The Problem of Time

So I was reading this article from the BBC.  It directly relates time to results, and number of graduates to quality of education; and by extension the viability of an economy.

With a few short sentences, let me quash this notion.

The most important idea stemming from this article is the need for education.  Not just university education, but a high quality education throughout the formative years.  They then throw this in:

In China, you see children going into school at 6.30am and being there until 8 or 9pm, concentrating on science, technology and maths. And you have to ask yourself, would European children do that?


Firstly, the kids in Japan do the same thing.  china modeled itself on Japan after all.  I can tell you, with absolute certainty, the kids here learn roughly nothing in every lesson.  The reason they stay behind for so long (obviously not everyone does this, only the diligent students) is not to excel, but to merely keep up.  The twelve hours the kids put in, relative to the six or so I did at school, do not equate to a doubling of performance in tests.  They don't even equate to a furthering of ideas or techniques - kids here go into university with the same basic knowledge and skills as the UK.  The extra hours are a vacuum, a time portal where nothing is achieved.  I see this every day in English class, but also in the other classes I see, and the notes from other lessons splayed across desks.  The maths classes in the second grade, for example, have been drawing the same graphs for three weeks now.  That's not advanced knowledge or understanding; it's identical to my classes back when I was fourteen.


Then you realise they don't study the number of subjects we do, and the picture begins to look even less like asians are superheroes.   


In England we study (for better or worse) English, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, (world) History, Geography, Art, Music, P.E, R.E and a modern foreign language.  There might be more, but I can't remember them all.


Here they study: Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, P.E (I haven't seen a P.E class in about 4 weeks though) Music, Art (looking good so far, isn't it) and then it stops.  They are taught English, kind of.  Geography and History are taught as one subject - they don't want their kids to know about things like nanjing or the second world war, so they don't teach world history so much as the foreigners and that lot did some bad stuff, but you should really know about Japan and our glorious history.  That, of course, is somewhat too long a title to represent a subject, so they call it social studies instead.


An interesting side-effect is that Japanese people couldn't tell you a thing about the dinosaurs, where africa is, what a sedimentary rock is, or why the ground shakes underneath them sometimes.


What they can tell you: what the square root of pi over forty divided by the sum of three radii of circle diameter 42.


SO they study three or four fewer subjects than us, for much longer, but only achieve a few percentage points higher test scores, on average, than their western counterparts.


Unless it isn't abundantly clear by now; the workaholics carry this country, and their efficiency is appalling.  It takes them nearly twice as long to learn the same amount of information as their western equivalents.  This isn't because they're stupid.  They're not smarter, but they're certainly not less intelligent.  They simply don't utilise time well and suffer long hours instead.


This is mirrored in their sports activities.  They train for hours every day in school, and they look well drilled.  When it comes to actual competition they fall apart.


They have no intensity in any training, they only train things that can be performed rote.


And yet our politicians want to emulate them?  Folly.  Pure and simple.


They should hire my old maths teacher, whose motto was 'work smart, not hard.'


Or they already did, and the memo they sent around parliament was missing the smart part.