Interesting discussion. Another anecdote: my husband taught statistics in a Chinese university last year. He, as he always had, enjoyed the students. But he said that a big difference between them and his US students was the amount of work they did. He said his students in the US were just as smart, but to a person the Chinese students worked harder.

What are we attracted to here? Oh, watching tv and trying to become rich and famous. Sports, lives of stars, etc. A significant percentage of our college students do as little as possible, never read, and are in college because it's something to do. These kids in other countries will outwork us and we'll never know what hit us. It's not the Democrats or the Republicans or the Tea Party or the Occupy Movement: it's us. We're lazy and we really don't care all that much. We expect the schools to teach our kids everything we're too lazy to do ourselves, then criticize them because we failed to parent. It makes me nuts.