SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Japan's ancient secret to better cognitive memory

Quote:

Originally Posted by Commander Wallace (Post 2858301)

If this is true, Where did Germany get It's abilities and acumen in such things as engineering ? Certainly, if students and children in Germany weren't pushed to work hard in school, this wouldn't be the case.

Nobody denies that "made in Germany" had a meaning in the past, and that the so-called "duales Ausbildungssystem" worked great in the past, and that qualifications were much higher in the past, and skill were better in the past. What have all these statements in common? The phrase "the past". Today is the present, and in recent times and the present all these thigns are in a steep decline. The qualificaiton of students who made their school exams and start to go to university, is not as good anymore. The rate of people leaving school and not able to thoroughly read and write and do basic math, is growing, and since many years.

You reflect on the echoes of Germany's past. Its an echo. Germany falls back in many, many economic-industrial fields. Do not judge the present Germany by its more famous past. ;)

Else the following could happen to you. One and a half decade ago they ran the first PISA study, a yearly comparison and rating of the school systems in various countries. The very first such PISA study was won by Finland in first place, and everybody said: oh, look, how great the Fins are performing and how much the students like the Finnish school system! We must do it like the Fins do!

Well, not so fast. I already told it repeatedly over the years in past threads, but the press over here just rediscovered it now and acts as if it is brandnew - it isnt. The first PISA study was compromised by a terribly severe methodological flaw. When the PISA team checked Finland, Finland was in the midst of a school reform, and had just switched from an older school system to a new system with new, progressive ideas. And then PISA team came in the first year this had happend and asked: hey kids, how do you like your finnish schooling? And the kids, now having much more freedoms and less pressure to blindly learn and memorize, of course said, due to the easier conditions: oh, its wonderful! And then the performance checks and tests were run, and the kids performed great - because they were still benefitting from the far greater learning success the old system had provided - by forcing students to work harder, which of course was not popular with the kids. The first PISA study thus said: The Finnish kids love their school, and they perform better than any other nation. In fact, the success of the old system was wrongly attributed to the new one. A terrible methodological flaw. Unforgivable.

And in the following PISA studies we then saw Finland's school dropping down on the list, giving up rankings, and now performing so mediocre that even in the Finnish press, if i may believe our own press reporting on it, they make critical comments on it and say: We have to be honest, we have messed up our schooling more or less. Because now the schooling is still liked by the kids, but the performance tests now run according to and reflect the much lower learning success of the reformed easier schooling methods. And compared to the old methods, the outcomes are much worse.

The same with German industry and qualifaction of students that you judged by the glorious past of Germany's past successes. The universities since years moan for the low level of adequatly prepared students when the come from school. And companies training their future workers often must start with providing education and classes on stuff the people should have learned at school already, but haven't. Spelling in written language. 101 of math, division, rule of three. reliable reading. Understanding tasks and questions. How cna it be that in more and more comanies this is trained first - while the young people should have learned these basics already at school...??? That costs time, and money, and Germany more and more suffers form lacking workers and employees in all areas.

In the house where I have my appartment, we occasionally need the service of craftsmen, of course. but in the past five years we had to fight conflicts with three servicing and construction companies whose claimed expert advisors and workers had messed things up, and did damage or did the work they were tasked with not properly, and repairs were needed. The chefs of all three said: sorry, we do not get better people anymore, I must work with whomever I can get.

And that shows! It shows in the quality of German cars and their repair statistics (severe drops, we are no longer the global elite of car makers), the lamentable expertise of experts in many areas providing customers with service advice, the lack of engineers and IT experts and the huge number of students doing humanities. We become a nation of dilletents.

Or to be more precise: endlessly moralising dilletents.