Stunted
In this New York Times article, David Brooks describes the relationship between China’s ruling elite and its school system. The ‘phenomenal feats of memorization to learn the Chinese characters’ are symptomatic of the ends and means of Chinese education - churning out a class of like-minded wonks to run its bureaucracy. This, he says, is a process that has evloved over 1,000 years. (I would argue that it is more like 2,000 years.)
These practices, combined with its cultural values, shape the Chinese technocratic state. Brooks continues:
The exams don’t reward all mental skills. They reward the ability to work hard and memorize things. Your adolescence is oriented around those exams — the cram seminars, the hours of preparation.
This description is accurate. (If anything, he understates it.) It is not uncommon for 3rd graders to work late into the night on homework assignments. Parents and teachers push kids relentlessly, particularly in math and in memorizing information, up to and including the university level. I actually doubt that parents generally think in terms of the Communist Party as the goal for their kids, but there are after all 50 million members in the CPC and it is a real career possibility. No parent would balk at the opportunity to see their kids in a position of power there.
You don’t get very far in the Communist Party without a PhD these days. This affords the universities, the political recruiting grounds, a level of influence unlike in other countries. The payoff is that the Party has demonstrated an incredible level of efficiency in going about its tasks. It can claim, with some plausibility, to have helped hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in recent years, despite (or is that because of) the widescale corruption within its ranks. In this snese the bureaucracy works.
Nonetheless, the educational system is stunted, and profoundly irrelevant to the needs of the vast majority of its students. It evaluates talent and ability in an absurdly narrow, stultifying way. If memorization is the most highly prized ability, then creativity, innovativeness, and other things are necessarily suppressed, a potentially huge problem for China’s competitiveness in the post industrial era. But perhaps even wsorse is the fact that, most Chinese children have a nightmarish time in the system. They leave it, for the most part, with few practical or intellectual skills to equip them for the realities of the 21st century.
As Brooks observes:
Perhaps it’s simply impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are.
Again, he understates the scale of the problem, if anything.
I understand that the article is reductionistic - describe anyone’s life in this way and it will sound kafkaesque. But the problems of Chinese education are real and Brooks has put them into context in a compelling way. From where I sit Chinese education looks pretty stunted.
Ken Carroll
December 6th, 2007 at 9:25 am
With the time I’ve spent in Beijing as a foreign student at Tsinghua University, I’d go on to say that at the highest levels, China’s education system rewards a nearly autistic approach to study. Students are given few opportunities to train their minds to look at problems through multiple vantages–as economists, historians, scientists, and so on.
Nothing could be further from the liberal arts spirit of education. I see in Tsinghua an obsession with knowledge at the expense of insight.
December 6th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Korean education is similar in many ways. When I asked my elementary students what time they go sleep each night, many told me 11, or midnight. It’s not because they are up late watching TV, they are studying. From the minute they leave school at 3-ish, to the minute their head hits the pillow some 8-10 hours later, they are studying at private tutoring centers.
December 7th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
ningmeng,
I asked a returning Chinese student about the difference in university approaches. She said that in China, the lecturers tell you what you need to know, including at the post-graduate level. Your job as a studetn is to take notes, read every blessed thing the professor tells you to, and memorize as much of it as you can. The answers to the tests are literal and all of them are to be found in the lectures/notes. In the UK, by contrast, she found that lectures were simply introductions to the topics. The lecturer offered insights to spark the learners’ thinking. After that the studnets were expected to research, form opinions, and describe their own interpretations. Clearly these two approahces will yield very different results in how graduates think.
austin,
I have a lot of Korean friends here in Shanghai. Their approach is even harsher on the children than the Chinese approach. They are obsessive about every possible moment of extra tuition for the kids. It seems to me that Korean kids have no say whatsoever in how their own childhood is spent. I don’t know enough about Korea to speculate on how that effects the broader society, but my feeling is that children need to learn to make decisions and the only way to do that is by actually startign to make their own decisions when they are young.
Ken Carroll
December 11th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
[…] I’m not quite sure, off-hand, how we might teach the efficient working of memory (though they may be exercised, ala Brain Age), but I strongly support guided practice in problem-solving (which David Jonassen elegantly talks about; see his forthcoming chapter in Michael Allen’s eLearning Annual from Pfeiffer). It’s clear to me that the curriculum we need to worry about is about not passing knowledge tests (see Ken Carroll on the Chinese system). […]
January 6th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Kudos to you Ken, for your insightful article. I do feel that things will change in China regarding the emphasis on rote as opposed to creativity.
Why do I think so?
Well, long time ago in Dublin, I did a test (as we all did unknowingly)in sixth class to determine our secondary education. A test mostly about Gaelic and math with some history and geography thrown in. I’m useless at math and still am today and as for the Gaelic language. I absolutely hated it. It was torture to recite those verb tenses and it just did not seem like a living language to me. Plus I hated my teacher who often hit me and anyone else within arms distance.
It was decided (by my teacher)that I should go to the Christian Brothers. I must not have done too bad on the test, as everyone else was told they should learn a trade.
Anyways, long story short - I was not allowed study art in the CBS due to my poor score in languages (meaning Gaelic) and was obviosly barred from studying French.
Those 2 subjects where denied to me. I remember my parents trying to talk with the headmaster… to no avail.
The point is this, back then in Ireland the education system was as bad as China is today. It’s come along way since. China has 20 years to go. Maybe longer. I’m sorry to say.
I was labeled as a kid that was retarded at languages and therefore uncreative/retarded in any artistic endeavor.
It was only after I left school did I find an interest in languages and art. I went on to be interviewed on national TV (Cursai) in the Gaelic language. What was I interviewed about? My creativity in the art of Goldsmithing and jewellery design. I later went on to design the logo/seal of Office for the Irish senate.
I never did learn French and I’ve forgotten most of my Gaelic, what with 12 years in the States and 3 in China. I have however become adept at Mandarin, (better than yours but not as good as J. Pasden’s).
That little test way back when I was 12, deeply effected my life and caused me and many like me great hardship in the years to come. A little like the college entrance exams here in China.
As you can see I still have a chip on my shoulder.
Education has always stifled creativity and it amazes me how so much music, art and literature has come out of a country (Ireland), then again, we must be doing somethign right, though for the life of me I never witnessed it. Come to think of it, most of our artists were exiles. This also mirrors China and my expat existance.
Ned