re: china

china's only advantage now is that they dont have to contend with things like labor unions, environmentalist, a middle class, voters, litigation, copyright laws, trade and patent laws, or a population that expects a first-world infrastructure.

their days of reckoning with these issues is coming, and when it does, they will end up back in the shit. plus they have a demographic time bomb ticking in the imbalance of men and women in their society.

remember a few things about comparing us education to that of other countries:

many of the countries do not have compulsory education
many track their students by aptitude
many are heterogeneous racially and liguistically

when you factor these in the us is doing pretty well. if you examine the results by race you see that the different ethnic groups in the us score better than their home countries do. ie asians in the us have higher scores than asians is asia, mex-americans better than mexicans and so on. so dont be too hard on the education in the us; it just cant be compared against someplace like finland or japan.

KGB Darkfall