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[logician]

As my handle would indicate, I think logic is very important.

Recently I've been trying to get a Taiwanese school administrator to understand the notion of standards as applied to student performance.

For example, if the students can barely string together a sentence, I hesitate to pretend to teach them how to organize a paragraph.

The administrator talks about the "style" of the course, but there are no written policies, no written curriculum goals, etc.

I spoke to some students about standards and tried typically American pragmatism, which of course was alien to them.

I asked, "Now I assume that you are trying to go to school in order to improve your careers in the business world. Am I right?"

One student says softly, "We just go to school because we like going to school."

I said, "But it would be crazy for me to just teach you impractical things like the history of Socrates, right?"

The same student says, "Anything's okay."

Is this Confucian thinking at work? Is this the culture of Confucianism -- i.e. rote learning and a dash of empiricism, with no theorization or application of general standards to specific problems?

Another question I asked was, "Would you rather learn how to speak English to Westerners, or general rules of business that would apply even if you only did business in Taiwan?"

There were no opinions. Therefore I told them that Western thinking was much more dialectical and that Westerners used standards a lot. I mentioned the International Standards Organization, which went over well, because they all recognized the phrase "ISO9001."

Some "Blue" Taiwanese have sometimes told me that they, the Chinese-descended Northern Taiwanese with "Blue" sympathies, are all Confucians. What exactly does that imply?