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Yea and China is definitely not the leading country in academia in basically every field
(hexbear.net)
China’s education system also suppresses innovation while rewarding imitation. Although some Chinese schools conduct innovative experimental education, they remain few and have little impact.From childhood to adulthood, Chinese students are subjected to rote learning—memorizing and obeying rather than questioning or thinking independently. Thus, while Chinese students and researchers excel at replication and refinement of existing work, they are poor at true creativity.
America focuses on rote learning pretty hard too, though.
It’s quite true but America also has a huge head start compared to everyone else. The declining quality in the American education system is not deniable.
What’s crazy was the contribution of USSR to basic sciences and the Nobel prizes they racked up. Go look up the Nobel prize for quantum electronics in 1964, where N. Basov and A. Prokhorov. Both fought in the Red Army during WWII. Prokhorov was a physics student, fought the Nazis, wounded twice, went back to defend his PhD after the war, then proceeded to win the Nobel prize. Crazy stories.
That's incredible. I'll have to look them up.
And ya, I think it will continue to get worse as time goes on. They are clamping down on various history, philosophy, and humanities studies (except business or neoliberal economics of course), which restrict the regular education of topics like analysis and critical thinking. I suspect as they get worried about a backlash to their fascist agenda rote learning and purely career-focused training will increase to produce less critical thinking and independent workers, but will also make them less well-rounded and creative as a side-effect. But that's just my guess.