Monday, April 29, 2013

How education prepares you

A friend is working in Taiwan. He commented:


Taiwan has some extraordinary researchers; yet the education system, at least that is how i see it; handicaps people in that they've never learned to ask the truly serious, and game~changing questions.  

Maybe the Work Hard and Obey attitude in Asia is great for making engineers, but not inventors. They are excellent at working within a known system, but having always been punished for being wrong, I'd guess one would be much less prone to stepping into the unknown or challenging the known systems or beliefs.

2 comments:

  1. You still need some ingenuity to be a good engineer. What has helped Asia is that you can buy a lot of that in, and then maximise your use of cheap labour. Anyone heard of Samsung. Or an innovative product developed by Samsung?

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  2. You still need some ingenuity to be a good engineer.

    There are very few good engineers. Most engineers just need to be able to follow the lead of those few good ones, and none of them are Asian. Let's face it, a culture that doesn't reward individuality isn't going to create great scientists or engineers or even artists. There is no Chinese Shakespeare just as there is no Chinese Einstein or Chinese Tesla.

    Anyone heard of Samsung. Or an innovative product developed by Samsung?

    I've heard of Samsung but am unaware of any innovative product of theirs. I know them as a creator of kind of cheap, kind of crappy TVs and laptops.

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