Responding to an earlier Phi Delta Kappan article, the author rejects the argument that East Asian students’ high scores on international educational assessments come at the expense of learning to be creative and entrepreneurial. According to survey research, people in Japan, Korea, and other East Asian nations perceive themselves to be not very entrepreneurial, but the author explains that their responses have do mainly with cultural differences in the ways people respond to such surveys, making them poor evidence that high school graduates in those countries actually are less creative than students in the U.S. and elsewhere.
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