Are you supporting that assertion, or are you making an unrelated point about educational models? Because the connection isn't clear to me.
To the question of vocational training vs. liberal arts education, I think you're exaggerating subtle differences in cultural attitudes toward education that really do exist. Schools in China have compulsory classes in physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and history, among other things — vocational training for a few percent of the population, but liberal arts for the rest. The most respected form of education is still calligraphy.
And, despite paying lip service to free questioning and rebellion, Western schooling consists almost entirely of intensive training in obedience and conformism: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Steve Jobs wasn't the product of the Western education system; he was the product of LSD, his machinist father, a neighborhood full of engineers, working at Hewlett Packard at 13, Hare Krishna prasad, Zen Buddhism, a pilgrimage to India, Transcendental Meditation, and Primal Scream Therapy, but especially LSD. Elon Musk isn't the product of the Western education system; he's the product of his emerald-tycoon engineer father, his supermodel mother who spent her childhood seeking the Lost City of the Kalahari, and his Commodore VIC-20.
Maybe if they'd been schooled in China they would have had the independence conditioned out of them, I suppose. But I think that's more a matter of the surrounding society than the school system.
I'm just reacting to the point about tutoring as a proxy for valuing education, when in my experience (living in China, and with my extended Chinese family), this mostly results from pressure over the Gaokao. In the US, college admissions aren't so test focused, indeed, a lot of colleges don't even require the SAT/ACT or AP scores for application.
> And, despite paying lip service to free questioning and rebellion, Western schooling consists almost entirely of intensive training in obedience and conformism
Yes, K-12 is mostly about indoctrinating kids into the requirements of society. Nevertheless, Western kids rebel against their parents and school, and media even celebrates this rebellion. Moreover, a growing number of parents commit to alternative K-12 schooling. I sent my kids to Montessori schools when it was possible.
> But I think that's more a matter of the surrounding society than the school system
The school system is a reflection of the surrounding society. If we were analyzing a country where most of the schools were religious schools that drilled a religious book, we'd obviously view the structure of the school as based on the values of the society. To the extent that K-12 education strips kids of their individualities and passions and independence, as it happens in both the US and China, the degree of harshness is substantially more in Asia in general. US school kids come home and after homework (if they do it), tend to play. Asia is renown for kids finishing school, then beginning after-school education, tutors, etc some of them study from 13-16 hrs/day in junior year.
My son is a senior in HS, his first class is 9am, he gets home at 3:30. He has 1hr lunch, and 1hr during the school day of advisory/study hall (tutoring). 2hrs of homework a day max. So about 8-9 hrs of study total. His peer in Shanghai is doing almost double that.
But I do think Chinese culture has greatly valued education (and standardized testing) for about 20 times as long as the gaokao has existed; in that sense, too, the school system is a reflection of the surrounding society, not only vice versa. It's true that the "education" in question has often been more a matter of convincingly repeating established doctrines than of repudiating them, and often valued because it was a gateway to material gain, by way of standardized testing.
On the other hand, I never see the kind of anti-intellectualism that got Trump elected in the US (and Hitler in Germany) in the families of my Chinese friends. I know it can exist in Chinese culture — the Cultural Revolution had plenty of it — but it doesn't seem to be a dominant thread the way it is in the US. And this is true of families from Taiwan, too; it's not just a Mainland Chinese reaction to the CR. They just don't seem to have the nerd/egghead stereotype.
(And I still don't understand why that other person thinks Chinese people don't spend enough on schooling or why they would consume more if they did.)
In general, I think this 'rebel' instinct can go either way. It can lead you to challenge the status quo and make an improvement, it can also lead you to think you're a rebel because you deny the moon landing, or you're a flat earther, or an anti-vaxer. Anti-establishmentarianism can turn from a legitimate gripe into a conspiracy rathole really quickly.
From "I don't wanna wear a mask or get vaxed" to "vaccines are implanting you with Bill Gates microchips!"
It's kinda weird how Americans would look down on a very qualified political candidate with lots of degrees, but then boost up a blithering idiot because "he's one of us". No where else is that attitude prevalent. When you are flying commercial airlines, do you want the unqualified, uneducated guy flying the plane? When you're getting heart surgery, do you want the guy who never went to med school doing your surgery? But somehow, when it comes to politics, the guy who studied economics, history, political science, engineering, somehow loses points.
This is almost entirely due to the Gaokao. Also, there's a difference between prizing education as a means to make money, and prizing education as a means to make a well-rounded person. The concept of a 'liberal arts' education in China barely exists, from the standpoint that education isn't about vocational skills to enrich yourself monetarily, but to enrich oneself as a person.
There's a reason why most of the huge breakthroughs, the foundational advancements, are still originating in the West (often from Chinese students), because Western upper level education pushes pursuit of knowledge for curiosity's sake, for things that could have uncertain, if any, economic payoff, at the same time it sponsors an open publishing, and question-anything adversarial system. Most of the output of Chinese Universities seem to be incremental improvements on breakthroughs from elsewhere.
Fundamentally, I don't think an authoritarian state that constricts intellectual, academic, and political freedom, combined with an educational system that acts largely as a vocational gatekeeper, is conducive to the free questioning that is at the heart of innovation.
Western education tends to teach rebellion. Rebellion against your parents, against the government, against the status quo. The way you get a Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk is to have something, who is told no over and over again, "you can't do this", to say "f*ck it, I'm doing it anyway, no matter how stupid or impossible you say it is."
It's this rebellion that's at the heart of innovation.