Students from the Confucian heritage (China, Japan and Korea) are notorious in the West for passively memorising. Well, that's the way they're taught, isn't it, to memorise large amounts of material in preparation for gruelling examinations in harsh, overcrowded classrooms? But don't they also outshine Western students in international comparisons of academic achievement, in science and mathematics achievement especially? And don't these students disproportionately gain first class honours in our universities? You can't do that by rote memorisation. So are we wrong about what constitutes ‘good teaching' and about the evils of rote memorising? Are Sino-Japanese brains genetically better than ours?

Enter “The Paradox of the Chinese Learner”, first articulated by me (for the record) in 1992 at the Fourth Asian Regional Congress of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Kathmandu, Nepal. For more Google "The paradox of the Chinese learner"