[Danieru]

Only if you don't understand what the "tutoring" industry in China truly does. They are all test prep, not general teaching or education but cram schools for scoring better on a specific test.

For example they are not allowed to teach calculus, despite calculus making the tests easier, for the exact reason public schools do not introduce it in the standard curriculum. Instead the schools are places to drill test taking and memorize tricks to be used on said single exam.

It is an entire industry geared to a single once per year test. Every dollar spent targeting said test is an economic loss. It is the exact sort of economic loss one should expect from perverse incentives. Banning this industry papers over the symptoms of a broken system, it is an obvious move but not a brilliant one.

[nabla9]

China is going trough huge education reform.

Shanghai was leading the way. They gave individual teachers more freedom that allows move away from rote learning (taking lessons from Nordic countries). They also increased teachers’ pay. The results have been amazing. Shanghai ranked first in OECD PISA 2009 and 2012 assessments.

In the latest 2018 assessments Bejing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang areas ranked first. Rest of the China is still behind.

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png

[mattmanser]

Because such calculus what?

Why don't they teach calculus, i'm genuinely interested, you've left us hanging!

Edit: thinking on it a little, I'm guessing the missing sentence is 'because such calculus is not on the test'.

[naveen99]

Something doesn’t add up. It’s not like there is a shortage of challenging material to learn and test on. I don’t know why tests are easy and then the people who can’t ace the watered down tests compete amongst themselves for the less less able titles. why don’t they just put some general relativity, quantum field theory, regular expressions, group theory, Elliptic curves, taxes, sec regulations, emacs, vim, options pricing, portfolio risk management, reinforcement learning, go, chess etc on the test…

[Danieru]

> I don’t know why tests are easy and then the people who can’t ace the watered down tests compete amongst themselves for the less less able titles

The tests are not easy, and the "passing score" is set by the sum of competition. The techniques allowed to be taught, and which get tested are obtuse. Instead of allowing brilliant students to progress into more difficult subjects the tests funnel the entire country into the same testing flow. It would be like trying to score everyone based on arithmetic.

Yes arithmetic is easy, but given enough volume of overly complex questions even easy skills can be tortured to create a grading curve.

[naveen99]

That’s my point. Why not test the brilliant students (and optionally allow everyone) on the more difficult subjects to begin with ?

[Danieru]

Ah. The specific Chinese reason is that the Government says no.

[naveen99]

but why should the government want to lower the educational standard for everyone ? It doesn’t make any sense. The rich and poor benefit when everyone is better educated.