Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?

There’s a huge teaching gap between USA and Asia.

See for yourself:

https://youtu.be/wIyVYCuPxl0?si=f6wFv2G3Iru7QFTy

https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/James_W._Stigler

Edit: since it may not have been clear from the video, this is my interpretation:

* in the Japanese math class the teacher teaches at the board and then walks around the class to look at the students. Students are not sitting in large groups.

* in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.

What is the video supposed to suggest? I think it's extremely hard to conclude anything from a plot of the teacher's position over time throughout the classroom.

Is staying at the front a sign that the teacher is lazy and not helping students? Or is it that the students are competent enough without aid? That could be good if it indicates your students have been taught well enough to master the material. But it could also be bad, indicating your school does not offer enough incremental challenge, and students who are beyond their current level, but not high enough for the next level (honors or whatever), never reach their full potential.

There's far too many uncontrolled variables here. Also, it seems the wikipedia-on-ipfs page for Stigler is down.

Ignoring your huge generalisations based on one silly picture and a bunch of Asian clichés, I think you have a point when it comes to the group thing.

When I was in school, most work & learning happened on the individual level. Sometimes in pairs, where we would have to check each other's answers. But from what I see among my younger relatives and friends with children, there's a lot of group learning going on these days. Groups of five doing all kinds of projects in pretty much any class on any subject. Maybe it's fun to collectively build a diorama of ancient rome for history class, but I doubt you'll improve your maths skills much in this way.

Is this a consequence of a teacher shortage? Are kids in these groups supposed to help other kids? Are they supposed to learn cooperating with (or leeching off) others, at the cost of learning useful skills for themselves?

If it's not clear, arts and crafts sessions are occasionally included in classroom material, especially at younger ages. A single picture is not indicative of how most classrooms operate, or even how this particular classroom operates most of the time. It looks like a quick group project for a basic presentation on some subject matter.

When someone links to a video I assuming that the video was heavily edited and cherry picked to show whatever point they want. I'm not wrong often enough to bother clicking on yours.

I find it interesting that James W Stigler doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I'm not sure what that means, but he somehow isn't very notable despite having written popular books and being a university professor. (or he is so controversial that they can't agree on one - which is a sign to not take him too seriously)

> Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?

Because paper cutters are too easy to disassemble as re-use as a shiv machete? And anyway, it's pretty hard to make cloudy curves with a paper cutter.

> in the American class the teacher spends practically 0 time at the blackboard, the students sit in large groups, the teacher spends most of the time with one or two groups.

Three or four students is a large group?

I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated.

For the former I'd guess its because they have very strong control on people's behaviors so they just want them more capable to innovate, grow economy, etc.

For the latter I'd guess its because they fear a more educated population will be harder to manipulate and hence erode government power.

What else would you have them cut paper with?

I'm not smart enough to understand what are the conclusions of the patterns observed in the video.

> Just looking at the picture triggered me. Why are the students sitting in groups and cutting paper with scissors?

So, I'm going to flag this as a perfect example of legibility vs. legitimacy[0]. You, probably AP's writers, and much of the public perceive learning as ocurring in a certain way. That isn't the way that 'the best' learning occurs, its the way that most closely resembles where we think learning occurs. Going further, it is much easier to interpret a lecture hall as a learning activity because it is easy to perceive what is being 'learned'. You sort of say it yourself. you are asking a why question about what is being learned - it is less legibile - and that is leveraged into an inference that less is being learned - i.e., it is less legitimate.

The problem is that the comparison you are making is false - but deeply embedded in our minds. Students *feel* like they learn more in lectures than in 'active learning' classes.However, when their actual knowledge is tested the oppostie is actually true. The students perception and actual learning are at odds and mediated by the environment[1]. It is, again, easy to sit in a lecture and overstate (i.e., feel like) you're learning because you are watching someone who is an expert talk about something. No metacognitive monitoring is required on the student's part. In contrast, it is really easy to perceive yourself as struggling in a class where your learning process and your failures in that process become visible. Students are taught to view failures/wrong answers as bad - so they view their process of learning as evidence of not learning.

Pedantically, no one in the picture you reference is cutting paper with scissors. There are scissors on the table, no one is cutting. You made an inference - inferences are important but difficult to test. They are working in groups to learn with peers (a science based best practice). I don't know exactly but I can infer it is related to math, possible learning to calculate area and estimate. Making that tangible, creating and measuring simple then more complex shapes helps them learn - its not arts and crafts. It leads to better conceptual understanding than an abstract explanation.

It may look different, but my hobby horse problem with US education is that everyone's vibes are treated as equivalent to actual scientific evidence. We regularly crator efforts to fix these problems simply because they don't look like the school that the parents went to. We had one parent try and ban school provided laptops (which are used for 20minutes / week) from my daughter's preK class because her kids are zero screen time. I can't imagine a parent in Japan or China even trying that.

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116

As a CODA - measuring learning is shockingly hard. As an analogy, it is not deterministic it is quantum. Data tells us that if I ask demographic questions before a test, certain groups score lower than if I ask them at the end. If I ask a math question using a realistic scenario, students show higher conceptual understanding than if I ask them a fully abstracted question. If a student is hungry or tired that day, they will score lower. None of those are measuring the latent construct (e.g., math ability) that we need to estimate, even if it is a high variability measure.