I think that, while Americans are more lax, this leads to advantages as well as disadvantages. The disadvantages are apparent: Students arent pushed to work has hard. However, the less apparent advantages are that those who are able to go above and beyond actually tend to innovate more, since they tend to do what they enjoy. In Chinese culture, there isnt only a lot of pressure to study, but to study certain things if you are smart (i.e. physics) from both society as a whole and parents. Therefore, in many cases, a very smart student will be stuck doing something that they don't really want to do because of their parents or societal pressure and thus, will often want to spend less time on it when they get into the workplace. If Einstein (who, coincidentally, was a bad student) was lukewarm about physics, would he have brought us the discoveries that we owe to him today?
