re: #251 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

Some of it must stem from a sense of cultural and technical inferiority with regard to Europe…we felt that our intellectual backwardness was an outward sign of our our moral superiority over those effete, decadent Euroweenies.

We started to shake that off when we got into the arms and space race with the USSR in the 50’s and 60’s but seem to have fallen back into the notion that education only counts as vocational training.

I’ve noticed that many Chinese have the same notion. A university degree is solely for the purpose of obtaining a good job, so serious study for the sake of intellectual improvement is not rewarded or highly regarded. In addition, the top-down nature of education in China (from the Party) actively discourages divergent thinking and critical thinking. As a college teacher, I find in endlessly frustrating to have a majority of students who only see their classes as a boring stepping stone toward a Job After Graduation, and not as a useful intellectual exercise in and of themselves.

In their defense, most of their classes ARE boring, because there is little incentive for teachers to be creative in educating their students.