While I am fully aware that the American public education system is far from excellent, I am always skeptical of reports that laud China, Korea, and Japan as pa

While I am fully aware that the American public education system is far from excellent, I am always skeptical of reports that laud China, Korea, and Japan as paragons of math and science instruction. What exactly is being measured here? Arithmetic and the ability to solve word problems of a few known formats is not mathematics. I do not want my future children to be calculators, I want them to be thinkers. There is creativity and beauty in math, and what worries me is not that it does not exist in the current implementation, but that it does not exist in the ideal implementation. Of course, I'm also one of those people who doesn't particularly care whether a college education prepares me for a job, because that's really not the point. See also: Lockhart's Lament (pdf at http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsL...)