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Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

Speaking specifically on the point of education, when I went to college I came from a backwater US school. A lot of my classmates came from elite schools from all over the world. The thing I noticed among a lot of the Indian and Chinese students is that, while they could regurgitate equations and solve problems very quickly, a lot of them would copy solutions or would have a hard time learning new concepts without massive problem sets to study patterns from.

While the US K-12 system does sucks, I don't really want to see it turn into a memorization race the way the Indian and Chinese systems seem.

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I always found that a "memorization race" is table stakes. Without going through that first, there is no way you can participate meaningfully at the higher levels.

And this is true even in cases where most of the actual research is done by computers/algorithms. Being able to quickly identify impossibilities or how to solve parts of the problem, because you effectively memorized thousands of pages of maths theory is invaluable and irreplaceable.

Oh I agree, but I think memorization is necessary but not sufficient for educational success.

Indian and Chinese systems certainly have tons of problem themselves, but that's a separate issue. Chinese students need to spend tons of time cracking the college entrance exam (and all exams before that). When the exam focused on memorization, the students would optimize for that, and the "top talents" selected by that exam are those best at memorization. However, the exams also changed overtime, and it is much less focused on memorization now.

While these exams still receives tons of criticism nowadays, being able to perform well on these exams still correlates highly on being able to succeed in future.

I am skeptical of this pervasive claim because it is effectively unfalsifiable; claiming kids from Asia are “just good at tests” and that thus we don’t need to worry about our education system ignores the fact that most European countries do better on standardized tests too (the UK, Germany, Finland, etc.).

And to add some anecdata of my own, in college I did not notice any race of people being less or more creative than another. If anything during office hours the people who had trouble “improvising” were remarkably well distributed corresponding to the demographics of the school.

> I am skeptical of this pervasive claim because it is effectively unfalsifiable; claiming kids from Asia are “just good at tests” and that thus we don’t need to worry about our education system ignores the fact that most European countries do better on standardized tests too (the UK, Germany, Finland, etc.).

That's not what I said (though you may be commenting on my response and not responding directly to me). I claim that the Chinese and Indian systems have a lot more memorization than the US or European systems and that they often produce students that excel at a skill that doesn't always correlate (but isn't uncorrelated either) with what I want STEM graduates to be. I freely admit the US system is bad, if not terrible, but I'd rather look to Europe for inspiration than Asia here.

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