re: #183 Barefoot Grin

I wonder if a side-effect of “entrance exam-based” education isn’t the tendency to treat history as just another list of facts to be memorized, especially in east Asia; IOW, essentially ahistorical. I have no idea—just musing. I know there have been K-Pop and J-Pop acts that have gotten in trouble recently for wearing Nazi-themed uniforms on stage.

I’m not an expert in Taiwan’s education system, but I’m not sure it is as reliant on exam-based education as the mainland is. Here in Big China, education is primarily rote memorization: teacher speaks, students listen (as if), and exams test the students’ memory of what they have learned or read. Students in middle school and high school — and even in their elective classes in college — never discuss or debate or analyze history or literature. My ESL students have a really difficult time summarizing English passages in order to answer questions about those passages, but if the question’s answer is contained verbatim in the text, they have no trouble with it.

As you can imagine, Chinese students coming to study in western universities have a serious adjustment problem dealing with our more free-wheeling classroom environments.