•November 21, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

For millennia, war was how you did economic development. Today, economic dominance is how you do war, and we’re losing.
I read recently that some school districts across our country are going to four-day weeks, “to save money,” and maybe to provide families more flexibility.
The article brought to mind the first of my several six-week teaching gigs at Fudan University in Shanghai, each capped by invited lectures for me to give at universities all across China. This sure doesn’t make me an expert on China, yet allowed me some observations.
The day after I first arrived in Shanghai, now 15 years ago, I took a stretch-the-legs stroll from my “foreign expert guest quarters,” located on a leafy side street.
It was early Saturday morning, and I was surprised to see gaggles of cute, early grade school-age kids in neat uniforms, gathering outside what was obviously a school building.
Later I asked my host professor about this. “Oh, of course, our children all attend school every Saturday morning, until noon.”
Indeed, Chinese children not only attend school about 210 days each year (versus our 174 days), but for an hour longer each weekday than in the U.S.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.