{ "content": "Author: Shuji Nakamura (Renowned Scientist, Nobel Laureate in Physics)\n\nThe East Asian Education System is Peculiar and Inefficient\n\nThe East Asian education system is rather peculiar, often praised by outsiders yet criticized by those within. Japan's education system is relatively relaxed compared to the other two countries in the region, not to mention others where teachers, students, and parents all suffer deeply.\n\nAs for South Korea, it is also notorious for its extreme exam-oriented and degree-focused culture. Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University are collectively known as "SKY." 70% of the CEOs of South Korea's largest corporations are graduates of these three universities, and 80% of judicial civil servants come from them.\n\nAlmost all Korean children attend cram schools. In 2009, the total profit of Korean cram schools was approximately $7.3 billion, more than Samsung Electronics' profits. The enormous education expenditure is the primary reason Koreans hesitate to have more children. In 2012, the OECD conducted the "Programme for International Student Assessment" (PISA). In mathematics and reading, South Korean students ranked first among all participating countries. However, this achievement came at a remarkably low efficiency. Some have commented: "These children achieved such results through double the effort and double the spending..."\n\nWhy does East Asia have such an education system? I believe it's because East Asian countries inherently possess the Prussian genes of the modern education system, further compounded by the Confucian and imperial examination traditions of East Asia. For some countries, one could also add the practical, quick-fix orientation and ideological indoctrination functions of the Soviet-style education.\n\nEast Asian Education Has the Rule-Following "Prussian Gene"\n\nBefore the 19th century, education was akin to an apprenticeship system in handicrafts, whether in Eastern private schools or Western tutors. However, with the increase in subjects and the demand for a labor force with basic education, the so-called K-12 education system (equivalent to our ordinary primary and secondary schools in Asia) emerged.\n\nThe standard education model in modern countries consists of several basic elements we now take for granted: entering the school building at 7 or 8 in the morning; sitting through 40-60 minute classes where the teacher lectures and the students listen; interspersed with lunch and physical education periods; students returning home after school to do homework. Under the constraints of the standardized curriculum, the vast and beautiful realm of human thought is artificially cut into manageable pieces called "subjects." Similarly, originally fluid, integrated, and interconnected concepts are divided into separate "course units."\n\nThis model was first implemented in the 18th century by the Prussians. They were the first to invent our current classroom teaching model. The Prussian intention was not to educate students capable of independent thinking, but to mass-produce loyal and easily managed citizens. The values they learned in school taught them to obey authority, including parents, teachers, and the church, and ultimately, the king.\n\nOf course, the Prussian education system was innovative in many aspects at the time. It enabled tens of thousands to join the middle class and provided crucial momentum for Germany's rise as an industrial power. Given the technological level of the time, adopting the Prussian system was perhaps the most economical way to achieve universal education in the Kingdom of Prussia. However, this system hindered students from deeper inquiry and was detrimental to their ability to think independently. Yet, in the 19th century, high-level creative and logical thinking skills might have been less important than ideological obedience and mastery of basic practical skills.\n\nIn the first half of the 19th century, the United States largely copied the Prussian education system. As in Prussia, this move greatly facilitated the construction of a middle class capable of securing jobs in the booming industrial sector. Besides the U.S., this system was also emulated by other European countries in the 19th century and spread to countries outside Europe and America.\n\nHowever, today's economic reality no longer requires a submissive and disciplined labor class. On the contrary, it demands increasingly higher literacy, mathematical proficiency, and humanistic grounding from workers. Modern society needs creative, curious, self-directed lifelong learners capable of proposing and implementing novel ideas. Unfortunately, the goals of the Prussian education system are precisely the opposite of this social need.\n\nToday's education completely ignores the wonderfully diverse and subtle differences between individuals—differences that make people vary in intelligence, imagination, and talent.\n\nEast Asian Education is Deeply Influenced by Confucian Tradition and the Imperial Examination System\n\nWhen the three East Asian countries began introducing this modern education system in the late 19th century to catch up with Western powers, they inevitably, due to their own Confucian traditions and imperial examination systems, subconsciously distorted and emphasized certain aspects of it.\n\n1. Confusing University Entrance Exams with the Imperial Examination System\n\nEast Asian countries often conflate university entrance exams with their long-standing imperial examination tradition. Ancient societies did not have such a great demand for creativity, so the imperial examination was an excellent system. It completed the selection of social managers with minimal conflict and established a criterion where intellect replaced family status. If we were to draw an analogy with the imperial examination, the modern equivalents should be civil service exams or entrance exams for certain large corporations. Because these exams, like the imperial examination, aim to select already well-trained adults who can immediately engage in certain work.\n\nUniversity entrance exams, on the other hand, aim to select malleable and ambitious individuals for further education. Such individuals should be like liquid glass taken from a furnace—highly malleable, capable of being spun and stretched. In contrast, those selected through imperial examinations are like glazed porcelain fresh from the kiln—ready for immediate use, but if you try to alter them, they either crack or get scratched.\n\nFurthermore, exams are tools with very limited utility. The imperial examination's failure to identify all talents is well-known in history. In modern times, which exams can truly assess a candidate's interests, aspirations, imagination, and practical operational abilities? Even the seemingly most objective and measurable math exams miss a lot.\n\nSalman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, uses algebra as an example. When learning algebra, students mostly focus on getting high scores on exams, which only cover the most important parts of each unit. Candidates memorize a bunch of Xs and Ys, plugging them into memorized formulas to get their values. The Xs and Ys in exams do not reflect the power and importance of algebra. The importance and charm of algebra lie in the fact that all these Xs and Ys represent infinite phenomena and perspectives.\n\nThe equations used to calculate production costs for listed companies can also calculate the momentum of objects in space; the same equations can determine the optimal path of a parabola or set the most suitable price for a new product. Methods for calculating the prevalence of genetic diseases can also be used in football games to decide whether to launch an offensive in the fourth quarter. In exams, most students do not see algebra as a simple, convenient, and versatile tool for exploring the world, but rather as an obstacle to overcome. Therefore, while exams are important, society must recognize their significant limitations and reduce their weight in talent selection.\n\nThe U.S. education system uses a double-insurance approach to curb students from wasting excessive energy on exams: First, SAT scores are just one of many factors considered for admission; overemphasizing them is unwise. Second, the SAT is offered six times a year. In contrast, the education systems in Taiwan and mainland China double down on making students waste their youth: First, the joint entrance exam score is the decisive factor for admission. Second, the joint exam is held only once a year.\n\n2. East Asian Countries' Overemphasis on Review\n\nA 2009 comparative research report on the rights and interests of high school students in China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States showed: 78.3% of Chinese ordinary high school students spend more than 8 hours a day at school on weekdays (excluding weekends and holidays), compared to 57.2% in South Korea. Such situations hardly exist in Japan and the United States. Chinese students have the longest daily study time. The amount of content students learn across countries doesn't differ much. So, what does excessive study time imply? It implies that review occupies too large a proportion. This is the greatest means of stifling students' imagination and creativity.\n\nWhen discussing the importance of review, people often quote Confucius: "Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?" Here, "application" refers to review. However, there is a huge difference between Confucius's time and today's society: the content of learning. The main learning content in Confucius's time was "ritual," which required repeated practice to master. But as human social life evolved into modern times, the main content of learning shifted from "ritual" to cognition. Cognition is expansive and changing; its essence is creating or learning new things. If education overemphasizes review, it cannot produce innovative talents.\n\nMoreover, as Paul Graham said, "Even the knowledge learned in the best high schools is negligible compared to university." Take humanities as an example. How do the few history textbooks that high school students need to recite repeatedly compare to just a few of the essential readings for university history majors? As for mathematics, even if one masters high school math perfectly, they haven't yet learned calculus, which appeared in the 17th century.\n\nFurthermore, with the explosion of knowledge, all mathematical knowledge in 1900 could fit into 1,000 books, but by 2000, it required 100,000 volumes (Keith Devlin, "The Math Gene"). It's evident how inefficient it is to spend the most energetic years of one's life repeatedly learning such limited knowledge.\n\nIn recent years, the popular 10,000-hour theory seems to provide theoretical support for repeated practice. However, such discussions mostly apply to activities with low cognitive complexity, such as chess, piano, basketball, taxi driving, and spelling. For activities with high cognitive complexity, like creation and management, it's hard to find sufficient evidence. In fact, this point can be used to explain why training in skills like piano and violin has declined in the West but flourished in East Asian countries.\n\nThese skills, which reached maturity in the 19th century, are characterized by relatively fixed difficulty training ladders and a limited total knowledge base, requiring only more practice. Moreover, learning progress can be measured by piece difficulty or grading levels. This precisely fits East Asia's preferred learning method. Therefore, most parents of child musicians in East Asian countries neither have a musical hobby nor understand the background knowledge of classical music, yet they make their children spend vast amounts of time practicing. Their underlying motivation is like the fool in the famous joke who only looks for his key under the streetlight because it's brighter there.\n\n3. The Influence of Egalitarianism and Scarcity Mentality\n\nMany defenses of the joint entrance exam argue that although it is not ideal, it is the fairest. This is influenced by the Confucian tradition of "not worrying about scarcity but about inequality." Fairness is not wrong, but if, in the name of fairness, we suppress different types of talent development paths with a one-size-fits-all approach, it is truly lamentable. Given the large population base of East Asian countries, the opportunity cost of such talent waste is incalculably high.\n\nTake an example from another country. In European academia, there is a comparison: both the UK and Germany are considered powerhouses in classical scholarship, but the UK produces more outstanding talents in this area. The reason, ironically, is that the British education system is less fair. In the UK, some secondary schools have a very high probability of sending students to top universities due to tradition, allowing students there to immerse themselves unhurriedly in vast classical scholarship from an early age. In contrast, Germany is more fair; all students must pass exams to enter university, so students have to spend more energy on common exam subjects. As a result, this superficial unfairness in the UK might actually foster high-quality talent.\n\nThis is like the business example Peter Thiel gives in "Zero to One." On the surface, perfect competition seems fairer, but in reality, companies participating in such competition see their profits become razor-thin, living hand-to-mouth, only focusing on immediate interests, unable to make long-term plans for the future. In contrast, monopolistic companies like Google, because they don't have to worry about competing with other companies, have greater autonomy to care about their products and make various long-term plans that might seem unreliable. Therefore, if students are under long-term competitive pressure from exams, they naturally cannot have long-term self-growth plans and can only focus their minds on the exams that will determine their life path.\n\nOn the other hand, the fierce competition for educational resources from kindergarten to university in East Asian countries is essentially a scramble for limited high-quality educational resources, which is not entirely unreasonable. But why does the competition in this region reach such an intense level? Perhaps it must be attributed to the scarcity mentality caused by long-term material deprivation.\n\nThe popular book "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much" points out that when people fall into a state of scarcity (material or time), scarcity captures the brain, affecting not only the speed of our perception but also our understanding of the world around us. And when we are extremely focused on solving immediate problems, we cannot effectively plan for the future.\n\nScarcity is a condition unique to East Asian nations. For thousands of years, these countries have had rice-intensive farming economies. On one hand, this could support more people on the same arable land; on the other hand, it required more labor and greater tolerance for crowding. After the 17th century, they all fell into the trap of involution. Take Japan as an example. From the 15th to the 19th century, Japan's population fluctuated between 10 and 20 million, about four times that of England during the same period. The arable land on which this large population depended for survival was only equivalent in area to an English county, yet its productivity was less than that of an English county. Therefore, during the Tokugawa period, to survive, the Japanese not only pushed diligence and frugality to the extreme but also exhibited two unimaginable phenomena.\n\nOne was that the Japanese government encouraged infanticide, resulting in zero population growth over 300 years. Additionally, because precious land could not be used to provide feed for livestock, the Japanese systematically abandoned the use of wheels and livestock, two fundamental agricultural technologies. The result? To use a vivid metaphor, they kept their noses just above water; any accidental disaster or unexpected expense could lead to drowning. This unique scarcity and anxiety mentality of East Asian nations is incomprehensible to Southeast Asian indigenous peoples, Europeans, Americans, and even Africans.\n\nTherefore, if educational resources are narrowly understood as well-equipped classrooms, high-level teachers, etc., they are indeed limited. For East Asians long in a state of psychological scarcity, participating in the scramble is inevitable. However, in reality, for children to succeed, the more important educational resources are the cultural background of their families, the teaching of values by example, and the subtle influence of aspirations and vision. These have nothing to do with the zero-sum game of "if you get into this school, I can't."\n\nMoreover, if parents, driven by a scarcity mentality, immerse their children in cram schools and endless practice problems from a young age, hoping to seize the seemingly scarce school resources in front of them, they might, in the long run, waste the child's greatest resource—the youthful time of infinite possibilities and innate curiosity. That would be loving them to their detriment.\n\n4. The Mentality Brought by Industrial Catch-up\n\nThe origins of modern industrialization lie in Western Europe, so both their economic society and education system had a relatively gradual natural evolution period. East Asian countries were swept into modern society. To catch up with other countries, they invariably adopted state-planned and guided development in their industrial systems. Japan's industrialization owes much to the bureaucrats of MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry). South Korea relied on government support for a few chaebols to配合 the overall development plan. China still has its Five-Year Plans guiding development.\n\nThis kind of national-level planning is based on 19th-century rationalism. Its underlying idea is that there is no problem in the world that cannot be solved, and thus the accurate future direction of things can be predicted through scientific investigation. Applying this idea to the education system assumes that some institution can accurately predict what knowledge children of a certain age need to master, what kind of talent a certain exam can select, etc. This confidence is terrifying upon closer thought.\n\nSpecifically, in the actual operation of schools and learning, the East Asian education system, specially established to meet the talent needs of industrialization, exhibits a more frantic pursuit of efficiency characteristic of the industrial catch-up period compared to the naturally developed Western system. Thus, the education systems of these late-industrializing countries resemble factory assembly lines more than those of the pioneering industrial nations.\n\nIn the early 20th century, Taylorism was盛行 in American industry. Taylor believed the fundamental purpose of management was to improve efficiency. To this end, he adopted measures such as setting work quotas, selecting the best workers, implementing standardized management, instituting刺激性 pay systems, and emphasizing a "精神革命" of cooperation between employers and workers. This pushed workers' potential to the extreme. Some described that in factories implementing Taylorism, you couldn't find a single多余 worker; every worker worked like a machine without stopping. The premise of Taylor's theory was treating the "human" as the management object as an "economic man," with利益驱动 being the main tool for improving efficiency. The most famous modern Taylorist factory is undoubtedly Foxconn. From reports, one can guess the psychological impact of such a high-pressure environment on workers.\n\nIf we compare the East Asian education system to a Taylorist factory, we find an almost one-to-one correspondence: setting high study loads and numerous知识点 for assessment, selecting high-achieving students to form key schools, nationwide unified assessment standards,大量 exams forming刺激性 rewards and punishments, and various motivational activities within schools. The school's goal is also to发挥 students' potential, with every minute dedicated to achieving the best grades.\n\nTherefore, critics of this education system often say children seem like industrial products on an assembly line, or students are child laborers for teachers, with their grades becoming the teachers' performance metrics. Thus, the interests of teachers and students are often not aligned but相反. This is not mere激愤之词 but has a certain internal logic.\n\nOf course, given the hardworking tradition of East Asian countries, if such hardship for children确实 produced results, it might be acceptable. But the problem lies in this effectiveness. This educational Taylorism essentially treats students as manual workers. For manual workers, because their work state is visible, factory management is easier. The requirement for them is "to do things right," not "to do the right things."\n\nModern students, I think, are more like what Peter Drucker defined as "knowledge workers" (knowledge workers do not produce tangible things but produce knowledge, ideas, and information; no one can see what they are really thinking). Moreover,