I like it, but I think it's incomplete and I think it shows some bias due to personal experience.
Education in the West is founded on Hegelian philosophy[/URL], which is what education majors are hit with immediately in their introductory college courses. This may be why so many SJ types are attracted to teaching. Hegel was the guy with such lovely and wonderful
quotes as these:
"The unfortunate urge to educate the individual in thinking for himself and being self-productive has cast a shadow over truth." - (Report to Niethammer, 23 October 1812).
"One of the chief factors in education is discipline, the purport of which is to break down the child’s self-will and thereby eradicate his purely natural and sensuous self." - (Philosophy of Right, §174a).
"This self-will, this germ of evil, must be broken and destroyed by discipline.” - (Subjective Spirit §396n).
"The assertion that the teacher should carefully adjust himself to the individuality of each of his pupils, studying and developing it, must be treated as idle chatter." - (Subjective Spirit §395n.)
"The most rational thing that children can do with their toys is to break them." - (Subjective Spirit §396n).
This philosophy has led our education system have a slew of
structural problems, imho.
-We group students based on age.
-We teach part time. Seasonally, and 5 days a week.
-Our achievement goals and learning criteria are heavily standardized.
-Funding is tied to achievement, creating a negative feedback loop wherein poorly achieving school districts can't get the funds they need to improve. When these schools financially collapse, successful schools, which are typically in wealthy districts, don't want to take in poor/poorly performing students, and use their political sway to avoid doing so.
-We remove students who don't function well in this structure; schools send poor achievers and anyone who sticks out to remedial units as a means to boost their numbers and secure funding.
Also, given your comparison between the U.S. and China, consider the number of Chinese college students in American universities, especially graduate school. The majority of the student population of many graduate school departments in the sciences are foreigners; some 80+%. Why is that, if the American system is so bad? The ratios of foreign to domestic student admissions have created a substantial bias and strong incentive to alter admissions criteria, as foreign students are frequently criticized for being robotic, lacking personality, and being deficient in areas other than academic scoring.