Formal education can serve a number of purposes. Different cultures see education as having different goals. It can help create a pool of informed citizens with a developed ability to think and reason. It can be used to establish students who share a common body of knowledge and who share socialization into the way things are done in a particular society. It can also be used to prepare individuals for good jobs and a place in society. Some societies see school as the beginning of the child's lifelong quest to get the best job possible and do well in society and the formal start of a process of socialization that began with birth, others consider education to be a necessary evil that fights against the child's individuality and specific cultural heritage. These different views influence how the society as a whole goes about educating its children and how particular children within a society react to school. Whichever of these purposes a particular culture finds most valuable will determine how that culture sets up its schools and measures individual progress.
The interest in the cross-cultural comparison of education stems from the fact that Asian students have consistently outperformed American students in science and math tests. Based on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) held in 2000, students from Asian nations such as Singapore and Taiwan have continued to outperform their counterparts from all the other 38 countries including the U.S. Furthermore, U.S. that received the third ranking in science in 1996 fell to the 19th place in 2000, indicating that the students' performance regressed, as they grew older (Holden, 2000, p. 1866). How have the cultural differences affected the points of view on education in the U.S. and Asian, thus contributing to the discrepancy of the performance between Asia students and their American counterparts?
In this presentation, the underlying causes of the ...