Cultural differences, school edition part 2
In my last post I talked about some of the day to day differences between Chinese and US schools. I'm going to dive a bit deeper into that with this post. The comparative history of education in various countries is fascinating to me, although I know it's not that way for everyone. It's vital to understanding how modern systems work, but I'll try to keep it general enough for everyone. As a reward for slogging through it, I'll show you some fantastic cafeteria food at the end of the post. The Chinese don't understand the resistance in the US to using high-stakes testing in education. They joke that they have 2000 years of experience with it and that it's worked out pretty well for them. They're not wrong. Civil service examinations for bureaucratic posts have been a feature of Chinese government since the Sui dynasty (AD 581-617), although it became much more systematized around the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1279). If you did well on these exams, you could ...