It is quite well known that the U.K's standards have been possibly falling for a while now. In other news, grass is green and the sun is warm.

However, it would not make sense to even use Shanghai as value in a chart to represent China as a whole anyway, even a complete downs would spot that a mile off. Even though it states that China does not participate as a country, the only cities that would have a valid right to feature in such a table would be Singapore and H.K, the latter's inclusion would even be questionable as the mainland is doing everything it can to kill off the local culture (that was once unique to H.K) there and homogenise them into the mainland, you only need to read a recent copy of the SCMP to see evidence of the propaganda war in action.

Besides, Finland probably has a far better known claim to leading the way in terms of education.

When it comes to research, the results are often not the most important thing. The important thing is often how those results are presented to the masses.
There's a lot of this going from many countries now, if you take a look at the media - China, the U.S, even the U.K. A battle of ideologies is bubbling under the surface.

I remember the example that a professor at my university once gave me in rather simplified terms to stress the importance of writing one's dissertation thesis well:

"Adolf Hitler had this strange, ridiculous idea that the Jews were responsible for all that was wrong in Germany, but he knew how to convince people at the time that he was somehow right, regardless of the fact that after the war; we now universally accept that his ideas and how he acted upon them was wrong... Look at what happened there."

Hi thanks for the response to my post. Here are some things I would like to comment on from your own post:

Some western people, though, seem to be lacking in a little "shame" themselves with some of the stuff they do in China.

That is because western losers love coming to China due to the fact that they are put up on a falsely high pedestal even if they don't deserve such credit and/or fame. I will give you this: At some training centers if you have the right "look" as in Aryan Blond hair and Blue eyes you may see the owner of the place bend over backwards to accommodate you and your schedule. I've known folks who got time off to do their own rock shows and folks who got away with having longer vacations because of this. Let's not even mention higher salaries and being allowed more legroom regarding tardiness and such. That is why the woodbine willies and londongirls are so adamant about defending tc's, because they reap the biggest benefits from this corrupt system. That and they have the moral compass of a drunken horde mongol who just broke into a monastery of pious, young nuns. They wouldn't care if other expats get raped in regards to money, time, and well being. That and they do not have a problem doing it themselves.

I am sure the folks who won't respect your girlfriend are grade A idiots. But that is their loss. You found someone nice, and good luck with your relationship.

What a great post! Good points and spot on with the analysis. Yep in China you are not allowed to look wrong for fear of losing face. It creates a culture where people are afraid to admit they're wrong and also afraid to make mistakes. Read somewhere that some of the biggest failures in life are people who are always trying to be perfect. How true!

We often read on this board, how bad, or at least how inferior to the West, the public education system of China is.

I just finished - with surprise - re-reading this article on the New York Times by Tom Friedman, who is one of the top journalists in the world: "The Shanghai Secret" (link below). Obviously, I can't reproduce the whole article here for copyright reasons, so I chose 4 paragraphs that summarize the essence of the article, including one about Chinese teachers teaching... English. I would be very interested in everybody's opinion about this article, including the opinion of the frequent posters who have experience in the public education sector of China.

Also, how is it that we never read on this board about the progress of the Shanghai system as mentioned in this article? Is it because most posters don't have the intellectual ability to evaluate what is going on? Is it because they are too self-centered, too focused on their own personal situation, too obsessed with Willie Woodenleg/whoever likes to rub their ego the wrong way? Why are there dozens of posts about this Willie character and none about the progress of the public schools of Shanghai in the last decade? Education is what is presently differentiating the potential of the next generation of the West as compared to the potential of the next generation of China. Is this gap dis-integrating in front of our eyes without the FTs even noticing it?

"...how is it that Shanghai’s public secondary schools topped the world charts in the 2009 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exams that measure the ability of 15-year-olds in 65 countries to apply what they’ve learned in math, science and reading.

"When you sit in on a class here and meet with the principal and teachers, what you find is a relentless focus on all the basics that we know make for high-performing schools but that are difficult to pull off consistently across an entire school system. These are: a deep commitment to teacher training, peer-to-peer learning and constant professional development, a deep involvement of parents in their children’s learning, an insistence by the school’s leadership on the highest standards and a culture that prizes education and respects teachers.

"Teng Jiao, 26, an English teacher here, said school begins at 8:35 a.m. and runs to 4:30 p.m., during which he typically teaches three 35-minute lessons. I sat in on one third-grade English class. The English lesson was meticulously planned, with no time wasted. The rest of his day, he said, is spent on lesson planning, training online or with his team, having other teachers watch his class and tell him how to improve and observing the classrooms of master teachers.

"China still has many mediocre schools that need fixing. But the good news is that in just doing the things that American and Chinese educators know work — but doing them systematically and relentlessly — Shanghai has in a decade lifted some of its schools to the global heights in reading, science and math skills. Oh, and Shen Jun, the principal, wanted me to know: “This is just the start.”