"For the past year, 18-year-old Zhang Hao has been studying for 12 hours a day. He spends a minimum of nine hours in class taking practice papers, then continues to study at home. His parents worry that he sometimes crams up to 17 hours work in to a single day. "
"LIN MING, a ten-year-old who has two years left at his primary school in Beijing, does not remember the last time he returned home before 6pm on a weekday during term. As soon as school is out, his mother, Yang Mei, shuttles him around the city, dropping him off at tutoring agencies where he studies advanced maths and English grammar. Ms Yang accepts that she is “maybe putting a bit too much stress” on her son. But she has no choice. “Around 90% of my son’s classmates attend after-school lessons. It’s a competition I can’t lose.” "
"Chinese officials worry that pupils’ achievements may exact too heavy a mental and physical price"
"As long as admission to senior-high schools is based on results from the gruelling zhongkao exam, parents are likely to exploit every loophole to give their children an edge."
So, if you think that pushing kids beyond their limits with something like 16h work days in ways that negatively impacts their mental and physical health is a demonstration of "naturalness", then I just have to concede the point that this is all natural.
But then you have to also claim that schoolchildren killing themselves is also somehow "natural"
"In the last few years, several studies have shown that adolescents and young people in China, Japan and other Asian countries have a large number of psychological problems that may lead them to commit to suicide."
"There are several causes for adolescent suicides. In many cases, suicides relate to fear of performing badly in exams."
"South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world for children ages 10-19 and extremely high elderly (60+) suicide rates. For children, most suicides are caused by stress relating to education. Korean children have a school year of 11 months and often spend over 16 hours a day at school and at afterschool programs called hagwons."
India: India has an average income of $2134 per person. Not per month, per year. It has 872 million people living below the poverty line. One quarter of the population lives on less than 60¢ per day.
So I'd respectfully suggest that there might be good, ahem, motivation to try your best to get good at STEM even if you don't find it particularly natural.
Ya, all east asian countries, you're right. China is interesting especially to me though because, just anecdotally, there seem to be an unusually high number of Chinese female STEM graduates. Not sure what's going on there, but they seem to have solved the gender gap in STEM somehow. Could just be i've encountered an unusual sample too, though.
Easy, just tell everyone that anyone can study STEM as long as they work hard. Do you know Noether, Marie Curie, Grace Hopper, Chien-Shiung Wu, and many more female scientists and engineers are household names? They are featured in mass media, in text books, and in our bedtime stories.
Gender bias in STEM? That's a god damn first-world problem.
Yep. Reduce wealth and increase economic pressure enough so that survival is dependent on a finding a good job, and suddenly, magically, "bias" disappears.
"Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects."
Then, when wealth (and all other measures of gender equality) dramatically increase and people become free to choose to do whatever they want, largely free from economic survival pressure, suddenly, magically and inexplicably, "bias" pops up again.
> Not sure what's going on there, but they seem to have solved the gender gap in STEM somehow
That's because you're not familiar with the actual data. Iran also has gender parity in STEM. The nordic countries have equal or worse gender ratios than America. It's called the gender equality paradox: the more gender equal a country, the less women choose STEM paths.
That's a bold claim. Evidence?