I assume he is comparing millions of students in America who go to public schools to the privileged few in India–admittedly, still a substantial number considering India’s population–who have access to good private schools.
The other couple of hundred million kids who are forced to go to wretched public schools because their parents are too poor to afford anything else and because the policymakers are too busy investing in sexy new IITs and medical schools would be hard pressed to compete with kids in sub-Saharan Africa.
Just ask the folks at Pratham.
This is the Thomas Friedman effect, I suppose.
p.s Here’s how Sweden does it.
Filed under: Views On News
Aah! This reminds me that I have to write that post on the fallacy of “education is better back home”. I *will* get to it. Really!
Just a point about “public schools” in America… not the same concept as public schools in India. In India a public school is actually a private school, affordable only for the wealthy. In America public schools are government schools financed by tax dollars and free. So yes millions do go to “public schools” in the US, and only the very privileged few go to private schools where they pay exorbitant fees.
Forget Schools, the breeding grounds of monotonous regularity of existence. Mr President, ideally, should not be so short-sighted….. raising the bar, upping the performance levels, heightening the rigor would not yield earth-shatteringly shocking an outcome.
Mr President should keep in mind this fundamental block of truth that there are definitely GENETIC RACE DIFFERENCES in Intelligence. Asians n Europeans are relatively smarter cultures than the tribes thrive in the land of dreams/opportunities
and one should also make himself / herself aware of the fact that “there’s at least one gene correlated with intelligence. That’s the gene for myopia. There have been many experiments conducted around the world, all showing that high IQ is a risk factor for myopia, independent of the amount of reading one does. Jews and Asians have the greatest prevalence of myopia, non-Jewish whites in the middle, and blacks have the least prevalence of myopia. The distribution is as expected. The smartest races have the greatest prevalence of myopia. .”‘
http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/10/race-difference.html
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/imo-scores/ this is the list of countries that won the IMO (since 1977):
China: 13 times
Russia: 4 times
Romania, West Germany: 2 times
US, Bulgaria, Iran: 1 time
Israel never made it to top 10. India has two 7th places, a 9th and a 10th.
a better solution could be marrying into the smartest / smarter race who seriously believes in the value of education. and we in India will continue living with this hard to gulp-down reality that a high % of kids (certainly have the potential to become bright stars if they are given an opportunity to see a school like construction) have no option but to spend their childhood scanning garbages.
….With the exception of indigenous people, everyone came from somewhere else. They were immigrants. Frontier societies absorbed many indigenous people and we also have a long history of interracial unions between Americans of European and African descent. It is not just Barack Obama, but most of us are a bunch of ‘mutts’ from different cultures and backgrounds…..
http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090327/888/twl-what-americans-will-look-like-in-ano.html