How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century

Time shows the views how American people would like education to be in the 21th century. Let's compare to Chinese education I received

• Knowing more about the world. (China: Almost all high school will teach English and we learn history of world. USA: where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.)
• Thinking outside the box. (This is weakness of Chinese education. But it seems with no child left behind(NCLB), American goes to Asian type education more and more.)
• Becoming smarter about new sources of information. (This one is hard to tell. Only thing I can say is that more knowledge I have, the smarter I can deal with new information)
• Developing good people skills. (This is also a weakness of Chinese people. There is a saying that 'three monk don't have water'. And I found the counterpart in English:Everybody's business is nobody's business. So it is also a problem in USA. I think it is due to how people get measured. Maybe in USA, there is fairer measure of team work than China. For example, almost every teacher ask students to put down name of people who help their homework)

One surprising thing is to see the following question for a second grade student: How many ways can you combine nickels, dimes and pennies to get 20¢? This question can be solved by recursion. It would be interesting to see how teachers tell students the way to solve the problem.