Chinese school math

[bigbadwolf]

Someone posted this as a joke at the FICS chess server:

All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.

 

[pruse]

ohh, hilarious!

 

[fengjian]

I am working in shanghai and grown up in china. Someone posted it as a joke?

 

[DominiConnor]

It's an interesting set of ironies.

Chinese people are more motivated to get their kids educated than average westerners, but in the PRC are subject to an educational system that seems to have been created by white supremacists in order to screw with their lives.

The PRC wastes the talent of more people than most countries have people.

 

[bigbadwolf]

I am working in shanghai and grown up in china. Someone posted it as a joke?

The humor is directed at the Americans, not the Chinese. As a school child in Manchester, my schoolteachers used to exhort us to finish our insipid mash and greens by somberly reminding us that African children were getting nothing to eat at all. The quote I posted is a play on this, with American children being portrayed as victims of deprivation. This humor has a bedrock of grim truth beneath the surface: mathematics in American schools is not what it should be. Many American youngsters are turned off mathematics (and by implication, quantitative subjects like physics and engineering) because of dumbed-down texts, ill-designed curricula, and appalling teachers. Indeed, I would wager that most US schoolteachers these days cannot manually calculate square roots.

 

[Yike Lu]

It's an interesting set of ironies.

Chinese people are more motivated to get their kids educated than average westerners, but in the PRC are subject to an educational system that seems to have been created by white supremacists in order to screw with their lives.

The PRC wastes the talent of more people than most countries have people.

It's based off the European system of entrance exams. I remember my ex (German) mentioned how she had to take exams to determine what high school she would go to (gymnasium being the only one from which entry into university was allowed). This reminded me of the Chinese system, so I asked my parents. The two systems are in fact related.