a manual worker, but to be effective like a knowledge worker, that is, to "do what should be done", (Good students must do this: decide the focus of their studies, measure their mastery of knowledge, and manage their own study time) This requires great initiative and freedom.

So, the tragedy is that due to the industrial age genes of the East Asian education system, they use the method of training manual workers to cultivate the scholars and entrepreneurs they think will be the future, which is inevitably the opposite.

4

East Asian education is in urgent need of reform, but it is becoming increasingly rigid

The East Asian education system has long had more advantages than disadvantages.

In the period of industrialization, a large number of useful workers and junior engineers can be created in a short period of time for the newly established industries.

So this educational system has made a great contribution to the rapid development of East Asian countries in the twentieth century.

However, with the evolution of technology and economy, this system has become increasingly outdated.

This can be compared to heavy industry during the Soviet period. Under this system, the coal mining industry is for steel smelting, steel smelting is for the machinery industry, and the machinery industry is dedicated to producing mining and smelting machines. This forms an internal self-circulation and ignores the actual needs of the market and competition. .

This kind of heavy industry did produce a large number of industrial products that were originally lacking during the industrialization period of the Soviet Union, and was very useful. But at a certain stage of development, its weaknesses in efficiency and international competitiveness were exposed.

To this day, what value does the Soviet Union, once the second industrial power, have in its automobile and machinery industries?

Similarly, won’t the large number of standardized talents that the East Asian education system once cultivated in batches become less and less valuable in the new era?

What’s more, in order to break away from this system, many East Asian families send their children to study in Europe and the United States. However, unless they stay abroad, if they return to their country to find a job, the returnees still have to use the various schools they graduated from. In order to gain weight for job hunting, I fell into the whirlpool of comparing the reputation of the school.

Just like many lower castes in India during the Middle Ages converted to foreign Islam in order to get rid of the oppression of the caste system. However, under the ubiquitous caste ideology, Muslims are also regarded as a caste, and they are still trapped in this within the hierarchy.

So American examination systems such as TOEFL and SAT have been invisibly integrated into the Eastern-style exam-oriented and academic system in East Asia.

This system has created multiple vested interest groups, so it is difficult to shake. It may even become "ill until death" like the Soviet heavy industrial complex or the Indian caste system mentioned above.

The heavy industry in the Soviet Union continued to produce weapons that were not beneficial to society, forming an interest-related force and wasting a lot of social resources until the entire national system collapsed.

The Indian caste system has been criticized since the time of Buddha, but it has been harming India for thousands of years. To this day, it is still a huge obstacle on the way forward for India, because there are a large number of high-caste vested people behind it. interests.

The education system in East Asia, on the one hand, supports a large number of public and private education institutions that are inefficient and outdated (similar to the Soviet industrial bloc).

On the other hand, through the emphasis on academic qualifications, those who occupy the middle and upper classes of society are mostly those who are most adaptable to this system, and this class in turn ensures their own future by spending more on exam-oriented education. One generation can also stand out in this examination system, thereby passing on its advantages in social status to the next generation (this is a bit like the caste system).

This system, which is in urgent need of reform, has become increasingly rigid under the conspiracy of various social groups.