What’s So Great about Chinese Education?
Nicholas Kristof, writing from China, expresses his admiration for Chinese education in a column in the New York Times.
Kristof says that we should “take a page from the Chinese book” to improve our own system of education. As he traveled, he visited elementary and middle schools and noted that even in peasant schools, children were learning math at levels matched only by the best American schools. But while his children’s school doesn’t start foreign language instruction until seventh grade, Chinese children start their English studies in first or third grade.
Why do Chinese students succeed in school, he asks? They are “hungry for education and advancement and work harder,” while American students spend more hours watching television than attending classes. At one school he visited, Chinese students show up for school at 6:30 am to get extra tutoring before classes begin an hour later. They have a lunch break from 11:30 to 2, then stay in school until 5. There is homework every night, every weekend, and every day during their summer vacation.
Then too, he says, the Chinese culture venerates education and educators. Teachers are respected more there than in the U.S.A.
And then there is a deep-seated belief that success in education depends on effort, not ability. Two American scholars, Harold Stevenson and James Stigler, wrote about this in their book Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing And What We Can Learn From Japanese And Chinese Educ about 15 years ago. American parents think that kids succeed in subjects like math because they have the ability (”my child just isn’t good at math,” or “math is Johnny’s best subject”), but Asian parents think that anyone can succeed if they work at it…
At bottom, we face the problem of our success. Too many American kids dream of growing up to be an entertainer or a sports star, neither of which is a realistic prospect…
The problem, which Kristof does not address, nor does Thomas Friedman in his best-selling book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, is that American youth are not hungry…
Source: Huffington Post
http://tinyurl.com/32dwa9
May 29th, 2007 at 6:50 PM
I am an Foreign English teacher in China. Everything in that NY Times piece is crap. Sure kids start to learn english in first grade here, but most students never progress beyond saying: “Hello”. I teach University students in China that have studied English for 9 years and most cannot hold a conversation, write coherent english sentences, or perform rudimentary tasks using the language.
Rote memorization is the norm for students here. Maybe that’s great for passing standardized tests and mathematics problems, but that’s all. Chinese students are unimaginative dullards with no analytical ability.
If that’s the kind of thing Americans think is great and want for their Kids, it illustrates just how low the Republic has fallen.
May 29th, 2007 at 6:59 PM
And to add further, students may show up for school at 6:30, but classes do not start until 7:50. Some of The early arrivers may get extra tutoring but it is because they are usually the idiots forced into it…it’s not the brightest students. And for the most part, kids who do arrive early spend the first hour cleaning the school, usually very poorly. More time is wasted during the day for eye exercises (at least 20 minutes of rolling eyes), 45 minutes for morning exercise where all the kids lazily swing their arms, and 15 minute breaks between each class. Add all the wasted time up, including three hours for lunch in the summer, and Chinese Kids actually spent last time in Class than American Kids.
And BTW, kids aren’t hungry in China anymore. They are getting fatter everyday as they are now being overfed on Cola and Junk Food.
God, American Ideas about today’s China are so out of touch with reality… But readers of the NY Times and others accept the PR tour version of things offered up by some lazy assed reporter. Wake up America!
May 30th, 2007 at 2:16 AM
The writer of this response is absolutely right. I too teach at a university in China. I’ve been teaching here for 4 years.
And whenever I read that China is producing so many more PhD’s than the US and we are falling behind it makes me cringe because I know the quality of these graduates is far below that of western graduates.
The educational system here is far below that of the US; however the Chinese do surpass us in math and science in the public schools. But creativity and problem solving are totally absent in these students. Rote learning to pass the ‘test’ is all they know and have ever done.
I second the ‘wake up America’ call!