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Showing posts with label Oxford University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oxford University. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Winning education, America and China!

Providing a student with a taste of life in two of the most powerful and dynamic nations in the world is a winning combination.

I AM always being asked by anxious parents about where they should send their sons and daughters to school or university.

As a graduate of a British university, most people would expect me to be a big promoter of UK institutions.
In the past, that would have been the case, but nowadays I’m no longer so convinced.

Indeed, the smartest Malaysian parents have already anticipated changing trends, sending their offspring to the United States, especially schools on the East Coast (and Ivy League colleges).

At the same time, virtually every young Chinese Malaysian scion is expected to spend at least a year or so brushing up his or her Mandarin in Beijing.

Some even attempt courses at the city’s prestigious Peking University.

To my mind, it’s a winning combination: providing a student with a taste of life in two of the most powerful and dynamic nations in the world.

This doesn’t mean that I think American graduates (even Ivy Leaguers) are cleverer than their British counterparts.

If anything, they’re just more articulate and confident.

These are qualities, however, that tend to evaporate the moment they put pen to paper.

Indeed, I’ve never understood the educational value of multiple choice tests so in vogue in the American education system.

Why is this trend occurring?

Well, for one thing, American universities really score in terms of the money at their disposal and the incredibly diverse student body.

This in turn creates a superb and influential network for the future for their students.

At the same time, one of the most high-profile recent British graduates was Bo GuaGua, the son of disgraced Communist Party apparatchik Bo Xilai.

The young Bo studied at the elite British public school, Harrow, followed by Oxford University’s Balliol College.

When his father and mother fell so spectacularly from grace, GuaGua’s ostentatious ways and flamboyant educational choices were viewed as evidence of his parent’s waywardness and lack of discretion.

With China now the source of the world’s largest number of overseas students (surpassing even India), GuaGua’s disastrous stint in the UK may well prove to be a powerful disincentive for other parents in Beijing and Shanghai.

Indeed, a million Chinese students were studying abroad by the end of 2006 and in 2011 alone, 340,000 students headed overseas.

The shift may well take time as London remains an important financial capital despite its fading diplomatic leverage.

Still, the Great Power rivalry across the Pacific means that the United States possesses a powerful allure for Chinese parents as they seek to prepare their children for the future.

The children of China’s new rich can now be found in places like the Phillips Andover Academy (founded in 1778, the alma mater of President George W. Bush), its rival Phillips Exeter (1781) and the Groton School (1884, where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt studied).

They’re attractive to Chinese parents because it gives their children the edge for entry to Ivy League universities like Harvard or Yale.

Even Bo GuaGua headed to the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) to study public policy after Oxford.

US Department of Homeland Security numbers indicate that there were 6,725 Chinese students in American secondary schools in 2011, compared to just 65 in 2006.

Overall, more than 157,000 Chinese students studied in America that year – a full 22% of the total number of foreign students there.

China again surpassed India as the largest source of overseas students for America in 2010.

Malaysia, in contrast sent just 6,190 students to America that year.

It would seem that many Malaysians still hanker for British educational institutions – perhaps to our disadvantage.

As this is being written, the best and brightest minds from the world’s two superpowers are rubbing shoulders in the schoolyards and lecture halls of America as well as, increasingly, China.

It’s always a good thing when young people come together.

Perhaps the long-feared clash between China and the West may not materialise after all as children from both compete in their respective elite institutions instead.

  Ceritalah
By Karim Raslan

Related posts:
Beware of Malaysian Chinese school leavers being lured into dubious degree and diploma programs ! 
Taikonauts teach from space  

Monday, April 16, 2012

Teamwork made Man brainier, say scientists

Learning to work in teams may explain why humans evolved a bigger brain, according to a new study published on Wednesday.

Compared to his hominid predecessors, Homo sapiens is a cerebral giant, a riddle that scientists have long tried to solve.

The answer, according to researchers in Ireland and Scotland, may lie in .



Working with others helped Man to survive, but he had to develop a brain big enough to cope with all the social complexities, the experts believe. – Reuters Photo

In a , the team simulated the , allowing a network of to evolve in response to a series of .

There were two scenarios. The first entailed two partners in crime who had been caught by the police, each having to decide whether or not to inform on the other.

The second had two individuals trapped in a car in a snowdrift and having to weigh whether to cooperate to dig themselves out or just sit back and let the other do it.

In both cases, the individual would gain more from selfishness.

But the researchers were intrigued to find that as the brain evolved, the individual was likelier to choose to cooperate.


"We cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals quite frequently, and that requires to keep track of who is doing what to you and change your behaviour accordingly," co-author Luke McNally of Dublin's Trinity College told AFP.

McNally pointed out, though, that cooperation has a calculating side. We do it out of .

"If you cooperate and I cheat, then next time we interact you could decide: 'Oh well, he cheated last time, so I won't cooperate with him.' So basically you have to cooperate in order to receive cooperation in the future."

McNally said teamwork and bigger brainpower fed off each other.

"Transitions to cooperative, complex societies can drive the evolution of a bigger brain," he said.
"Once greater levels of intelligence started to evolve, you saw cooperation going much higher."

The study appears in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a journal published by Britain's de-facto academy of sciences.

Commenting on the paper, Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, said the findings were a valuable add to understanding brain evolution.

But he said there were physiological limits to cooperation.

Man would need a "house-sized brain" to take cooperation to a perfect level on a planet filled with humans.

"Our current brain size limits the community size that we can manage ... that we feel we belong to," he said.
Our comfortable "personal social network" is limited to about 150, and boosting that to 500 would require a doubling of the size of the .

"In order to create greater social integration, greater social cohesion even on the size of France, never mind the size of the EU, never mind the planet, we probably have to find other ways of doing it" than wait for evolution, said Dunbar.

By Mariette le Roux AFP