The above poster is right in many ways about the memorisation load of learning kanji (or hanzi/Chinese characters). An Chinese university student will have learnt to recognize over four thousand characters (estimates vary here).

But readers should avoid the common misunderstanding that most characters are predominantly pictoral. In fact, over 90% characters in current use in Chinese are 'picto-phonetic', comprised of one part that is semantic, and one part phonetic. To use the example the poster takes of 'cat' the character is comprised of an element on the left for 'animal' and on the right indicating prounciation (the element is miao, with cat pronounced mao in modern Mandarin). There's quite a lot more of abstraction in characters than is generally realised in these kind of debates, and claims that they are not as good "in practice" as alphabets should not oversimplify the issues at hand.

The question the poster above asks is an excellent one. If readers are genuinely interested in how another country has managed to turn their average public school system into a world-leading one, I'd recommend a read of ''Finnish Lessons'' by Pasi Sahlberg. The Finns realized that if you want the best people to teach your children, you have to make sure that teaching is a desirable profession. This is not just about salary--it means making sure teacher education attracts top talent and properly prepares new teachers, it means giving teachers less class hours than many other countries so they can spend time researching new teaching approaches (yes, a good teacher *is* a researcher too, Slashdot), and it means letting individual teachers and schools, rather than centralized authorities, decide how they are going to educate their students. If I was thinking about becoming a teacher and saw this story, I might choose to do something else. How about law? Seems that the parents respect lawyers just fine...