@ Cottage
That is a silly position to take and fails to consider so many obvious factors.
One of the main reasons Oriental students do not thrive in the west is because of the massive cultural difference, and not education. When my father worked at a university in the UK, he was always able to get the best out of Chinese students, and those students tend to be far better than their western counterparts, not that there are many western counterparts that is.
It is folly to expect people brought up and taught in a completely different culture and manner to be able to take to the kind of jobs and roles that are designed for natives. It is as unreasonable to expect an Oriental person to get off a plane and fit right in in the west as it is for a westerner to do so in places like China, Japan or South Korea.
Funnily enough, there is a new term that is fast becoming common in finance circles. FISHTAIL, which stands for Failed In Shang Hai Trying Again In London. These are the young hotheads who went over to China expecting to take China by the scruff of the neck and own the Chinese economic miracle. Needless to say, most of the people who went over with that attitude and mindset did not do so well, and have started to move back to London to try and get their old jobs back.
The main reason that western firms are investing so much to train local Chinese people to perform roles they would have sent ex-pats to do in years past is because they are realizing that it is easier and cheaper to train locals to do the job right than to teach westerners who already can do the job how to do it in Asia. And guess what, their businesses are benefiting from the change.
You are also in for a big surprise if you think western educated students are ready to hop into work straight out of campus with no need for further education. Even in highly specialized fields like law, firms still invest huge amounts of time and money to train their staff to do their work.
There are very few exceptions where what you learn at university will be useful for you in your working life outside of pure academia.
China's education system does have its flaws. The biggest that I can see is the poor transition between high school and university.
In high school, there is so much competition and pressure to get an amazing mark to get into a good uni that students are forced to work insanely hard, and teachers pretty much spoonfeed the students to make sure they get the best possible mark as their bonuses depend on the marks their students get.
But once you get into Uni, the lectures in China behave largely like their western counterparts, meaning there is no-one there to spoon feed the students or to jump on their backs to make sure they do all their homework.
For most students, the habits of doing so much work learnt up to high school keep them working hard. But for a significant minority, they just struggle to adapt and end up doing too little work and drop out.
That is far from an uniquely oriental problem, as many high-flyers in western countries who achieve that because of parental pressure also 'rebel' like that when they are at uni, and you can usually tell which students are there only because it is what their parents decided, and they tend to not do so great unfortunately.
The broad nature and lack of specialization in Chinese primary and secondary education is less clear-cut. Choice is a double edged sword, and can be extremely harmful if the person making the choice does so for the wrong reasons. Given the choice, I don't think any children would want to brush their teeth. Would you ever allow your child to take that choice?
I have seen many of my old high school friends from the UK under-achieve badly and end up in dead-end no-hope jobs that they will probably keep for the rest of their lives, and these were smart, capable kids who are in this position today because they chose their subjects at high-school not based on what the good universities and courses wanted, but on which are the easiest subjects and the timetable the classes are scheduled. So they can have an early finish or late start on certain days.
That is the kind of stupid decisions children make, that is why we do not allow children to enter into legally binding contracts or hold them to the same standards of culpability if they commit a crime. Why should be intrust their futures to them at such a tender age, before they really know what they want or how these choices would affect them in the long-term?
Another thing I will say in favor of a broad approach is, how will you know what you really like if you have not tried different things out?
In the west, you are seeing fewer and fewer students taking up 'mathy' subjects and careers, and that is mainly down to choice. We all know that it is hard work learning your times tables and periodic tables, that it is no fun doing endless sums to hone your skills, and that os why kids are not choosing them. But you will not experience the true job of subjects like math or science until you have mastered the basics and move on to the more interesting aspects.
If you ask the world's great musicians, engineers and academics whether they loved the subject they are doing now when they were children, and 9 times out of 10, they would not only say they didn't like it, but that they hated it. Until that one magical moment when the scales lifted from their eyes and changed their lives forever.
I may not remember everything I learnt in all those different classes in middle school in China today, but they did open my eyes to what is out their, and for the subjects that did truly interest me, those early foundations have proved invaluable.
There is much to be admired about how western secondary education prepares a student for university life and helps them to develop independently and confidently (interestingly enough, while American students rarely rank top in international competitions, they always rank top when asked how well they felt they did, some might laugh, but confidence and self-believe is an extremely powerful and useful trait, and all too many oriental students seem to be too lacking in that department). However, there is something terribly amiss with the American education system.
If you have not seen 'Waiting for Superman', then I strongly urge you to see it. It is an extremely well made documentary about the modern American education system. What impressed me most about the film is that there does not seem to be any political motive, any axe to grind by the makers. They only cared about finding out what is wrong with America's education system and how to fix it. It is a very eye-opening, powerful and genuine story, and it is hard not to be moved by it.
