http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/fact ... cation.pdf


I don't think poor parents can afford elite pre-schools or kindergartens. Most of which are not willing to receive government assistance due to the government restrictions on what the assisted schools can charge and how parts of the curriculum must be structured.

Parents who live in the New Territories area of HK near the Chinese border are also faced with enormous competition from mainland Chinese whose children were born in Hong Kong hospitals. There have been so many of these children applying for places in HK because their parents prefer HK education that to get the application for preschool or kindergarten would take maybe 1 to 1-1/2 day of queuing and then again for turning in the application prior to interviewing. There was one school where parents started queuing 3 days ahead to get the application as reported by local newspapers.

More info: http://therealnewshk.wordpress.com/2013 ... ten-years/

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

In Ireland a school gets more money per pupil if it's in a disadvantaged area than if it's in a normal or wealthy area. (Private schooling is present but makes up a small percentage of the schooling).

Guess what, the disadvantaged areas still do very poorly academically compared to the others. It's usually not a money problem at its core.

In athletics, drills and conditioning are important to instill proper form of technique in the athlete, so when the athlete gets out on the field to play, he/she can play to the highest level of ability, especially under pressure.

Go players are no different from outdoor athletes in this regard; constant training through replaying and study of pro games, puzzle solving, and playing actual games helps pros and strong amateurs to stay at the top of their game.

My guess is that Go is still, at least in the West, a game strongly associated with East Asia, a region famous for producing exceptionally talented intellectuals. As a game with strong intellectual connotations, it's not a very popular choice in societies where it is more important to attend to your friend's needs than to attend to any patriarch's desire for intellectual achievement in the family. In fact, this might explain why outdoor sports such as association football and basketball outstrip Go and other board games in popularity (apart from mass commercialization); follow the money! With the amount of money a star athlete or even average pro athlete earns in a year, how many friends and family can be helped out with their problems? (Knowledge does not pay bills. At least not directly.)

Go in the West isn't strongly associated with anything. When I say I play go to people they go "what's that?" "The oriental game with black and white stones on the board." "Oh, I think I saw that in some movie once." It's unknown to a very large percentage of the people. Whilst almost everyone in my country would know what you mean by baseball but wouldn't have a bull's notion as to what the rules are, because it's not really played here on any medium scale. Activities are either totally unknown in a country, shoji in Ireland for instance, vaguely aware of, go, aware of but not familiar with, baseball, familiar with but may not play, chess, soccer, gaelic games etc. Most people in my country would have some idea about how chess works on a basic level, a rather large percentage could probably play a game with you (though very much at "30k level") but our chess clubs are *tiny*. The biggest night of the year in my city of 250,000 people is 40 people showing up (and that'd be everybody).

The problem in the US is not the schools, its the parents. We no longer (if we ever did) believe in disciplining our children, and we wait years to let someone else educate them. By the time our kids start pre-school, same-aged kids in other countries are already becoming expertly skilled in various areas.

Could you tell us what you mean by "go education system here"? The topic seems interesting, but I am not sure if the replies are addressing the point you wanted to discuss.

I guess those are different kids than the ones spending 14 hours a day playing StarCraft...

Probably, but even then they study in "their field" 14 hours a day^^

It's just the other side of the coin, I think. You can't expect children to devote 14 hours a day to an abstract future scenario without forcing a fair number of them to flee into other realms. Playing Starcraft is for some far more enjoyable than studying something they are just told to do and like Go they can make money with it, if they are good enough.
In the end this might show some remaining sparks of individual pursuit.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I read a newspaper article about these test results and there was an interesting point made that hasn't been discussed. In the USA the state of Massachusetts submitted its scores independently of the country-wide scores and placed much higher than many of the higher-scoring countries. In reading, Mass. 15 year-olds ranked fourth compared to all countries, 6th in science and 10th in math. Florida also submitted its scores separately and did much worse. So it seems that in the USA, some educational systems are performing very well while others are performing badly. In the USA there is a general perception that students' failure to do well is the teachers' fault. However, studies have shown that around two-thirds of educational results are due to outside-of-school factors such as poverty, lack of parental support for learning, and the general societal attitude toward education.

Returning to the original post for this thread, it is interesting that the great go-playing countries tend to have drill-based education systems. One might infer from this that drill and memorization are the most effective way to learn go. However, it might also be the case that go, being outside the official educational system and therefore not subject to the same pressures as formal school, offers a way for people (including young people) to be free of the rigid drill regimen and just enjoy playing something. The fact that a large number of Japanese youths are addicted to video games might be due to the same factors. Some noteworthy pros such as Ishikura Noboru 9p were on a career fast-track but quit to play go because professional go is a meritocracy rather than dependent on what school you went to and what social circles you belong to. So the oriental education pattern might be driving young people to play go and once they get hooked more of them want to be pros.

Yes. And this should be noted in the context of comparing to Shanghai rather than rural China, for which we don't yet have data. But I guess that might be available in 2015.

I've been reading the Pisa reports and they are fascinating. Consider this comment:

"It seems that the U.S. students have particular strengths in cognitively less-demanding
mathematical skills and abilities, such as extracting single values from diagrams or handling well-structured formulae.
And they have particular weaknesses in demanding skills and abilities, such as taking real world situations seriously,
transferring them into mathematical terms and interpreting mathematical aspects in real world problems. These are
tasks where the well-known superficial classroom strategy “Don’t care about the context, just extract the numbers from
the text and do some obvious operations” is bound to fail. This strategy is popular all over the world and frequently
helps pupils and students to survive in school mathematics and to pass examinations. However, in a typical PISA
mathematical literacy task, the students have to use the mathematics they have learned in a well-founded manner."

And this one:

"At the system level, the average number of hours that students spend on homework or other study tends
to be unrelated to overall performance (OECD 2013d, Table IV.1.2)."

So I'm not certain that speculations regarding more drilling being the answer are supported by the Pisa findings, but I guess it depends on what is meant by drilling. In general, there are a lot factors to be considered. As a U.S. citizen, my feeling is that primary and secondary school teachers don't get as much respect in the U.S. as in some European or Asian countries, so we attract fewer people who are enthusiastic about teaching at those levels. There are also large swaths of both cities and rural areas where students see no hope. They just don't view educational success as a way out of anything, so they just give up or pursue pipe dreams.

This article on Japan's PISA results appeared in Yomiuri's English language edition this morning. The delicate phasing on Japan's 'departure from cram-free education' is interesting I think. Japan had earlier tried to ease the burden on students and counter the perception on students' part that J education was increasingly irrelevant. This may or may not have been working as intended but it was clearly accompanied by lower standardized scores. So back to cramming. There is also a move afoot here to go back to Saturday classes in public schools, which were cut back about twenty years ago.

Note at the bottom of the article that students do not believe that what they are learning is interesting or relevant in terms of future jobs.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

A comparison chart from The Economist on Facebook, Dec 3, 2013:

I agree, comparing Hong Kong and Shanghai is not truly representative of China as a whole, since Chinese cities are very affluent(compared to American cities), however I think it is fair to say their affluent kids are expected to study more than our affluent kids any way. I think one thing to note is that the Chinese education system has other problems, for example instead of a testing system they have a portfolio system, which is easily corruptible. The NY times ran an article about how many of the brightest students portfolios get switched with children from rich and powerful families. This may be the reason advanced education in the US is considered superior to the Chinese system, though they generally look down on our early education. Watch out for the Tiger Mom.

Sure, because money won't get you admission into an American University/College.


Even when you totally anonymise the system (like Ireland where universities never know who they are accepting into undergraduate courses) the money finds another way, i.e. better schools = better results = more likely to get into the anonymous system that relies totally on results. The poor intelligent kid going to the poorly functioning school is only going to get into the most competitive courses (medicine, law etc) if they have immense self-discipline and an ability to self-teach far exceeding that of the vast majority of people. The richer kids will get every possible help they can to make this easier to do (though still damned difficult to be fair).