"Those of us who work with the Japanese are often amazed at how so much schooling leads to so little learning, but with the millstone that is kanji I am surprised that so much is achieved."
As an American, I'm just really hesitant to agree with this given how much better China and Japan seem to educate their students at math and the sciences.
Perhaps you come from a country that educates your people much better than Japan and China, which is why you can say such things.
I can only speak of Japan, I'm biased all to fuck and I'm making crass generalisations, but my essential objection to their education system is that I've never seen a truly creative solution from a Japanese worker. If you need a lab tech or an equation plugger, the Japanese are great. If you need to make something 12% lighter or 8% more aerodynamic, they should be top of your list. If you need anything more than steady, incremental improvement, give up.
The Japanese make great hardware but abysmal software. To use a martial metaphor, they make terrific soldiers but appalling generals. They have been taught that in order to excel, they simply need to memorise the 'correct' way of doing things and then follow that prescription with maximum effort. Young Japanese dearly want to be creative, but by and large they are simply unequipped to do so. Some manage it, but most end up as shachiku (literally "corporate livestock") clogging up the innards of some vast corporation.
There are myriad social and cultural factors at work of which the use of kanji is just a tiny part, but Japan is in a truly dire predicament. We all know the massive demographic problems facing Japan, but the shocking part is the complete inability of the Japanese to seriously address the issue. The current trend in Japan of using robotics in elder care is a good example - it seems innovative, but in my opinion is a symptom of a factory-bound mindset that has no problem-solving strategy other than "fix it with engineering". Japan desperately needs immigrants in vast numbers, but is simply unwilling to do anything at all in order to accommodate them. To return to kanji, it is currently practically impossible for foreign nurses to get residence in Japan due to a language test which only three out of 1,112 candidates have passed - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07...
Education in my native Britain has rather gone to pot recently, but in defence of my home country we do have something of a track record of, well, inventing and discovering nearly everything. My poxy little rainlashed island (population 62 million) has five times more nobel laureates than Japan (pop. 127 million) and China (pop. 1.3 billion) combined. We educated Jonathan Ive, Heston Blumenthal, Norman Foster, Tim Berners Lee, Chris Curry, Frederick Sanger, Turing, Crick, Watson, Darwin, Dawkins, Faraday, Babbage, all the Dysons, Watt, Joule, Newton, Kelvin and quite a lot of other properly clever boffins.
Unfortunately, I think test taking falls into the same trap -- drilling for memorized procedures, without necessarily really understanding the material in a meaningful way.
It'd be like measuring which country has better literature by seeing who does better in spelling bees.
As an American, I'm just really hesitant to agree with this given how much better China and Japan seem to educate their students at math and the sciences.
Perhaps you come from a country that educates your people much better than Japan and China, which is why you can say such things.