##Writing as a Block for Asians

<quote>
Mr. Hannas blames the writing systems of China, Japan and Korea for what he says is East Asia's failure to make significant scientific and technological breakthroughs compared to Western nations.

Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity.
</quote>

This <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/arts/03ASIA.html?pagewanted=print">article in the New York Times</a> starts off with a great exposition of the Eastern Asian languages, but then descends into the ignorance that its main subject proposes.  Anybody with half a clue about East Asian languages can see that this is a joke; will he be prepared to argue that the Koreans and Vietnamese are exhibiting a bloom in creativity sinced they've ambraced phonetic alphabets?  Hardly.  Mr Hanna mistakes the cause for the effect.  The lack of focus on creativity is embedded in Eastern Asian cultures in their tradition of social stability, and is the reason why parents in those cultures push their children to spend countless hours memorizing more and more characters.

Rather than switching to an alphabet, I think China would need to reduce the number of characters that children have to learn in school, and combine that with a curriculum that encourages critical thinking.