There's tonnes of research on this:
- Shallow sources of information from mostly unreliable sources on the internet - EX Wikipedia or anything with wiki in it etc.
- Poorly conceived outcomes based curriculums that pay little focus to academic skills like analysis, research and ever more poorly conceived assessment practices that are more about assessment for parents that assessment for students.
- An aversion to failure that pervades western education, translated into a directive to not fail students even when this should clearly be the case.
Having taught in central Asia, Korea and China, the difference is immediately noticeable. Though asian students tend to come into international or western style education later in school as a pathway into western universities and tend to lack analysis and research skills, the work ethic (many students do 2 full curriculums in dual language) they have, the fundamental understandings they bring and the way they see schooling in general as a long term development and an essential part of their future means they catch up quickly and surpass a good portion of their western counterparts.
So whilst education is important (international education was the focus area for the PhD) it also comes down to family attitudes, students attitude and work ethic. The apple, unfortunately doesn't fall far from the tree. Western folk absolutely LOVE talking out their collective asses about things they know very little about, decrying experts etc and this tends to condition their own children against effective learning in some circumstances.
Asian cultures are just fundamentally different from the west in this regard.
