Chinese Maths books to be translated into English

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... uk-schools

The schools minister, Nick Gibb, has described it as “one of the most valuable education initiatives undertaken by our government over the past few years”. The mastery approach involves a whole-class approach to teaching maths. Each lesson concentrates on a single mathematical concept, which is covered in great depth, and the class does not move on until every child has mastered the lesson.

//
“Some uphold Chinese education as being better than that in western countries, it is also not without its problems,” said an opinion piece in the Beijing Youth Daily following the announcement of the textbook deal. “It lacks respect for children’s creativity and is too exam-oriented.”

It's the end...

So everyone learns at the rate of the slowest learner....seems good for churning out identically dull automatons.

The entire concept of teaching batches of students in a class seems horribly suboptimal for both tails of the student distribution.  Self-paced with lots of quick tests and drills is better.

there are all sorts of issues here
I've posted in off-topic before that in the US, someone has broken down the results of international standardized tests by race, and it seems that the much-maligned US educational system actually does very well when that is taken into account: chinese in the US score better on average than chinese in china, europeans in the US score better on average that europeans in europe, and so on, and it seems that test scores in the US are dropping because of the changing demographics: in particular, latinos (and latinas) score worse on these tests than say chinese and europeans,  so if you increase the proportion of latinos in the US then test scores will drop
If you accept what appears to be the premise of the UK government (that chinese score well in standardized tests because chinese math books are better) then by that same logic, the math books in the US are better still

maybe they could take the chinese model one step further and pirate the books

So everyone learns at the rate of the slowest learner....seems good for churning out identically dull automatons.

which is pretty much what the chi-comms want in china, and maybe the UK government wants as well.
With the UK class system, the elites are trained in the private schools and the identically dull automatons are trained in the state-run schools

There are many societies, like the Chinese and Middle East, that showed great promise thousands of years ago but haven't done anything of note creatively for hundreds. After gunpowder and zero...not much else. I assume that this is because of their society's rules and/or religion.

Maybe it doesn't matter these days when it is so easy to learn/steal from the West.

It'll be political correctness to kill off the West. The race to the bottom is on!

I hope Russia doesn't dominate the planet. I hope it's some as yet undiscovered Pacific Islanders.

I've just stumbled onto this github repository when a guy wrote a cool neural network that write random realistic Chinese characters. His motivation is however disturbing!

As a child growing up in a mostly English speaking country, my parents would force me to attend these dreadful Saturday morning classes where I was to be taught Chinese. There would be these dictation tests where the students have to write out full passages of memorised Chinese text from a textbook, usually indirectly exposing us to Confucian moral values. We would have to spend a lot of time during the weeknights memorising passages to prepare for the test on the following Saturday. A score less than perfection is frowned upon. This would go on for years. I still have nightmares about those dictation tests.

Wooden food

I've just stumbled onto this github repository when a guy wrote a cool neural network that write random realistic Chinese characters. His motivation is however disturbing!

As a child growing up in a mostly English speaking country, my parents would force me to attend these dreadful Saturday morning classes where I was to be taught Chinese. There would be these dictation tests where the students have to write out full passages of memorised Chinese text from a textbook, usually indirectly exposing us to Confucian moral values. We would have to spend a lot of time during the weeknights memorising passages to prepare for the test on the following Saturday. A score less than perfection is frowned upon. This would go on for years. I still have nightmares about those dictation tests.

Wooden food

Which part(s) is "disturbing"?

It's the "frowning upon." I believe that the "snowflakes" call this a "micro-aggression" and they need to find a "safe space" to recover.

Cuch, you've got to get with the program. Not knowing this sort of thing is a "meta micro aggression" and would get you banned from most forums. Now go and write out "I will never use a whiteboard again" one hundred times.

So everyone learns at the rate of the slowest learner....seems good for churning out identically dull automatons.

I wonder if the powers that be did an analysis of how learning and teaching mathematics really works. The above approach does not work.
It does produce very hard worker (and so much competition), something that is not to all tastes..

In most of Europe academic competition in the classroom is frowned upon since recent years.There is a misplaced feeling that comparing academic ability is a slight on the person in question. Misplaced egalitarianism.

Funnily, in sport the good footballers/baseballer are taken out of the average teams and sent to the A team. Sport seems to be more important than learning. In China, not so.  Every father wants his son to be the next Johan Cruijf.

It's the end...

It's very late.

It is mostly self-inflicted. A number of major mistakes were made by industry and government in ~ late 80s. Basically, they thought it would be business as usual, as in previous 100 years.

The crown jewels were given away.
I worked in a relatively small Dutch university in 1977. 200 first year indigenous maths students. These days I doubt if you get that number for the whole country.

Talking about misplaced egalitarianism, around 2007 I was working in the City as a quant developer and next to me I had two contractors. Contractor A was on 650 per day and contractor B on 600 per day. When B leaned about the difference, he immediately went to HR to complain about it and ask for his rate to match that of A's. HR duly complied. What made this incident interesting for me was the fact that B (in my mind and that of a few other colleagues as well) was clearly not getting the same amount of work done as A in the same amount of time (equal difficulty/same area). As a matter of fact we were wondering what he is doing all day! At that point I thought, there's something wrong in this industry. I'm not sure if B actually knew he was producing less but cynically decided to take his chances, or if he really believed he was being treated unfairly.. 

There is an interesting mean/variance problem here...

Chinese and German education is optimised to produce a good average, but that seems to have been at the expense of producing the most outstanding people in a broad sweep of science and arts. Thus we have the situation where individual Cambridge colleges have won more Nobel prizes than France and the EU spending serious money for a "socially relevant" league table for universities, since when the UK leaves, the EU will not have one top university.

That's not inherently better or worse, the British education system which is optimsed for producing people in the tail of the distribution more resembles a filtering system rather than value-add and during the period of UK optimising for variance over mean, the French and Germans have out-grown the UK.

Startups follow the same pattern, I have a minor political role and attended a EU briefing where I learned that Camden a midsizedLondon borough has more startups than the whole  of France and what appears to be one street has more than Italy. Yet when one meets with startups in FinTech, AI, Identity, bullshit webby things, music et al, a large % aren't Brits or even EU citizens, sometimes they don't have a single native born Brit in the firm.
When the French invited me to look at their startups, hardly any of the people weren't French.

The natural winner-take-all market dynamics of the internet imply that countries that are better at creating and supporting positive-tail people will succeed over those that merely foster high average success or who concentrate resources on lifting the negative tail of human capacities.

Note: the positive tail doesn't have to be lone genius. If a society can foster effective teamwork and a collaborative environment, it can also produce products and services that "win."