We’ve heard about the schools that produce Wall St types, and the ones that educate engineers.
In the U.S., we constantly are tweaking the K-12 testing machine to be competitive.
I thought it would be interesting to look at another measure of education and innovation, the Nobel Prize.
I don’t know if it means anything, but it * is * interesting.
I did wonder why there haven’t been more from countries like Singapore and Finland, who are often lauded for their schools.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country
I don’t know that you can look at the Nobel Prize as purely a measure of education and innovation, that’s for sure. There are people on there that are obviously there for political purposes. Look at people like Al Gore, Paul Krugman (I mean, seriously?), Barack Obama and Yasser Arafat. Education and innovation? Maybe it’s more of who is the popular flavor of the month, and who the people on the selection committee like the most, for any reason.
EK, there is (approximately) a 50-yr lag period between someone getting high school education and being awarded the prize. The list is reflective of the past, so we will see in 50 years how the current schools will fare. 
Population of US: 321 million
Population of Singapore: 5.5 million
Population of Finland: 5.5 million
Population of Minnesota state: 5.5 million
5.5 million as a percentage of 321 million:
1.7%
Singapore didn’t even exist as a country until 1965, when it was kicked out of malaysia. For a country that has the unique distinction of being the only country in the world that became a country involuntarily, Singapore ain’t doin too bad.
Finland was a poor agrarian country for a long, long time. It didn’t become industrialized until the 50’s. It didn’t have a 1st world GDP per capita economy until the 70’s. It also ain’t doin too shabby…
The Nobel Prize became an utter, irrecoverable joke, beginning in 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita
The stereotypes are true.
No, only the Nobel Peace Prize.
I would leave the peace prize out of it, simply because by its very nature it is political. It isn’t just the size of the country, it is also the culture as well. Nobel prizes, especially in the sciences and medicine, tend to be about ground breaking discoveries, that require major reaches from what is known. The countries that do well on standardized tests in the sciences in general have not done well in terms of nobel prizes or in things like original patents (as opposed to patents on incremental improvements). The problem with countries like Singapore and China and India is they produce kids who do well on standardized tests, but the culture of the countries work against innovation, work against the kind of basic research, that leads to breakthroughs. The proof of this is that kids trained in those countries who have gone to the us for grad school, then come back home, often find out the difficulties of dealing with constraints they wouldn’t have in the US and other countries that have gotten a lot of nobel prizes, China because of its crazy government culture especially makes doing open research difficult. In some ways, the same culture that produces those high test scores also works against things like nobel prizes or new discoveries, the countries in question are pretty homogeneous and prize order and structure.
The other thing to keep in mind about US schools is that there is a wide dichotomy between schools, and while we have schools that do a poor job of educating kids, we also have schools that are more than world class, that turn out well educated kids who go on to do things. What the standardized tests show is that in the countries that do well, they a)don’t have the dichotomy of education levels and b)emphasize a curricula that does well on those tests. There are also arguments that those standardized tests don’t show necessarily the attributes to actually do science,that they are memorizing science formulas and such, rather than real learning (Richard Feynman, himself a nobel prize winner and someone whose legacy is still paying off, was a bitter critic of science as rote learning). The one thing that the culture of the US accomplishes is the idea of the individual, and one of the things we have been pretty good at is creating mavericks, willing to go against conventional wisdom and such. I remember reading in an engineering journal my father used to get, that Japan was trying at the time (this was back when everyone thought Japan was going to take over the world) to change its education system, to try and create the mavericks and such (and obviously, Japan does create mavericks, those doing new things, the nobel prizes in the sciences are one indicator of that). This becomes more evident when you get to grad schools here, it is one of the reasons they are very attractive to foreign students in the first place.
That doesn’t mean our schools are great, I personally think we are trying to create kids who do well on standardized tests, rather than trying to create kids who can think and innovate, I personally think as a measure of things standardized tests, including the ones that claim to measure creativity and such, are not indicators of many of the things we should be encouraging, among other things, standardized tests can be gamed, the infamous ‘teaching to the test’, or the cram schools they use in Asia and so forth, very one dimensional, and greatness is achieved on many dimensions.
A lot of US prize winners were educated in those exam focused countries.
@sorghum-
you missed the point, first of all, I would bet the foreign born students educated over there got grad degrees either in Europe or the US, and more importantly, you also missed the cultural aspects of how innovation and new ideas come about. Put it this way, the original question is correct, if the education system in those countries are so great, how come for example South Korea, which everyone holds up as this great economic powerhouse with a great education system (as measured by standardized tests),has never produced a nobel prize winner? Korea has been industrialized a long time, in the period after the Korean war they ramped up (now almost 60 years), so how come they don’t have a nobel prize in anything but the peace prize? Why does China, that has so emphasized education, that has sent a lot of students for advanced degrees in foreign countries, rely more on industrial espionage than R and D, and copying intellectual property made elsewhere, rather than do it native, and why are the huge majority of Chinese patents incremental improvements on earlier patents, rather than truly new ideas? Achievement is a combination of things, and a country like China, for example, that puts so much stock on controlling society, on not making waves, fearing change, has a hard time innovating because innovation causes disruptions, and education systems that pride themselves on standardized test taking, and on protecting the stauts quo, generally don’t do well with making radical advancements
Feynman told stories about his lecturing in other countries and having no questions asked except by people who had gone to school in the US. He blamed rote learning but it is also cultural.
My kid went to a top exam school in China for half of 10th grade. Mornings spent in classes with the Chinese kids and afternoons staying up with US work. The regular math program there, which she had almost every day, was between AB and BC calculus, a level that most kids in the US never reach. This was an exam school so it isn’t wholly typical. The other big difference is they learned entirely by rote and were tested on what they retained. So they’d learn this system of equations and these problems and they were tested on those problems, something entirely unlike the US where students are constantly frustrated by tests that see whether they can “apply” knowledge to new facts and problems. The Chinese method has a strong virtue: it can teach anyone who works reasonably hard a tremendous amount of math. In fact, they had a system for identifying the relatively few kids whose math skills were superlative and giving them special schooling - even sending them off to special schools. Their idea is that anyone and thus nearly everyone should learn material that makes them useful and that stands in direct contrast to the US method which thinks, against evidence, that all people should “understand” math. This is why they have so many engineers. It’s even why they have so many artists: the kids learn specific drawings and repeat them until they get them right. They identify kids with talent and give them extra training - again, at high end schools unless the kid is really something - but they believe anyone can be taught to do x and y with hard work and repetition.
Their system works very well for generating vast quantities of trained people. It doesn’t generate much creativity. It doesn’t reward creativity. That is why there’s a general divide between the Jewish, sometimes labeled Russian math approach and the Asian math approach: the former is rooted in intuition and understanding and thus creative application. The same holds even in classical music, notably in violin and piano where the methods of instruction vary dramatically.
Culture can be stultifying or liberating. Scandinavian countries, not including Denmark, tend to be more collectively oriented and some Scandinavians speculate that raises the whole at the expense of certain edges of the kind we might see in science. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know.
I do know that culture can be a tremendous negative. Just consider the entire Islamic world from N. Africa to Pakistan. There have been 2 science Nobel winners and 1 worked in the US - Ahmed Zewail, born in Egypt, PhD at Penn, has spent his career at CalTech and has been an American citizen since 1982. The other is one of my favorite winners and one of the saddest examples of what is wrong with the Muslim world: Abdus Salam. He won the physics prize with 2 Jews, Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, and established Pakistani high level physics but he’s an Ahmadiyya and Pakistan in 1974 actually passed a Constitutional Amendment declaring that Ahmaddis aren’t Muslim (and Salam was essentially forced to leave). There is today a very high level of violence, meaning mass killings, of Ahmaddis in Pakistan. Doesn’t this speak volumes: the guy who drove Pakistan toward the A-bomb was cast out because Ahmadiyyas aren’t “Muslim”, though he’s listed as a “Muslim” in wikipedia. (And I note the abject silliness of so many peace prizes awarded to Muslims given what’s going in the Muslim world. Is that an expression of wishful thinking?)
Meanwhile Israel, with a Jewish population of a 6.25 million, has 8 science winners, 6 if you don’t count economics. In some science fields, the percentage of Jewish winners is over ¼ and near ⅓. Some people ignorantly say that must be some kind of favoritism, but Norwegians aren’t Jews and the nominating process isn’t run by Jews and Jews have faced extraordinary prejudice in academia. My sister-in-law’s mother is, in fact, coming to Radcliffe for her writing about the long process to have her father’s PhD recognized in Austria when it was denied him because of his religion. I have a theory why Jews are so creative - it’s not genetic nonsense - but that’s off topic.
@lergnom-
You describe it beautifully.The Muslim world has another big irony to it, when the west was in the throws of the dark ages and where religious authority helped place a damper on scientific knowledge and discovery (it wasn’t absolute, before anyone jumps in defending the church and what it did or didn’t do), the muslim world produced large advances in science and math and astronomy. In the Cosmos reboot, they mentioned an 11th century Iraqi scholar, who laid down the basic rules of the scientific method, including not assuming that because something is old and held dear that it is true.
The problem with rote learning is as you say, it doesn’t spur creativity, it does spur widespread knowledge, but it also tends to spawn the idea that that knowledge is the only thing, countries that rely on rote learning produce engineers who tend to improve what is already out there, not create new things. And yes, you are correct in music, one of the knocks on Asian musicians has been that they were taught to play the notes perfectly, through repetitive practicing, and it often produces kids who are technically out there, but musically are basically imitating what they were taught, it is where rote learning breaks down. There obviously is a certain amount of rote learning required, and I am not in favor of some who argue that understanding basic math logic is not required in a world with calculators,there are things to be gained in understanding the root of math, but as a training method it also leaves big holes.
One explanation for the success of Jews in science and such that has been put forth is cultural. Judaism as a religion is a bit different, as a faith it encourages people to think about things and find their own answers, rather than being dogmatic as for example Christianity often has been (it reminds me of the old joke, ask 10 Jewish folks what something means, and you’ll get 20 answers:), and it translated over into the aspects of learning and such…and it makes sense to me as at least part of the explanation.
Are you kidding? orthodox Judaism is highly dogmatic. You don’t get to decide for yourself what’s kosher or what the laws of family purity are.
I think there’s one additional glaring reason for Jewish success that no one wants to explicitly state but everyone knows. But anyway, it’s not all about schools. Schools don’t make someone a genius. You have to be born a genius.
I’d like to know what you mean, @Vladenschlutte. FWIW, I think Jewish success is rooted in the importance of learning within the Jewish tradition – a tradition we know is plenty old. To be a good Jew, you had to read the torah, so literacy was common among even the poorest Jews. Once you can read, you can write, count – etc. Kate Simon, the great travel writer, wrote about growing up in the predominantly Jewish Lower East Side in the 20’s… where the mark of “making it” was… getting a piano and piano lessons for your kid. Literacy, music, theater – all existed wherever there were Jews.
When my mother and I moved to the U.S. in 1969, someone told us that the best places to live are areas with a lot of Jews, because it automatically meant good schools, cultural activities available at local JCCs – and palatable white bread
Since the thread has shifted, my belief is that Jews aren’t smarter on average than any other group which applies itself but that key traditions in the religion both make Jews apply themselves and generate creativity. These two things are inextricably combined.
First is that study has been one of the most important projects, both personal and as a community. Some people extend this - stupidly, IMHO - to say that somehow changed the gene pool to favor smarter people, something for which there is no evidence. It’s just that study has always been rewarded within the Jewish communities and, further, that these Jewish communities have essentially been isolated from the mainstream surrounding cultures for many hundreds of years, not all the way back to Rome but not that far from then. Whether a small local ghetto, meaning the walled street in which the Jews were locked at night, or villages and towns in the Pale of Settlement somewhere in Poland/Belarus, etc., study was important. That gets to the second part: what is study in Judaism and how is it different?
The answer is the Oral Law, which was created conceptually BCE as a way to fill the obvious gaps in the Written Law and to apply the Written Law to current circumstances - which in part meant the Babylonian Exile. That is the Talmud or rather Talmuds because there is more than one and the odd thing about Judaism is you don’t memorize the Torah as Muslims memorize the Koran and there is no prize for memorizing the Torah as there is for memorizing the Koran and no competitions for recitations of the Torah as there are for the Koran. And compared to Christianity, with its central authority and then authorities, there is no doctrine to learn, no catechism, no set of principles to be repeated. It’s all about reading the Torah and related books and the Talmud and talking about what they mean in light of the overriding concept that God has given people an Oral Law and it is our job as humans to figure it out. This means, as I’ve likely noted in other posts, that creative interpretation and story-telling and building an argument based on precedents and documentary logic and other evidence is the single most rewarded form of scholarship in the long history of Judaism. A wise sage is one who illuminates the meaning by creative interpretation and presentation.
Of course the Orthodox are “doctrinaire” but they are also phenomenally creative in their interpretations. An example I use is the son of the former Grand Rabbi of Italy - which is some sort of elected or appointed post which means nothing in Judaism other than it sounds important - actually wrote a book which argued, as a highly devout man, that maybe, just maybe an account of ritual murder might be true. This guy, btw, was himself late middle aged, so not a youthful exercise. Horrifying but he wrote it and not because he hates Jews but because he thought it was an argument which needed to be made because it could be made and no one was making it. He decided to yank the book but the fact he could write it is something (and no one tried to kill him).
When the Jews were released from the locked streets - mostly by Napoleon and then later - this unleashed a wave of creativity that changed the world as the methods learned in centuries of creative arguing were applied to the problems of the non-religious world. And that to me says there is at least a ray of hope because the ultra Orthodox are starting to move out of their near total isolation (in Israel), forced by economic reality to find work, and we will be adding their creative intellectual efforts to addressing the everyday world.
@ pizzagirl-
Orthodox and ultra orthodox Jews are relatively rigid in the practice of their faith,in terms of prescribed rituals and so forth, but even Orthodox Jews are supposed to ask themselves each day what God is trying to tell them, and Orthodox scholars and rabbis have written tons of commentary , debating what things mean. While in orthodox communities the rabbis hold a lot of sway, have real power, it is not the dogma as is common in Christianity, the idea of the literal words of the bible or the idea of ‘ultimate truth’. Without turning this into a discussion on Jewish history, the kind of authoritarian faith you are talking about died when the temple was destroyed and Rabbinic Judaism became the basis of the faith. Note that a Rabbi (or Rebbe) translates to teacher, they are not the same thing as a priest is in orthodox Christianity, they teach but Jews are expected to ponder things and find their own truth of what God is telling them.
And this did translate into what happened in secular society, the religion itself stressed learning. Add to that because of the way they were treated, Jewish culture is centered around themselves, they realized they had to help themselves, and one of the reasons Jewish kids succeeded was the community helps each other. If a kid was having trouble in school with math, often an older boy or a parent would end up tutoring the kid, the temple wasn’t just a place of worship, it also was the center of the community. It isn’t because Jews are smarter, distribution of intelligence doesn’t happen that way, it is a combination of the religious background, plus cultural issues, that cause what you see. Richard Feynman did not grow up observant, his family wasn’t, but he said that the culture was such that it taught asking questions, it taught about in seeking out those questions how you learn to learn, a religion that values questions, as Judaism does, is likely going to turn out people curious about things and not take anything at face value as truth,whereas dogmatic religions tend to turn out people conditioned to believe without questioning, which hampers intellectual curiousity and learning. As far as I know, I don’t think Jews for the most part ever had problem with evolution theory, and even the ultra orthodox don’t believe the earth is 6000 years old and made in 7 days the way fundamentalist Christians do.
My point is that Europe has generally meritocratic and exam-focused educational systems.
China is far more innovative than it is given credit for in most of the pundit-driven media. The first stage, over only the last 30 years, has been to build up an infrastructure, including a modern tertiary educational system.
But you get to argue about it.
I’m Jewish. Jewish culture emphasizes education, and Jewish mothers were the original Tiger Moms pushing their kids to do well in school. That’s why Jews have a disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners. (And a disproportionate number of neurotic, stand-up comedians.) If there’s a genetic aspect to it, I’m confident it only plays a very tiny role. And I certainly don’t think Jews sitting around arguing about religion contributes much to their creativity or intelligence.
I’m old enough to remember back in the 60’s when Japan was considered to be an undeveloped country, and a lot of people attributed that to the Japanese being inherently unintelligent. That clearly wasn’t the case, and is a major reason why I don’t buy into any genetic arguments about intelligence.