shakh your bootie

Yep, it's an arrogance to think that our "temples of learning" will always churn out creative, motivated people - I can't speak of China with any authority but certainly the old view that the Indian mentality is too embedded in hierarchy to produce self-starters is no longer true. The "knowledge based economy" is by no means unassailable from the emerging world. And those suckers is hungry, my brethren.

MacScot

Al Gore should follow a process or set of rules in his calculations or other problem-solving operations on climate change...then he would an Al Gore rhythm !

shakh your bootie

Groan.... I take it you were being allegorical......

MacScot

Touché monsieur !

shiva

SYB is spot on, google, microsoft, cisco etc already do a huge amount of their fresh grad hiring in India and Asia in general and not for the dubai reason of cheap labour but because they are super qualified, talented and unbeliveably motivated.
Instead of parents complaining about the level of work required of their child they should be saying, " oh shit" because this is whats expected by other parents and their children.
The west has become lazy and complacent and is in for an almighty shock. The dumbed down chicken has well and truely come home to rest i'm afraid.


(as an aside and purely a personal opinion, my belief is that relying on teachers and schools to provide the majority of a childs education is foolish in the extreme, whilst i'm also not a supporter of the total hot house approach, i do firmly believe that it is a parents role to educate and encourage self education within their child)

The Dean

I remember the election when it was all Bush and Gore.............

Bit like a night on Channel 5 really..............

Kim67

I do too, that's another reason we are here in Dubai, there is more to educating a child than sitting in a classroom learning from a text book. However, I do think kids need some down time. My kids went to school in Australia until the end of August, then came here and went straight into the new school year at the beginning of September, this was their first real holiday for 18 months. My girls do a lot of dance comps and workshops on the holidays in Australia so the break in July was taken up with a dance comp. They didn't have mid-term last term (which is out of the norm for us anyway so didn't miss it) and they've had to do a couple of Saturdays as well.

Kim67

Hi Poitin - I'll be interested to see how many kids complete it too. I'll let you know. I'm with you, I'm having to do the research with her because I don't know the answers to this stuff off the top of my head.

seraphnina

Hows the home work going?

lionheart

FWIW it seems to me that Indian children are generally more academically gifted than our European counterparts. You should see some of the projects my 5 year old has to do on a Wednesday night. Schools here seem to follow Indian school regimes...for obvious reasons. I have no problems with that. Mind you, its a little annoying when she is asked to write in Arabic as well. Times have certainly changed from when I was a lad but I suppose we have to either keep up or shut up.

Kim67

Not well, we'll finish the bulk of it on the weekend and hand it in next week. She's got a virus too so I'm not pushing her.

Kim67

Obviously, that's why my daughter is 10 in grade 5 and her good Indian mate in the same class is 13 (oldest in the class).

Let's face it, kids are kids, the world over, you get gifted one's and not so gifted. It also depends on where their talents lie. My daughter is good at english and the arts, but not so great at maths and science, my son it's the other way around and my youngest can do anything she puts her mind to.

Grace O Malley

Thats absolute rubbish, Indian parents are notorious for pushing their children, they have no social life at all. Weekends is spent studying or attending extra tuition.

BangleMan

so who looks after the kids when the parents are studying ?

Grace O Malley

oh bog off