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The Japanese/American Tech Deficit
Why do the Japanese get all the coolest gadgets, while the U.S. is left with the second-tier, less-innovative ones? The San Francisco Chronicle delves into this age-old mystery and provides a few explanations for those of us who don't live near Akihabara.
"This is in the way that they don't really like learning"
s/learning/teaching/
Teaching here is almost all memorization and regurgitation. Teachers don't care, though -- no reason to. Their jobs are safe. The worse they do the more money their school gets. A great system, American public education...
I don't know anybody that actually believes that saying overly much. To some degree, I buy it simply because it's so easy to be a teacher since the payrate is so low.
It all comes down to why they became teachers.
I also say "Radio Shack: you have questions. We have blank stares." This is a similar thing: they stopped paying electricians enough to work at Radio Shack and replaced them by barely trained cell phone salesman monkeys. Anyone capable of actually answering my questions who is working at Radio Shack isn't doing it for the money.
I'll stop thinking that no one with a marginally good grasp of engineering works at Radio Shack when they start making a decent wage. I'll start thinking that teachers have as good a grasp as working professionals in the fields when they pay them a decent wage.
Oh, except any history teacher who prefers to be called "Coach." Those, I think, don't really know anything about history, and never will.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
As an educator (who has lived in Japan...) and now back home in Canada (blame it on the Canadians...:-)), may I throw my .0235 cents in here? The coolest gadget I ever bought was an incredibly small Toshiba Libretto Win95 computer back in, well, around 1997 or so...:-) (seems M$ wants to set an M$ year standard...) in Japan. I have yet to see anything that compares with it in North America.
Also note that Japan values, and produces, far more engineers than say, the U.S. Lawyers are the American way, and there are very few lawyers, relatively speaking, in Japan.
And I understand that Linux is catching on like crazy in Asia, but here in Canada, in 2004 (soon to be 2005), we're "standardizing" on M$ Windows 2000!? in one of the largest school boards in Canada, at horrendous cost...which brings me to that ever famous, ever popular quote that every Canadian holds near and dear to his/her heart:
"Go ahead, tax me, I'm Canadian..."