When I finished posting the Chinese Crossbow and other Inventions, I wondered why the Chinese were so successful at coming up with so many innovations while the West had to wait centuries. To answer that, I thought of a long debate I had with an “old” friend.
He and I had an e-mail debate last year about education in the US until I was sick of hearing his opinion that vouchers would fix the problem. To him, the American public schools were broken. The whole mess was the fault of the Teachers’ Unions and the public schools should be replaced with schools run by the private sector like Wal-Mart. Imagine Wall-Mart running thousands of schools and being paid from our taxes.
In my opinion, the “old” friend was wrong. America’s schools are not failures. The problem with kids not learning is cultural and socio/economic. To make my point, I’ll use Asian culture as an example.
When I said that Swan, my daughter, had earned straight A’s since kindergarten, this “old” friend said that was a fluke. It was not a fluke.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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