Ahem, I was in Muzha with my Taiwanese friend last Saturday. She I and her sister who has been driving for 9 months were heading out. Well we were in the car and sis pulls out from the curb without looking over her shoulder. A scooter rider just misses her but smacks into another scooter to his left. Ahhh, we drive off I asked sis why she didn’t she look behind her the scooter had to avoid you, you did not signal and you could have been hit. She looks at me like I am ET and says the scooter should be ready for people to pull out. People always pull out from the curb!
What am I gonna say.
When I tell people I was an education major, played volleyball in college and worked with needy kids after classes they think I must not have had any time to study hard.
If I were to explain to my friends why they might want to look before crossing a street, or pulling out into traffic or apply analytical thinking to any number of daily activities to consider possible outcomes, I can almost already hear them tell me: You think too much.
I wonder if it could be because the priority in the education system is memorization and not really critical or analytical thinking…
I think most taiwanese out on the streets are motoring around not actually thinking but powered by INSTINCT instead. You cant THINK as fast as the moves that are needed when surrounded on all four corners by motos and scoots.
All of us follow the crowd to some extent. Sometimes we do it because experience suggests it’s a good idea. Sometimes we do it just cos we’re dumb humans. But not all the time. I have regular experiences like mike029’s. It doesn’t bother me too much that Taiwanese people can’t invent things. I mean, do we really need a new iPhone every year, or a new copy of one? I do have to source components for my work from foreign companies (subject to an import tax) because the Taiwanese equivalents are 10 years behind the curve. Other that that, it doesn’t affect me personally. It bothers me when they can’t think through the simplest real-life problem, especially “what ifs”:
what if I cross this street without looking and there’s a car approaching at speed?
what if (on a scooter) that car in front of me turns left, as his left-turn indicator suggests that he will, and I still overtake on his right?
Or even, what if it turns out that accidents are not caused by bad luck and not enough ghost money being burned, but by my own stupid decisions? What then? Like mike, I lose a little bit of respect for people who fail to think when it’s important to their wellbeing that they should, and I don’t like that feeling. I think CraigTPE is right: it’s the education system, not just the system of memorization but the entire concept that school is where you go to learn stuff, and once you’re done with that all learning (and thinking) can stop.
OTOH Western education systems have largely failed to do what the Taiwanese system does well: keeping the great masses happy with their lot in life, while the elite get on with the important business of wallowing in their crapulence. They sit at their desks, keep quiet, don’t cause any trouble, go home and make babies to keep the population up, and eventually die without too much complaint. In the UK, there is a vast swath of the population who went through the education system and came out the other side with nothing much to show for it, and go through life in a state of nihilistic angst. They’re too daft to express it, except by standing outside offlicenses looking sullen, threatening to start a knife-fight on the bus, or throwing bricks through windows, but deep down their Id is thinking, “Is this it? is this all there is?”. Sometimes it maybe is best not to think too much.
Selective quoting I acknowledge, however it seems to be the gist (tell me if I’m mistaken).
To my thinking this simply says that “Western education systems” do not perpetuate the acceptance of the mediocre.
I’ve always thought that the purpose of “education” was to learn so as to better ones lot in life. Not become satisfied living in the rut. While the herd may offer security to those who chose to forfeit their hopes of betterment - it certainly does nothing to further progress.
“Keeping the great masses happy with their lot in life”…looks and sounds like something out of…well…Marx? Mao? Stalin? Ortega? Nikita?..I think you get my drift on this.
added:
I also would like to add that there is a great spirit of individual capitalism on constant display here on Taiwan.
The number of folks striking out on their own with various enterprises is quite good to see.
…now if I can just convince more of them to focus on longer than 2 years…well…
I agree, and no, you didn’t quote out of context. I wasn’t suggesting it was desirable. Just that the Taiwanese system does what it sets out to do, which is to prevent people thinking so as to “maintain social harmony”.
The ‘western’ system (if there is such a thing - I’m thinking of the UK) does teach people to think, but then plunges them into a society where it would be better if you didn’t.
Yes, ‘our’ system does produce a great deal of creativity and whatnot, but it also produces a lot of “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Why teach people to contemplate the meaning of life when, in all probability, life consists of a 9-to-5 flipping burgers at McDonalds; or even worse, an 8-to-7 in a soulless office designing ‘inventions’ that nobody really needs until the advertisers convince them otherwise?
Teaching people how to think and then not allowing them to do so is more cruel than teaching them to be compliant, bovine dolts.
[quote=“Dangergyrl”]Ahem, I was in Muzha with my Taiwanese friend last Saturday. She I and her sister who has been driving for 9 months were heading out. Well we were in the car and sis pulls out from the curb without looking over her shoulder. A scooter rider just misses her but smacks into another scooter to his left. Ahhh, we drive off I asked sis why she didn’t she look behind her the scooter had to avoid you, you did not signal and you could have been hit. She looks at me like I am ET and says the scooter should be ready for people to pull out. People always pull out from the curb!
[/quote]
Woooooo…the scooter guy didn’t stop her? Lucky her. She’s liable for that accident since she caused the guy to veer his scooter to the left and hit another scooter.
[quote=“Funk500”]
I do have to ask the question though of all the rules and regulations that people choose to follow it seems in this country the only two rules that people will DEFINITELY follow no matter who they are or claim to know are
no eating/drinking/chewing/ smoking on the MRT
you must wear a cap when you go swimming
Why only these two?[/quote]
Not really. I drink water when I’m thirsty on the MRT…got a few to talk to me about it but I sorta ignored 'em (ooooooo…spank me). Eating…now that’s f-ed up.
Well, at least they want you to wear a head cap. Imagine if they require you to wear a cap at another discrete bodily location :ohreally: :ohreally:
Well, it matches the reality and experiences of the writer, and I have little reason to believe that the writer is a cartoon character. It’s therefore a little mean to call his experiences narrow, even if you don’t agree with them.
Anyway forget all this inventing stuff. How about just some critical thinking and common sense to improve yourself or keep out of danger I want my zombies in movies only. That is all I ask my students and Taiwanese friends. When people don’t look to the left when pulling out. When friends tell me they are good drivers so their kids don’t need seat belts or baby seats. When parents say basketball is very dangerous and you learn very little, but scooter riding is safer cause it is for work/school. When people don’t drink iced tea on the MRT yet crash into a guy carrying a new PC because they won’t let him out first. When a 31 year old guy in my class who makes 40,000NT a month stays at home with momma and sister and says they have not talked for 6 months cause they are split between green and blue politics and his sis owes him 10 grand. But mom loves him and makes dinner every night…in silence.
Just an example in my conversation class. 2 weeks ago 9 out of 10 students for the death penalty in Taiwan. Whatever the debate I respect their opinions. Last week we talked about prison films, all of them American of course, those shows on Discovery, etc. I ask what they know about Taiwan’s prison system, blank stares. They know almost nothing about it no background. Not much in the schools, media, books or whatever, what really goes on there, nothing. But kill the murdering lot. It baffles me.
A. Cross the street without looking could a car hit you?
B. Yes it could.
C. Leaves class and does it anyway.
I have not read the whole thread, but my approach to an answer to the question why so many Taiwanese cross the street without looking and all similar questions about the utter lack of common sense etc pp. is that these Taiwanese people live in a different world and I think one way we Westerners can somehow gain access this world & its thinking and reasoning is to go home to our Western country and use a time machine to travel back maybe just some decades. At that time, our own culture&society was strange to us, the reasoning & handling of things so different that we would look at it with confusion and even dismay. We’d see people who look like us, who speak our language, share our religion and fairy tales and basically share our culture but behave differently, we would see people who apply logic in a different way, we’d see people who don’t ask questions we certainly do ask today, we would see how people do dangerous things and we would cringe at their totally different sensibilities.
This morning I turned my head to the loud crying of a toddler. I saw a women repeatedly slapping the face of a little kid who apparently had just left their scooter and was terrified to get back on. The woman eventually succeeded in forcing the kid to step up on the scooter again and still crying, it was standing between the woman and the handle bar of the scooter. They slowly took off into heavy traffic.
Probably true. And I’d rant and whine about them, too. I’ve seen that particular scene too btw (kid slapped around for crying about something it has good reason to dislike). Not nice. Presumably that also has a lot to do with people growing up thinking bad/weird/unsafe behaviour is normal: it was beaten into them at an early age.
