[gotorazor]

I had a bit of schooling in that kind of educational system (Asia) before continuing schooling in North America. I'd say that you there is no free lunch. You're always giving up something for something else.

I had a job 10 years ago doing in-person training at a company trying to digitize their paper-based office for the first time. They were in a commodity distribution business, so while the math isn't hard, there is a lot of day-to-day arithmetic (conversion between unit of measure and price/unit vs total price) for all the employees from the warehouse guy to the sales staff.

The system introduced a change in their workflow. Before in their old manual paper system, people just kind of put things on a truck and figure out later how much got shipped and how much to invoice a customer. The whole can be very hand-wavy. There was no live inventory system either.

Digitization meant that sales have to write sales orders that had precise units to be sold. Based on inventory, they know how much they will actually ship and they know that down to the dollar. Everybody suddenly had to start being aware of the math involved in their work.

It was kind of funny to see a bunch of blue-collar, ex-con, high school dropouts learning faster than all the college-education office workers. The college-educated guys were too drill-orientated and approached the work like the math worksheets that everybody is talking about. The ex-cons had a working relationship with the numbers on the screen and the things that are hanging off their forklifts. Many of the white-collar clerks had been getting by memorizing formulas. They had no idea what any of those formulas mean.