Status Updates From Beyond the Tiger Mom: East-...

They’ve already mentioned Shahrukh Khan twice this book slaps

Talking about the immense amount of money invested in preparing kids for exams, and how it keeps increasing like an arms race, I suspect it is a strong indicator that education is about signaling, not human capital. Were these long hours capital formation, South Koreans would all be jillionaires, but I’m not sure if the data supports this.

Another benefit to these exam systems, is that they are a very straightforward way of keeping schools and teachers accountable. However, I fear that, on the margin, innovative or even definitively superior methods of teaching may be neglected by teachers whose careers depend on how they score on exams, and they will rigidly “teach to the test” instead.

She points out that while rigid, exam-based hyper-quantitative exams may not be very holistic, they are much more meritocratic than nepotism, and without standardized exams, jobs/education/resources would be distributed very nepotistically.