American education V.S. Asian education

Have you ever heard a lot Americans go to China Japan or other Asian countries to study recently? Although as an international student here, I still do not know does American education is far away than other countries’. I am a person who educated in Asian countries and China but I still do not which is better than the other. Like the things in the world, it is hard to say which one is definitely white or black because a lot of is none of them which is grey. A lot people consider that American education is far away better than others because  american education allow students free to think and provide students opportunities to develop their creativity .

Last semester i read a article ,said a author who was born and educated in Indonesia he had to memorize all the major cities in the world but his son who grew up in American at the same age already knew use creativity to draw a map from his house to school. He also said when he was eighteen year old, he had to memorize Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” clearly but his son was allowed to write a creative love letter to Juliet. It is true Asian education focus more about the memorzing.

But does it necessary? Definitely!!!

When I was in China, the teacher required us to recite the formula of the mathematics. At that time, I really did not know the reason and it was unwilling for me to do that. I thought it is not necessary to do that because we can look up them in the textbook. Since I came to American, I found I have a huge advantage of memorizing. When I took the mathematics classes here, I realized that I can calculate the result much faster than my classmates who grow up by the American education. Once when American students use the book to find the formula and then use the calculator to count the results of the second part of test sheet, I already finish the whole test. At that time because of the huge amount of the test questions, a lot American could not finish all of them on time, some of them because the time was so limited ,they failed that test. But it is piece of cake for me to do that because I already memorized all of them when I was in China. Do you still think memorizing is not important and spend time to memorize is not worth?

It is hard to say which countries education is better.Each of them has advantage and disandvantage.What we should do to learn the advantage and improve our own disadvantage.

-by  YIHUA HU