[msohcw]

Education in Asia, especially the main cities in the developed nations (Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul etc. ) is pretty much exactly the same. There's many purposes to an education, manifest and overt ones. For example, keeping youths neatly congregated and managed in singular locations, socialisation into specific social archetypes of value etc. We may say that an education is about Finding Your Passion and Being An Educated Person or to Engage Civil Society. But that's pretty much just what we're saying. Tax dollars are the votes at hand, and capitalist society really doesn't value An Education over a populace well-educated to obtain economically-productive jobs that produce tangible wealth.

We want to reverse this trend (overly competitive schooling systems) as much as we want to value philosophers and humanities scholars and artists. Enough to say it, but not quite enough to pour copious amounts of money into it. As students we're told to shoot for the sky. Study harder. Get straighter As. That's best for (capitalist) society. Every human resource neatly and fully expended. Maybe things will change when the data illustrates how people who like their jobs or areas of study are more productive. But that's a big if. The status quo seems easier.

[rwallace]

The irony is that it's actually appallingly bad for capitalist society.

That is, it was good for capitalist society in the nineteenth century when what the economy needed was people who were literate enough to read an instruction manual but broken enough to spend all day everyday on an assembly line carrying out the same hand motion over and over again without going mad from boredom.

These days, the repetitive work has mostly been automated. The value in a modern economy is people who can think, make decisions, find creative solutions. But that requires leisure time, play, rest. So the economy is glutted with broken people desperate for jobs while it's hard to find a good manager, a good programmer or a good plumber for love or money.

[moonchrome]

I agree that schools are doing a poor job at educating for practical applications but most of that comes from rewarding for satisfying arbitrary metrics and norms that don't really correlate with real world skills. Students being motivated and competing isn't really a bad thing if they were actually learning useful things.

Historically education-performace correlation worked because it turns out that smart kids are generally good at most things so having higher barriers to entry meant higher education was a good filter for general competence and motivation.

Nowadays the "everyone gets to college" system made the filter much less reliable but still left expectations from all those kids that entered college that they will be treated as previously top percentile. Also it decreased the value of college networking as now you're less likely to meet the top percentile students of your generation.

I don't think schools were ever that good at educating for real world but they were a good signal. Leading students to believe that just by imitating the signal will lead to success is bound to leave a lot of kids disappointed.

[11thEarlOfMar]

There are a very high percentage of foreign-born parents all over the Bay Area. Last time I checked, for example, more than 30% of the residents of Alameda county were born outside the US.

One factor, in my opinion, is that for a lot of immigrant parents, their success in education enabled them to move to Silicon Valley. Education changed their lives and, many would say, in a hugely positive way.

So they apply that same perspective to their children's education and expect the kids to have the same educational experience they did.

The problem for the kids is that what it takes to succeed in the US is different from what enabled their parents to get into the US in the first place. It's not clear to me what the implications of that are, but boldness, innovation, insight, team spirit, leadership, and a lot of other desired attributes don't get discovered by students because they have no opportunity to allow them to emerge.

[erikpukinskis]

Even if the effect you describe is real (and I believe it is) the status quo is still easier under capitalism.

When you are poor your incentive is to find employees who are undervalued and hire them to release the potential energy in their skills. Development of those employees takes time, but you're poor. Time is all you have.

Once you have a successful business though, you have plenty of money and time is what is scarce for you. If a competitor develops your employee to extract additional value that's bad for you. If they poach your staff you have to take additional time to develop a new hire to do something the original employee was already doing.

So mature businesses shift their resources to building a moat that makes it hard for competitors to do that. This is so ingrained in how we think businesses have to work that mostly we don't even notice it. But almost all jobs contain quite a lot of "moat maintenance" tasks.

This is all, of course, depended on capitalism which says the management of resources should be done by those people who have capital. If resources were managed collectively, the moats wouldn't last because other people would bridge them. It's only under property law (or martial law) that a moat can even exist in the first place.