One of the greatest aspects of Western culture has been tolerance...
FischerKing@FischerKing64
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Dec 27, 2024
~1 min read
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One of the greatest aspects of Western culture has been tolerance for eccentricity. You don’t get a bizarre man like Isaac Newton without this allowance. Einstein was weird too. Wittgenstein was bizarre. Beethoven couldn’t get along with people. Bach is an outlier as pretty normal. You identify the brilliant people and give them space.
The Asian system of mass conformity - beating the individuality out of kids through rote memorization (which has its place, but shouldn’t be exaggerated) and totally controlled time and space, all day, every day - does not give you a Scientific Revolution which puts Europe far ahead of China. There is a reason China hunkered down and Europeans transformed entire continents - building the modern world we all enjoy.
So the guys who want to recreate American culture along Tiger Mom systems might consider that their own education was just sucking up the achievements of what people not subjected to their childhood slavery developed. They scored great on tests, got into schools, made some dough. But following this model of 12 hours a day as a society will lead to stagnation and deep unhappiness.
The Asian system of mass conformity - beating the individuality out of kids through rote memorization (which has its place, but shouldn’t be exaggerated) and totally controlled time and space, all day, every day - does not give you a Scientific Revolution which puts Europe far ahead of China. There is a reason China hunkered down and Europeans transformed entire continents - building the modern world we all enjoy.
So the guys who want to recreate American culture along Tiger Mom systems might consider that their own education was just sucking up the achievements of what people not subjected to their childhood slavery developed. They scored great on tests, got into schools, made some dough. But following this model of 12 hours a day as a society will lead to stagnation and deep unhappiness.
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You can argue our schools suck and we need more discipline. I would agree with this - although the major problem is our aversion to identifying and separating out the exceptional kids. But the Asian slave model isn’t for Westerners.