Mr. Kristof, Please Stop Idolizing China's Education System!
A week ago, Nicholas Kristof published a NY Times column in which he equated China's recent success in chess, embodied by a freakishly talented sixteen-year-old female named Hou Yifan, to success in its national education system. As if Bobby Fischer might have been a model for America's education system; Fischer's devolution into hermit-like irrationality and irrelevance is likely an analogue of the decline of American education in Mr. Kristof's rather confused world view. The notion that a three-sigma chess champion discovered (by her parents, not the education system) in a country of 1.3 billion people represents anything other than the laws of chance never seems to have occurred to our intrepid journalist, nor the fact that in China, the State immediately extracts three-sigma talents in any field from their standard educational system and shunts them into highly restricted, one-dimensional, "talent development" schools.In his column published in this Sunday's New York Times, Nick Kristof seemed finally to have redeemed