Category: Education/Psychology

Public education in almost all developing countries is under-funded, and therefore of poor quality. One result is that developing countries fall further and further behind developed countries in human capital. Their poorly educated graduates just cannot compete with those from developed countries. Private schools spring up in developing countries in order to meet the demand […]

I hear so many educators pontificate about ‘maintaining standards’. In developing countries, there is a cry of, “Don’t water-down the curriculum” from the standards of Harvard, Oxford, and other top Western universities. This attitude usually comes from local scholars who have achieved their advanced degrees from top Western universities. When they return to their home […]

This blog is essentially a lesson in Statistics 101 — one that you won’t see in any Statistics textbook.  Lesson One in most statistics courses starts with means and medians, while Lesson Two moves on to standard deviations.  This blog does almost the same, but starts with a question that many people are asking: “Are […]

Identical twins have different fingerprints.  Let that sink in. They have identical genes and DNA, and yet their bodies are different. Fingerprints are therefore not entirely determined by genes. On the other hand, those twins didn’t learn from society to have different fingerprints. Neither a ‘nature’ theory (i.e. genes) nor a ‘nurture’ theory (i.e. learning) can […]

A friend of mine once told me, “If a school calls itself an International School, it isn’t.” Developing countries around the world have imitated the Western model of higher education. This imitation can go to extremes, such as the graduation procession of the professors in their caps and gowns (even accompanied by Elgar’s “Pomp and […]