*Hallo Mr Mathiu, * *I am a Ugandan.
Please thank you for this gem of an article on manufacturing methodology and the attendant learning process in China. You observe....... * * ......"the Chinese concept of industry is a man and one or two of his sons, or neighbors or workers, bent over a forge in a small, informal, mom-and-pop operation, manufacturing for the world............. This approach to production and the attendant skills acquisition and the learning involved are the brain-child of none other than the infamous Bismarck, of the 'Partition of Africa'. Yes, that is the type of Production/Learning that Bismarck bequeathed to Germans, while in all history the Anglo/English thrived on pillage and plunder, and are still poor. It took them only fifty years after Bismarck had changed their Production/Education Practice, for Germans to crack the Atom around 1910, and leading humanity into Nuclear Science. Yes, with the start of the Steam engines and Railways Bismarck set Germany on track to always use** "mom-and-pop operations manufacturing" , and to mass-produce artisans and technicians. Germany has never looked back. It is not that Germans are a superior race but a people who crafted an education system that works. An education that gave us, among others, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Kurt Godel, and legendary John von N**eumann*, *probaly the sharpest mind of all time. Mr Mathiu, Kenya's success belongs to us all. Kenya, and all East Africa, must close all TTC's whose intake are Form Four leavers. **Such "teachers" don't deserve coveted pensionable jobs in our Civil Service. They just swell Government payroll, as if the primary duty of schools is to tackle unemployment. We have to copy Finland. A Master's Degree is a prerequisite for a Teacher. We must have very stiff competitiveness into Teachers' Colleges. And then we send these fine fellows to Machakos or Isiolo, etc... to be Head Teachers that also build Science Laboratories, Language Labs etc... We are willing to pay such teachers $40,000 or $50,000. But not the form four failures that President Uhuru is now advising to enter teachers Colleges. Such below-average fellows should never be allowed into our classrooms, even in Standard One. * * Mr Mathiu you write.... **"The Chinese are very numerate, very clever with their hands, and inhumanly hard working". ** Yes Mr Mathiu, Kenya's Education Structure and Ontario's are similar i.e. both don't have Form Six. Kenya's Educators should have a look at Ontario's Maths Curriculum; and those of other countries. * *With us in Uganda we dream that one day, God willing, we will offer the following multiple Advanced Level (Form Six) Maths Subjects: * 1. Analytical Geometry and Calculus. 2. Discrete Maths - Combinatorics and Statistics. 3. Classical Mechanics – including “Generalised Coordinates”, and an extension of Newton to Lagrangian Dynamics. 4. Introductory Linear Algebra. 5. Abstract Algebra – Groups, Rings and Fields. 6. Maths for Technical Studies i.e. for Accounting, Building and Construction, Book Keeping, Home Economics, etc… *On the above list Subject # 2. is to prepare youths for Genetics, microbiology, intensive Computer programming etc....* *Subject # 3. is to prepare them for Geophysics, mineral prospecting, and aerodynamics ( Fluid Mechanics ) to make and fly drones etc....* *Subjects # 4 and # 5 are meant to help to prepare youths for Modern Sciences.* *Thank for your time, Brother Mathiu. * Mitayo Potosi Toronto ====================================== *By MUTUMA MATHIU* More by this Author <http://www.nation.co.ke/-/1148/472988/-/view/asAuthor/-/nro422/-/index.html> I have been dying to write about China, its ascent as a dominant power and the concern that it causes the West. When I was a student at Stellenbosch Business School in 2007, I was a bit taken aback by how much intellectual energy was taken up by this discomfort with China. I found that South Africans regarded China as a fellow who had come to eat their lunch. Basically, clever South African intellectuals have been looking at the African mainland and planning what to do with/to it over the next 100 years. Business schools, for example, are factoring in a new class of students from Africa’s growing corporate sector. It’s a fat, juicy morsel. The problem is, China is seen as sticking its finger in everyone’s mouth and trying to remove it. In three years, if I am not wrong, China will replace the US as the biggest economy in the world. Americans and Europeans will not say it, but my conclusion is they view China as an unworthy, Third World bunch of patent pirates ruled by a repressive cabal of communists. All these things are, to some extent, true. China is not California or New York. It is rich developing country where public toilets are all the hole-in-the-ground type, some without doors, and people eat chicken head and claws. And the Chinese are brazenly piratical. They really have a very generous interpretation of copyright. I am prepared to wager that there is a Chinese copy of almost anything in existence. I was amused to no end to see BMW X5, or Toyota Rav 4, only it isn’t a BMW or a Toyota. My hosts would insists with a twinkle that it was not an exact copy and, therefore, no laws had been broken. It is also true that the Chinese generally have a very exploitative attitude towards the world. They want to make money from people, but they don’t want people to make money from them. This is probably unfair because I know Chinese people who are generous and nice to a fault. But China does not like buying from others. But all this fear misses the key distinctions between the Soviet Union, for example, and the Chinese. The average Chinese you meet has no ideology and no God, as one person put it. They don’t preach communism and they don’t appear to be interested in it. They just want to do business and make money out of you. It is this business-only attitude which attracts people from other developing countries, used to being told what a band of corrupt fellows they are, to the Chinese. But all these things are missing the real issue and the real Chinese contribution to the theory and practice of economic development. Ever since the backyard steel mills of the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese have interpreted the concept of industrialisation in a very fundamental way. Yes, the government owns giant enterprises and there are giant, formal industries. But the Chinese concept of industry is a man and one or two of his sons, or neighbours or workers, bent over a forge in a small, informal, mom-and-pop operation, manufacturing for the world. The whole of China, at the least the China I have seen, and it not that much, is a factory. Every shopping centre, every hamlet, is a workshop where you are likely to find people sewing shoes at 2am. The Chinese are very numerate, very clever with their hands, and inhumanly hard working. The old China of Shaolin temples and Bruce Lee movies has been completely destroyed and replaced by a forest of high rises, thrusting into the smog above. A lot of Chinese movies and soaps are about imperial, agrarian China, a China which I think is basically lost forever. But I do think the Chinese are happy with what they have created to replace it and I think that should be good enough for everyone. After 50 years of stiff smiles, endless duplicity where loans become “aid” and small “aid” numbers are fudged and re-fudged to make them substantial, it is refreshing to meet a guy who says: I am here for the oil and I will do your road for it. If that is eating somebody’s lunch, well, what about it? It probably wasn’t his lunch in the first place. *mmat...@ke.nationmedia.com*
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