Stigler and Hiebert comes closest to the answer, I believe, when they talk about the different cultures of teaching. The Japanese teaching culture is much more collegial and self-critical than the American teaching culture, as is best illustrated by their organized 'lesson studies' in which groups of teachers discuss, prepare, practice, observe, and revise, at length over the period of months, the teaching of one particular lesson. This creates an ongoing, reflective conversation within the schools focused on how to best
teach different concepts and course material. There is nothing remotely comparable in American schools. Out of this difference, a lot ensues. American Math classes, Stigler and Hiebert found, tend to be much more captive to the technology, with the teacher employing an overhead projector with a prepared, closely followed script, while the Japanese teacher uses the blackboard to provide an ongoing account of how the thinking of the students in the lesson develops. Stigler and Hiebert note that we go into a cultural role such as teaching with a script of how to perform its practices in our head, almost completely taken from prior experiences as a student. The virtue of the Japanese culture is that allows, much more than the American culture, for critical self-reflection -- and thus, revisions -- in that cultural script. We can talk about why this script of teaching is most rigid in Math and the Sciences -- I think it has something to do with the self-image of these subjects as 'hard sciences' with one correct answer to every question, and one correct way of arriving at that answer -- but the bottom line remains that this culture of teaching impedes the development of Mathematics education in the US.
It is extraordinarily frustrating to see this incredibly rich and complex cultural reality reduced to some misleading set of statistics on Mathematics achievement, such as those of the TIMSS study, and made the basis for some vulgar generalizations of the relationship of intelligence and race/ethnicity, such as was done in the first post of this original thread.
There is never any in-depth investigation of the cultural realities it so blithely generalizes: consider, for example, that Chinese and Japanese characters are not phonetic, as are letters in Indo-European languages, but have their origins in pictographs, leading to some crucial differences in the acquisition of literacy as we generally understand it -- when have you ever seen that central cultural difference discussed when folks run at the mouth concerning their racial stereotypes of Chinese and Japanese abilities, and abundance/lack thereof, in literacy and numeracy?
In these discussions, common resort is made to the work of left wing scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould, who does a generally fine job in laying out the history and logical flaws of "scientific" theories of racism in his _The Mismeasure of Men_. But now there is more recent and more deeply grounded work in genetics which really goes straight to the core of the
racist claims that there is some sort of ethnic/racial genetic differentiation in intelligence. This work is best explained, for the scientific layperson, in Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's _Genes, Peoples and Languages_ [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000]. Cavalli-Sforza shows how, usually quite sophisticated statistical analyses of DNA variations in large demographic pools, one can develop a concept of "genetic distance" between different populations, and trace the historical development and evolution back centuries. When combined with other fields such as linguistics and archeology, a compelling and fascinating picture of the origins and evolution of humanity and human diversity emerges. [In Europe, both Lapps and Basques, demonstrate a genetic and linguistic uniqueness from which one can lay out an entire account of the settling of Europe by humans.] Looking at what are generally socially accepted as the markers of race [the hue of skin, facial physiognomy, texture of hair], Cavalli-Sforza shows how they are simply natural selection reactions to the local environment: thus, although the indigenous people of Africa, Australia and New Guinea are similar in those respects, Australians and New Guineans are actually genetically farther from Africans than either is to the Asian peoples, despite the physical differences. Those features which are socially used as "racial markers," therefore, can be shown as adaptations to the physical environment in which the population lived: a darker colored skin, for example, provides much better protection against the sun's ultra-violet radiation, and thus, against skin cancer.
Leaving aside entirely the rather scientifically primitive conceptions of intelligence used by "scientific racists" [usually nothing more than scores on Sanford-Binet IQ tests], and their complete ignorance of developments in cognitive science in the last 50 years [almost no one in the field would accept that there is a singular index of intelligence], these developments in genetics completely blow "scientific racism" out of the water. Races are shown to be social constructions which can not be sustained in any terms of "genetic purity," and there is shown to be no scientific basis for the idea that there is a connection between the physical markers attached to the concept of race and intelligence. He concludes: << ...the [genetic] variation between races, defined by their continent of origin or other criteria, is statistically small despite the characteristics that influence our perceptions that races are different and pure. That perception is truly superficial -- being limited to the body surface, which is determined by climate. Most likely only a small bunch of genes are responsible, and little significance is attached to them, especially since we are progressively developing a totally artificial culture. >>
Jan wrote: << It seems to me a huge mistake to suppose by explaining national differences in math achievements we will understand any better variation === message truncated ===>>
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010 212-598-6869
===== Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who eant crops without plowing the ground. They want run without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass
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