Hong Kong Super-star Tutor Millionaires
In Hong Kong, the best tutors get their photos on the trams, and can earn millions. Blogger Freeman Hunt looks at this very "un-American" trend, and can only say "wow!". She links this table in the Wall Street Journal that suggests that Hong Kong may have started a trend that is likely to spread.
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Imagine a society where the superstar millionaires are the ones who help students achieve their goals--instead of gangsta rappers and too-often-thuggish sports stars? What kind of society would reward the intelligent and productive people who have a positive impact on people's lives, instead of the psychological neotenates who are current pop stars and idols?
You may notice that Finland occupies the top spot in the WSJ table of achievement. Studying the top-level "national" performers should give us an idea where we have gone wrong. Notice also that Canada places third internationally, suggesting that US educational researchers can begin by studying their northern neighbor.
Educational unions in the US are a significant impediment to useful educational reform. The multicultural nature of the US population also makes it difficult to compare stats to smaller and more homogeneous populations. Finally, reforming the psychologically neotenous nature of US popular culture is virtually impossible. The best result to hope for is that a significant fraction of the US population will begin to see the importance of focusing more on things that matter.
Update 29March08: More here.
Labels: education, Finland, neotenous society
posted by al fin at 9:23 am
9 Comments:
Latvia,Latvia:( Each year more [censored] and [censored] we stay!
Want change,but don't have will and money of course.... government. Big problem is russian language to,after you finish school many Latvians don't know this language(so good) and have problems to find good jobs!
Off Topic-soon average IQ will be 85 :D
P.S.Sorry for grammar:)
varjuga!
Your link to Freeman Hunt points to the Wikipedia Cram school entry.
Cram Schools have been going for a long time in HK (and other places like Korea, Japan and even China). It is not a new trend.
People seem unlikely to deal with the IQ realities, it seems to me.
Neato!
Consistent with high regional IQ of East Asians?
Thanks for the comments.
Yes, the IQ issue is one of the many issues needing to be dealt with, Richard, absolutely.
Martins, what did you mean when you said "soon average IQ will be 85"? The last I heard, the average IQ in Latvia was 97.
More interesting than those averages would be the variance ...
That would give us some idea of how many high performance individuals are likely to come from each group ...
Okay, but you can go to the bottom of the Al Fin sidebar and find hundreds of publications that deal with those issues.
This post is about society's priorities and how it rewards different types of individuals. That is a very deep-seated problem that requires more honest analysis than current academicians are willing to apply.
"Imagine a society where the superstar millionaires are the ones who help students achieve their goals--instead of gangsta rappers and too-often-thuggish sports stars? What kind of society would reward the intelligent and productive people who have a positive impact on people's lives, instead of the psychological neotenates who are current pop stars and idols?"
A necessary (but not sufficient) precondition of such is a high IQ society. As the birthing patterns and immigration trends continue to drive down the average IQ of the US, the Idiocratization is only going to accelerate. Hong Kong and Finland can still pull this off. The US--well, maybe in Minnesota and the stuffy areas of DC, but I don't see how it is viable at the national level to any extent.
Sveiki!
In Latvia the new post social(USSR) birth generation are getting dummer and dummer,because they only know they right but not duty.Many end secondary school and don't go study further to high school or college!
And one more Finland and Hong Kong have low birth rate so ,they will fall to IQ average :)
varjuga
Heh,
There is quite a bit of symbolism in that photo that will be missed by most westerners.
The number on the building behind the tram is 298, which loosely means it is easy to gain wealth. (It's a Chinese thing ...)
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