Several Asian countries acknowledged over-dependence on rote learning in the 1980s and 1990s and worked to try to get the creativity that the US had in a lot of different areas. So yes, critical thinking. A good example is the Singapore Math books that you can find in Barnes and Noble. The elementary school books would give a lot of parents a tough time. These textbooks are really cheap but they have very challenging problem sets.

We have kids for 12 years and I don't understand how kids learn so little math (or other subjects) in that amount of time. There are school districts in the US that are world-class but the average seems to be poor. I think that NH does well compared to the rest of the country. I used to follow the TIMSS studies out of Boston College and recall that Asian countries did particularly well in their testing.

My mother told me stories of working in rice fields and women delivering in the rice fields and then going back to work. I don't know if she was serious or not. She did a lot of the survival stuff and we used to go to Chinatown to buy live birds and she would butcher them in the sink. She was a single parent of four kids and worked two jobs to support us so we grew up without any supervision.

The modern world is considerably different and demands different skills and abilities and a lot of our young people have those abilities. It almost seems natural to them.

We used the Socratic method around our house to teach and to get an idea if the kids understood something or not. And to see if they could connect things together that were not inherently obvious.