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Whoa there. I never said Asians in general or Asia as a whole weren't creative. That was not even remotely stated, implied, or even in my thoughts when writing

Whoa there. I never said Asians in general or Asia as a whole weren't creative. That was not even remotely stated, implied, or even in my thoughts when writing that comment. What I said was that the strength of the American system, for decades, was that it seemed to foster and encourage creativity - and that is being destroyed by the pursuit of standardized objectives. I didn't say a thing about the other systems' creativity or the students' ability to be creative. I made a comparison of the levels of stress experienced in the two. Korean students have ENORMOUS pressure placed on them was my experience. And in the US we pulled THAT experience from their system. We seemed to have taken all of the bad with none of the good. Relax.

nugget 8y ago
I think of it more as appetite for risk than creativity. The US system encourages and rewards taking risks more so than others. Failure is forgiven and sometimes even celebrated. I worked in Japan and found its famously risk-averse culture way more intense than Western descriptions make it out to be (and those descriptions are not kind to begin with.) This component of their culture absolutely acts as a headwind to entrepreneurship. On the other hand, some of the most dynamic risk-takers I've met recently are young Chinese kids from Beijing and Shanghai who grew up in very traditional formal educational pathways.
- Loughla 8y ago
  That's fair, and makes a ton of sense. I think maybe it's a chicken and egg problem with the standardized tests, and we are 'measuring' out our stomach for risk as a society.