Education in China

This is our last blog from our trip.  This one will be in relation to the school we taught at and education in general in China.  We certainly don’t know everything there is to know regarding education in China, but we did spend 6 weeks there observing, teaching, talking to some people who were very candid with us regarding education there and reading some information from a book called “Catching Up or Leading the Way.”  It was written by a man who was born, raised and educated in China.  He now teaches at Michigan State and his two children have been born, raised and educated in the USA. He claims our system is better and has many good points to back this up.

Some of the things in the blog have been mentioned before, but much of this is new.  We didn’t want to send too much information on this topic while we were in China.  We don’t think that we were monitored or watched, but we didn’t want to be critical over the Internet and cause some problems while we were there.  The people there were very nice to us and seemed eager to learn from us.  Whether they can or will follow through with some things that were suggested, remains to be seen.

China’s educational system is heavily based on testing.  This is true on all levels: elementary, secondary and university level. It is also heavily based on rote memory.  The subjects that are most important are: math, science, Chinese and English.  The other subjects (social studies, music, art, phy ed, etc.) are taught, but not part of the 12^th grade exam (gaokao).  Writing is NOT emphasized. We were told that very little writing is done until grad school.  There is presently a big scandal in China regarding people whose doctoral dissertations were not written by the people themselves.  They apparently hired people to write it for them. Don’s students (juniors in college) had very poor writing skills in English and he was told by a Chinese professor that if they could have written the assigned paper in Chinese, it still would have been poorly written. (Also the majority of the papers was copied and pasted from the Internet.)

As we mentioned earlier, class sizes are large (even 40-70 on the elementary level). Teachers shout out information and students shout it back.  It is common to hear young students repeat what they hear adults say (as they are taught in school). K-12 schools are rated as very good to very poor schools and this is reflected in their name.  For example, the best school in the community in which we lived is titled Gaoxin #1, the second best is Gaoxin #2.  It often costs under-the-table money to get into a “very good” school.

Original thought and creativity are not part of the curriculum.  Some of this may be political but this is the way Chinese (and most of Asia, for that matter) education has been for centuries. They invented the civil service exam centuries ago, which was based on stating facts and filling in blanks (again memorization) from famous Chinese quotations. Don had a difficult time getting them to make choices or give opinions during class “discussion.”  Relating facts was what they were more comfortable doing.

Doing well on the gaokao (high school final exam) is extremely important.  This determines whether you can get into a public (their best) university  and which one. Some students are told NOT to take the exam (to prevent their high school from having a lower test score average). Poor test scores are the student’s fault, NOT the teacher’s fault. Cheating on the exam has been documented, and there are very severe penalties for cheating (banned from public colleges).  Private universities are for profit and will accept anyone who has the money (around $2,000 per year for all expenses at our university). Some students are bright, hard working and interested in learning. But some of them commented to us, that many at the university are NOT hard working, good students. Because they pay extra money to go to school they expect to pass and (we were told by other foreign teachers) they do, regardless of how they do in class.  Don failed approximately 40 of his 245 students for very low test scores (20-30%) and plagiarizing their required paper.  We’ll probably never know if they really did fail the class.  The test he gave was one he would give his high school juniors, of which maybe 1 or 2 would score that low (out of 125 students). The great majority of the students who failed only came to the final exam (not the other 3 or 4 classes).

The biggest problem that the Chinese see with their own educational system is that they rely too much on rote memory and testing. (This is true of most, if not all of the Asian nations – high test scores, little practicality when it comes to actually working and producing.)  They know that they need problem-solvers and creative thinking people to succeed in the 21^st century.  Economically they get by now with copying our products and using their cheap labor to undersell us and the rest of the world. This already is ending as other nations pay their workers even less. They send a large minority of their brightest to USA and other foreign universities to get better training. Some of their top national graduates can’t perform on the job, as they only know how to memorize and test well (well documented in the book “Catching Up or Leading the Way”).  They also have a high suicide rate because of the testing pressures. China is trying to incorporate more “Western” style teaching (thus hiring teachers like us).  But they have a tradition of thousands of years of memorizing and testing to judge educational success.  This makes the transition tough. Their main current solution is to send many of their best overseas for university and graduate work, as previously mentioned.

Of course this is ironic as many in this nation want us to test of children as never before and judge their school solely on these test scores.  Be careful what you wish for. We can adjust to that, but will that make us more competitive in the 21^st century where problem solving and creative thinking will be more important than spitting out facts?  Back in the 50s (Sputnik) people blasted our educational system and predicted disaster.  (We should copy the Soviet system; they obviously know how to do it better.)  How did those Soviets do, by the way??  Every decade people have blasted our system (certainly not perfect), but we still have the best overall economy and most creative people.

Copy the Asian or European systems?? – End secondary school at 2:00 pm – give 3-4 hours of homework every night (Chinese elementary school day ends at 6 PM with homework.), no special ed in schools, no special help in the schools (only privately available at your expense at home),  no extra curriculars in school, tell 20% of the students at the end of 8^th grade they’re done with school based on their test scores and train them for low paying service jobs, tell another 30% that they can’t go to university at the end of 10^th grade (based on test scores), but that they can go to technical college, then the other 50% have one test that determines if and what university that they can go to. If they fail, it is their fault, not their teacher’s fault or school’s fault. Do you see us going to this model in the near future??  Yet, this is what we are being compared with!! – Is this even comparing oranges to tangerines??  Sorry, but I could even go on longer.  Read the book “Catching Up or Leading the Way” to get a real good comparison of the systems.



Building #1 with Media Rooms (gray partially due to air pollution; building in which we both taught our classes)

One of Don's classes; 18/31 showed up for first class; notice jackets because it's cold & notice cracks in wall because of poor workmanship



Bobbi with some of the enthusiastic and friendly faculty who were her "students"

Trash in classroom because students are responsible for cleaning and only do so special occasions; wasn't cleaned for at least 3 months

Classroom graffiti; students didn't show much respect for the classroom

Student dorms with "green" dryers in full use; most rooms had 8 students living in them with 4 sets of bunkbeds and not much open floor space 

Phy Ed class on sports field (artificial surface); most phy ed was dancing & various exercises rather than game-playing