readx;

On January 3, the first day of the 2o16 Nobel Prize draw, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Osumi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the 21st century, the number www.biquge.info of Japanese scientists receiving awards has increased rapidly. There are 8 prizes in physics, 6 prizes in chemistry, and 3 prizes in physiology or medicine, a total of 17 prizes, with an average of almost one prize a year.

Japan has won so many Nobel Prizes, and other factors such as Japan's scientific research environment, evaluation mechanism, and funding guarantee have all contributed to it. But Nakamura is concerned about the current state of education in Japan, as well as the education system in East Asia as a whole.

Shuji Nakamura believes that the education system in Asia is a waste of time and that young people should learn different things. The modern Prussian education system in East Asian countries hindered students' ability to engage in deeper inquiry, which was detrimental to their ability to think independently.

Yoshinori Osumi is the winner of the 2o16 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In January 2015, Shuji Nakamura, who won the 2o14 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on blue LEDs, held a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Association in Tokyo to criticize Japan's patent system and the East Asian education system as a whole. He slammed Japan's education system, saying that the university entrance examination system was terrible, as was China and South Korea, and that all high school students were educated with the goal of getting into prestigious universities. He believes that the education system in Asia is a waste of time and that young people should learn different things.

Shuji Nakamura is a first-class Japanese scientist:

Born in an ordinary fisherman's family, his examination ability is also mediocre, and he went to Tokushima University, a third-rate university in Japan;

He is very hands-on: adjust instruments in the morning and do experiments in the afternoon;

Very self-taught: Nakamura has a deep understanding of physics, but he is entirely self-taught. The University of Tokushima, where he attended, didn't even have a physics department.

Shuji Nakamura is the 2o14 Nobel Laureate in Physics

Such a person is suppressed in Japan, and his criticism of the Japanese education system is also for good reason.

1. East Asian education: Inefficient, and everyone suffers

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

As for South Korea, it is also known for its extreme test-taking and academic qualifications. Collectively known as "SKY", 7o% of the CEOs of Korea's largest corporations are graduates, and 8o% of civil servants in the judiciary are from these three universities.

Almost all Korean children go to cram schools, and the total profit of Korean cram schools in 2oo9 is about 7.3 billion US dollars, which is more than the profit of Samsung Electronics, and the huge expenditure on education is the biggest reason why South Koreans dare not have more children. In 2o12, the OECD conducted the "Programme for the Assessment of International Student Aptitude", and Korean students ranked first among all member countries in mathematics and reading programs. However, this achievement was achieved with considerable efficiency, with one comment: "These children work twice as hard as they do...... to get such results. ”

Why does East Asia have such an education system? I think it is because East Asian countries have the Prussian genes that are inherent in the modern education system, plus the East Asian Confucianism and imperial examination traditions. For some countries, it can be said that the practical orientation and ideological indoctrination function of Soviet-style education have been added.

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

Before the 19th century, education was a craft apprenticeship, whether it was a private school in the East or a tutor in the West. But with the increase in subjects and the demand for a working population with basic education, the so-called K-12 education system emerged.

The standard educational model of modern countries is an essential element that we have taken for granted:

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

In the 4o-6o minute lesson, the teacher is responsible for speaking and the students are responsible for listening;

Interspersed between classes are lunch and physical education time;

After school, students go home to do their homework.

Under the confinement of the standardized curriculum, the originally vast and beautiful field of human thought has been artificially cut into pieces, pieces that are easy to manage, and are called "disciplines". In the same way, the concept of flowing, blending, and integrating has been divided into individual "course units".

This model was first implemented by the Prussians in the 18th century. They were the first to understand the way we teach in the classroom. The original intention of the Prussians was not to educate students who could think for themselves, but to produce a large number of loyal and manageable citizens, who learned values in school that made them obey authority, including parents, teachers, and churches, and, ultimately, the king.

Of course, the Prussian education system was innovative in many ways at the time. This education system turned tens of thousands of people into the middle class and provided a crucial impetus for Germany to become an industrial power. Given the state of technology at the time, perhaps the most economical way to achieve the goal of universal education in the Kingdom of Prussia was to adopt the Prussian education system.

However, the system discourages students from engaging in deeper inquiry and is detrimental to their ability to think independently. However, in the 19th century, a high level of creativity, logical thinking was perhaps less important than the ability to obey orders in thought and master basic skills in action.

In the first half of the 19th century, the United States largely copied the Prussian education system, as it did in Prussia, a move that gave a strong impetus to the construction of a middle class that would enable them to secure jobs in a thriving industrial sector. In addition to the United States, this system was also copied by other European countries in the nineteenth century, and was extended to other countries outside of Europe and the United States.

However, today's economic situation no longer requires a submissive and disciplined working class, but instead requires more and more reading ability, mathematical literacy, and humanistic literacy of workers.

Unfortunately, the goals of the Prussian education system are the opposite of what society needs in today's society, creative, curious and self-directed, lifelong learners who are capable of coming up with new ideas and putting them into practice. Today's education completely ignores the extraordinary diversity and nuances between people, and it is these diversity and nuances that make people different in intelligence, imagination, and talent.

3. In addition to Prussian genes, East Asian education was also heavily influenced by the Confucian tradition and the imperial examination system

When the three East Asian countries began to introduce this modern education system at the end of the 19th century in order to catch up with the Western powers, they inevitably made a subconscious distortion and bias to this system due to their own Confucian traditions and the imperial examination system.

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

East Asian countries' university entrance exams are always mixed with their long-standing tradition of imperial examinations. Ancient societies did not have such a great demand for creativity, so the imperial examination was a good system, which completed the selection of social managers with minimal conflict, and completed the establishment of a criterion for replacing the gate valve with intelligence.

If you want to simulate 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, require the selection of well-trained adults who can immediately take on certain jobs.

The goal of the university entrance examination is to select people who are highly malleable and ambitious for the next step of education, and such people should be like liquid glass taken out of a furnace, which can be rotated and elongated, and is extremely malleable. The personnel obtained from the imperial examination should be like glazed porcelain out of the kiln, and they can be used immediately, but if you make any changes, they will either be broken or scratched.

In addition, exams are a very useful tool. In ancient times, the imperial examination was well known for missing talents, but in modern times, no matter what kind of examination, what can test the candidate's interest, ambition, imagination, and practical ability? Even the most objective and measurable mathematics test can lose a lot of things.

Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, gave algebra as an example. When learning algebra, students tend to focus on getting a high score on the exam, which is only the most important part of each unit. Candidates memorize only a large number of x and y, and they can get their values by substituting x and y into rote formulas. The x and y in the exam do not reflect the power of algebra and its importance. The importance and beauty of algebra lies in the fact that all these x's and y's represent infinite phenomena and ideas.

The equation used in calculating the production costs of a listed company can also be used to calculate the momentum of an object in space, and the same equation can be used not only to calculate the optimal path of a parabola, but also to determine the most appropriate price for a new product.

The same method used to calculate the prevalence of genetic diseases can be used in football to determine whether an offense should be made in the fourth quarter. In the exam, most students do not see algebra as a simple, convenient and versatile tool for exploring the world, but rather as a hurdle to be overcome.

Therefore, while examinations are important, society must be able to recognize the great limitations of examinations and weaken their place in the selection of materials.

The U.S. education system discourages students from wasting too much energy on the test in a double-insurance way: first, the SAT score is only one of the factors considered for admissions, and it is unwise to attach too much importance to the SAT, and second, the SAT has six opportunities to take the test every year.

The education systems in Taiwan and China have doubled down on students to waste their youth: first, the score of the joint entrance examination is the decisive factor for admission, and second, the joint entrance examination is held every year.

2. East Asian countries attach too much importance to revision

According to the "Comparative Research Report on the Rights and Interests of High School Students in China, Japan, South Korea and the United States" released in 2oo9, 78.3% of ordinary high school students in China usually spend more than 8 hours a day in school, while 57.2% in South Korea, while Japan and the United States almost do not have such a situation. Chinese students spend the most time studying on a daily basis. There is not much difference in the amount of content that students learn from country to country, so what does it mean if it takes too long to study? It means that the revision time is too large. This is the biggest means to stifle students' imagination and creativity.

When it comes to the importance of revision, people often quote "learn and learn", and this "practice" is review. However, there is a huge difference between the time of Confucius and today's society, and it is the content of learning. In the era of Confucius, the main learning content was "etiquette", and the actor could only achieve the effect by repeated practice.

However, the social life of human beings has evolved to modern times, and the main content of learning has changed from "etiquette" to cognition. Cognition is expanding and changing, and its essence is to create or learn something new. If education is overly intensive and reviewing, it will not produce innovative talents.

And, as Paul Glaxo said, "What you learn in the best high schools is nothing compared to college." "In the liberal arts, for example, how does the knowledge in those history textbooks that need to be read repeatedly in high school compare with the required books in any university history department? As for mathematics, even the middle school mathematics has been mastered very well, and calculus has not yet been learned in the seventeenth century.

What's more, with the explosion of knowledge, all the mathematical knowledge in 19oo can be crammed into 1ooo books, and by 2ooo it will already need 1o million books. It can be seen that it is 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 discourse is mostly in lower activities, such as chess, piano, basketball, taxi driving, spelling. However, it is difficult to find sufficient evidence for higher activities, such as the role of creation and management. In fact, this 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 established since the 19th century, is characterized by a relatively fixed difficulty training ladder, a limited amount of knowledge, only more practice is required, and the progress of learning can be measured by the difficulty of the repertoire or the examination. This is in line with the learning method preferred in East Asia.

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

3. The influence of egalitarianism and the mentality of scarcity

Many of the justifications for the JAE are that although the JAE is not satisfactory, it is the fairest. This is the influence of the traditional Confucian idea of "not suffering from few, but suffering from inequality". There is nothing wrong with fairness, but it would be sad if it suppressed different types of talent exhibition pathways across the board for the sake of fairness. With such a large population base in East Asian countries, the opportunity cost of this waste of talent is also incalculable.

Let's take another example from another country. There is a comparison in European academic circles, such as Britain and Germany, which are considered to be the hegemonic countries of classical academics, but the British talent in this area is much better. The reason for this is that the British education system is not fair enough. There are some secondary schools in the UK that have a very high probability of going to a good university for traditional reasons, so that students can immerse themselves in the vast classical scholarship at an early age.

Germany, on the other hand, is fairer in that all students have to pass exams when they go to university, so students have to spend more energy on common exam subjects. As a result, the UK's apparent unfairness has the potential to produce high-quality talent.

This is like the commercial example of Peter Trier, where on the surface perfect competition seems to be fairer, but in fact the profits of the companies participating in such competition will become as thin as a knife edge, and the future will be precarious, and they can only take care of their immediate interests, and it is impossible to make long-term plans for the future.

Monopolies like Google, on the other hand, don't have to worry about competing with other companies, but have more autonomy to care about their own products and make all kinds of long-term plans that are simply unreliable. Therefore, if students are under the pressure of examination competition for a long time, it is naturally impossible to have a long-term self-growth plan, but can only focus on the exams that will determine the path of life.

On the other hand, it is not without certain truth that the battle for the learning card position in East Asian countries from kindergarten to university is in essence a competition for limited high-quality educational resources. But why is the competition for the region so hot? It may be due to the scarcity mentality caused by chronic material scarcity.

Last year's popular point pointed out that when people fall into a state of scarcity, scarcity will capture the brain, and the capture of people's attention will not only affect our ability to see, but also affect our understanding of the world around us. And when we are hyper-focused on solving the problems of the moment, we cannot plan for the future effectively.

I think scarcity is a condition peculiar to East Asian peoples. Because these countries have been rice-intensive economies for thousands of years, they can feed more people with the same amount of arable land, but of course they need to work more and endure more congestion. After the seventeenth century, they all fell into the trap of involution.

In Japan, for example, the population fluctuated between 10,000 in the 15th and 19th centuries, about four times that of Britain during the same period. The arable land on which a huge population depends is only the size of a county in England, but not as productive as a county in England. Therefore, in the Tokugawa period, in order to survive, the Japanese not only swept their diligence and thrift to the extreme, but even had two unbelievable phenomena.

One is that the Japanese government has stepped in to encourage infant drowning, so that the population has zero growth for 3oo years. In addition, because the precious land could not be used to provide fodder for livestock, the Japanese systematically eliminated the two basic agricultural techniques of wheels and livestock, and as a result, to use a figurative metaphor, they kept their noses above the water, and if they had an unexpected disaster or unexpected expense, they could drown. This kind of scarcity and anxiety that is peculiar to East Asian peoples cannot be understood by the indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, Europeans and Americans, and even Africans.

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

However, in fact, in order for children to become talents, the more important educational resources are actually the subtle teaching of their respective families' cultural backgrounds, values, aspirations and visions, which have nothing to do with the zero-sum game of "I can't go to this school if you go to this school".

Moreover, if parents, driven by the scarcity mentality, let their children immerse themselves in cram schools and questions from an early age, hoping to grab the school resources that seem scarce in front of them first, perhaps in the long run, they will waste their children's biggest resources - the teenage years with infinite possibilities and natural curiosity, that is, the suitability of love is enough to harm.

4. The mentality brought about by industrial catch-up

The origins of modern industrialization are in Western Europe, so they have a relatively gentle natural evolutionary period, whether it is an economic society or an educational system. East Asian countries, on the other hand, have been coerced into modern society, and in order to catch up with other countries, they have adopted planned and guided exhibitions at the national level in their industrial systems without exception. Japan owes its industrialization to the bureaucrats of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, South Korea has a government that supports a few chaebols to coordinate the overall development plan, and China now has a five-year plan to guide it.

This kind of national planning is based on nineteenth-century rationalism, and it contains the idea that there is no problem in the world that cannot be solved, and that the exact direction of things can be predicted through scientific investigation.

The assumption that an institution can accurately predict what kind of knowledge a child needs to acquire at a certain age, what kind of talent can be selected by a certain examination, and so on, is terrifying.

In terms of the specific operation of schools and learning, the East Asian education system, which was specially established to meet the needs of industrialized talents, has more of the frenzied pursuit of efficiency during the catch-up period of industrialization than the Western system of natural exhibition. In this way, the education system of these backward industrial countries is more like an assembly line of a factory than that of the former industrial countries.

At the beginning of the twentieth 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 a "spiritual revolution" that set work quotas, select the best workers, implement standardized management, implement a stimulating payment system, and emphasize cooperation between employers and workers.

This has unleashed the potential of the workers to such an extent that some have described the fact that there is not a single superfluous worker to be found in the Taylor factory, and that every worker works like a machine all the time. The premise of Taylor's theory is that the "man" as the object of management is regarded as the "economic man", and the profit drive is the main magic weapon used by this school to improve efficiency. The most famous Taylor factory in modern times is none other than Foxconn. From the report, you can also guess the impact of this high-pressure environment on the psychology of workers.

If we compare the East Asian education system with the Taylor factory, we will now have an almost one-to-one correspondence, formulating a high amount of learning and a large number of knowledge points that need to be assessed, selecting students with good grades to form key schools, national unified assessment standards, stimulating rewards and punishments formed by a large number of examinations, and various activities within the school. The goal of the school is also to unleash the potential of the students, and to strive for the best results every minute.

Therefore, critics of this education system often say that children are like industrial products on the assembly line, or that students are child laborers of teachers, and their grades become teachers' performance, so the interests of teachers and students are often not consistent, but opposite. This is not simply a word of indignation, but there is a certain internal logic.

Of course, because of the industrious tradition of East Asian countries, children work so hard, and if it does work, it is not unacceptable. But the problem lies in this effectiveness.

This kind of Taylor system in 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", not "do the right things".

As for modern students, I think they are more like the "knowledge workers" defined by Drucker, and most of them should become knowledge workers in terms of the purpose of training. The real results of their student days are not the homework and exam papers they hand in, but what they really learn and think. These are not technically possible to be closely supervised.

Therefore, to be a good student, it is not necessary to faithfully complete the teacher's homework like a manual worker, but to be effective like a knowledge worker, that is, to "do what needs to be done". A good student must be able to determine the focus of his studies, measure his knowledge and manage his study time. This requires a great deal of initiative and freedom.

The tragedy, then, is that, because of the industrial-age nature of the East Asian education system, it is inevitable that they will train manual laborers to train the scholars and entrepreneurs of the future in their minds.

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

East Asian education systems have long had more advantages than disadvantages. During the period of industrialization, it was possible to create a large number of useful workers and junior engineers for the newly established industry in a short period of time. Therefore, the development of East Asian countries in the 20th century, this kind of education system has made a great contribution. But as technology and the economy evolve, the system becomes more and more anachronistic.

This can be modeled as heavy industry in the Soviet era. Under this system, the coal mining industry is for steel smelting, and steel smelting is for the machinery industry, which in turn is dedicated to the production of mining and smelting machines, thus creating an internal self-circulation, ignoring the actual needs of the market and competition. This heavy industry, during the industrialization of the Soviet Union, did produce a large number of industrial products that would otherwise be missing, which was very useful. But at a certain stage, its lack of efficiency and the weakness of its international competitiveness are exposed. Today, what is the value of the automobile industry and machinery industry of the Soviet Union, which was once the second industrial power? In the same way, will the large number of standardized talents that the East Asian education system once cultivated in batches become more and more worthless 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, but unless they stay abroad, if they return to China for employment, the returnees still have to use the various schools they graduated from as job search weights, which falls into the vortex of comparative school reputation. It is like in the Middle Ages, many low-ranking castes in India converted to foreign ****** religions in order to get rid of the oppression of the caste system, but under the ubiquitous caste mentality, ****** is also regarded as a caste, and they are still stuck in this hierarchy. Therefore, the TOEFL and SAT test systems in the United States have also been invisibly integrated into the test-taking and academic systems with oriental flavors in East Asia.

This system is difficult to shake because it has created multiple vested interests, and it will even be "sick to death", like the Soviet heavy industrial complex or the Indian caste system mentioned above. Heavy industry in the Soviet era continued to create weapons that were not useful to society, forming a stakeholder force, wasting a lot of social resources until the entire state system collapsed. The Indian caste system, which has been criticized since the time of the Buddha, has plagued India for thousands of years, and is still a huge obstacle to India's progress to this day, because of the large number of high-caste vested interests behind it.

On the one hand, the education system in East Asia feeds a huge number of inefficient and outdated public and private educational institutions, and on the other hand, through the emphasis on academic qualifications, most of the people in the middle and upper strata of society are the most suitable for this system, and this class in turn ensures that its next generation can also stand out in this examination system by spending more on examination-oriented education, so as to pass on its social superiority to the next generation.

In this way, this system, which is in dire need of reform, has become more and more rigid with the complicity of various social groups. 8