When saying something is the best at anything you are saying so based on two comparative aspects: why it is good, and why the others are worse at it. This is the case of why Asian countries have the tendency to be better in mathematics than other nations across the globe. On top of the quality of the education given on the topic in such countries and the incentive children get from an early age by their parents to succeed at it, research demonstrates that the opposite happens in other places giving them an edge, where children are driven towards liberal arts and have poor math education. This explains why the top of the graph contains red dots exclusively (where red represents Asian countries) and the bottom is blue and green (most of Africa and northern Africa and the Middle East respectively).
Asia obtains the best results in mathematics by own merit. There are some theories that are mostly not the prevailing reason behind this phenomena relating to how much easier mathematics are to people speaking Asian languages, based on the premise of that “One would need to learn 28 unique words to count up to 100 in English while in the Chinese, Japanese or Korean languages, it would be just 11 - one to 10 and 100”, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his best seller The Tipping Point and Outliers. The true reasons behind this are the quality of mathematics and education in Asia has the best rankings, “In the 2007 results the top five nations in both maths and science are from East Asia - Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.” (Lim, 2013). Yet not only do they have access to the best education in this particular subject, but they are more driven to be good at it and pursue knowledge in that field. Research shows that Asian parents prefer their kids to excel at mathematics or science than in any other field, like music or sports. Given this extra support and single minded focus from their parents, children seek excellence there from an early age disregarding any other subject as important enough. Where children and teenagers normally take after school lessons in diverse areas as a hobby, Asian parents “send [their children] to tuition classes after regular school hours” (Lim, 2013) in mathematics or science. This yields into having a significant amount of undergraduate studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) on these countries as that is what they are taught from an early age is important, totaling 50% majors in that area: twice as much than in the UK. Finally, Asians are better than any other part of the world in math because of the incredibly high competition there is to get to a university. According to George Lim in the New Zealand Herald “every year around nine million high school students in China take entrance exams to compete for only three million university places. Only one in three high school students can get into university.” With this level of competition the entrance exams escalate to extremely high scales, obligating children study much more than in other countries in order to access higher education. (BBC NEWS, 2007).
On the other hand, Asia is not only the best because of their good results, but by the failure of the rest, as pointed out before. The worst part about this is that is not even linked to the economic prosperity of the nation as that is the common perception, but rather to the importance given to the subject and the student’s drive to pursue it. “South Africa’s education system was recently ranked one of the worst in the world. According to the 2011 annual national assessment figures, the World Economic Forum ranked South Africa 140th out of 144 which is lower than Lesotho and Swaziland.”, according to CII broadcasting last year, and South Africa has a very strong economy.
To add up, the support given to STEM in Asia in every level of the system produces the incredibly high results they have achieved in the present. The strong support from parents from their children early age sets them into a mathematics course before they even know what it is. Then when they enter school they have access to the world’s top curricula for that subject. On top of that their parents sign them up for after school mathematics classes. Finally, they have to remain in the top 33 percentile of the nation if they want to get into a university. Luckily for them the rest of the world doesn’t pay that much attention to mathematics and science and hence their challenge ends there, and that’s why they’re the best in math.