China

I don't know if you remember school, but there is a bonkers amount of rote memorisation, and there's a limited amount of "how to think" you can teach a classroom of 30-40 kids who are mostly checked out.

I had the benefit of experiencing two different school systems. One in a formerly socialist Eastern European country and one in a Western European one. Of course times change and i'm sure by now it's different that it was even two to three decades ago, but from my experience there is some truth to the statement that there was more rote memorization in the eastern educational system.

I wouldn't say this was always a bad thing though, because in many subjects the results produced by that system were objectively better. Students not only fared much better in international math and sciences competitions (where it's definitely not all about simple memorization but often about solving new and quite complex problems that you have never encountered before), but also generally students were at least one, maybe even two years ahead in many subjects over their western counterparts, at least until you get to the university level where things become much more equalized.

As for the western educational system "teaching how to think", maybe in theory, but in practice from my experience what this usually resulted in is a lot of "unconventional" teaching methods (a lot of props and group work, the latter being very bad at getting everyone to actually engage with the material) that could be frustrating and even confusing for some students. Some of these methods worked while some were a complete waste of time.

And also there was a lot of "i won't tell you what to do, you have to figure it out for yourselves" which ended with a lot of students just giving up and never actually learning how to do something because they couldn't get there on their own and the teacher wouldn't take the time to properly explain and do demonstrations themselves of how it's done because that was considered too "traditional" of a teaching method, and the class would eventually just move on to the next thing.

Also, in the more "humanities" oriented subjects there is a lot of refusal to just give a straight up "this is the correct answer", which again can be confusing for a lot of students and end up with them finishing the class without having actually learned anything concrete. In general there is a lot less factual information that is imparted on students in the western educational system. I probably knew more historical facts from early childhood schooling in eastern Europe than i learned in all my years in a western European school.

The western system relies on students being motivated to go further on their own initiative, which frankly is simply not the case most of the time. Even the best and most motivated students often want to do other things after school than more voluntary school work that goes beyond your assigned homework. The result of this is that when you go to university you often find that you have serious gaps and a lot of catching up to do to even get to the level that is expected of first years, whereas you don't see this problem in international students coming from certain other countries that still have a more "old fashioned" system. Again, this depends, it's not always the case, but more often than not, it can be.

This is not to say that there aren't some advantages to the western system, i can't speak to higher education in the humanities for instance, so maybe there are certain skills there that are better developed in this system (though judging by the state of "economics" and "political science" in the West, i'm not even sure that's true). And maybe some students do feel more comfortable with this style rather than the "traditional" one. But overall i don't think it's enough to say that it's a superior system, especially in the hard sciences.