On Monday, I introduced Principal Wang Zheng, who took over at Shenzhen Middle School in April 2002. Underlying all of Principal Wang’s reforms were several assumptions that would seem correct to Westerners but too visionary to Chinese. First and foremost, Principal Wang believed that the national examination was a test that students could cram for in one year instead of three years. In other words, preparation for the national examination was a distinct and separate project from education. That’s why he instituted a system whereby students would for the first two years learn to understand choice and responsibility in order to become productive citizens; for their final year they would be isolated in the school’s western campus so that they could cram for the national examination.
This was in itself controversial, but what truly outraged parents, teachers, and government officials was that Principal Wang recognized his limitations as an educator. Having been an educator all his life he understood that there were going to be intelligent students who wouldn’t need to study that much,much less intelligent students who were going to flunk the national examination no matter how hard they studied, students obsessed with testing for Peking,students who wanted to work for Goldman Sachs and students who were happy being bartenders. His greatest achievement, his legacy, and ultimately his undoing was that he accepted the individuality and diversity of the student pool, and permitted students to decide their own destiny.
That was simply blasphemy, sacrilege, and heresy in Chinese education. Parents handed their only child to Shenzhen Middle School with the expectation and demand that the school would do what’s right and responsible, and beat and whip any individuality and spontaneity, any free thinking and pubescent behavior out of their only child so that he or she couldfocus solely on getting into a key university. Teachers and government officials agree: if a student doesn’t get into a top university it’s because the school didn’t make him do enough multiple choice questions, wasn’t strict and stern enough, and permitted him to play, think, and sleep too much.
And the stakes had become far too high for parents. They now only had one child in a country of 1.3 billion, and Chinese society, because of free market reforms, had become much more competitive and intense. That made parents risk-averse, and they favoured the safest, least dangerous path to success for their child. And that invariably meant having their child test into a strict demanding high school, then a key university, and then onto graduate school in the United States or becominga bureaucrat. This game called life was too dangerous and uncertain for Chinese parents to permit their child to have any say. The grandfathers controlled their child when he was small, the schools controlled him when he was a teenager, and when their child becomes of working and marrying age, then parents will assert control once and for all.
So imagine how Chinese parents must have felt when they heard from their child during dinnertime conversations that Principal Wang was encouraging his students to think for themselves and make their own decisions, was permitting them to organize basketball tournaments and to volunteer at retirement homes, and turning a blind eye as they dated and played video games. If China were ancient Greece, then the parents would have surely made Principal Wang drink hemlock. Instead, they could only shout at their child to not participate in any extra-curricular activities and just focus on studying, and to their colleagues and friends they would whisper these terrifying words: Shenzhen Middle School was risky.
Shenzhen Middle School’s tenured teachers were even more angry and frustrated with Principal Wang’s reforms. Before they were Gods, and students their flock of sheep. These teachers succeeded under China’s traditional education system, and were comfortable and confident teaching multiple choice tests. Now Principal Wang told them they had to make class interactive and interesting, had to write examinations that tested students’ understanding of the material, and to encourage self-inquiry and self-discovery. In other words, Principal Wang was making his teachers teach, and they certainly had not come to Shenzhen Middle School todo that. They came for the pension, the job security, and Shenzhen Middle School’s fame and reputation that permitted them to pay for a new Audi with weekend cram courses. Moreover, what was the point of all this ‘teaching and learning’ when the national examination only tested memorization and regurgitation?
Before,when teachers could hide behind the podium and just lecture, they didn’t notice that most of their 50 students were asleep and texting each other on their mobiles about how boring class was. Now because Principal Wang made the teachers face the students and they could see all too clearly that students were bored and disinterested. But instead of thinking about how to interest and engage the students they decided to spend the class criticizing Principal Wang’s reforms. They called Principal Wang reckless and irresponsible, and they told the students that they were nothing more than lab rats in Principal Wang’s experiments.
Parents and teachers wrote letters and complained to local education officials, who were not happy with him either. In their eyes, Principal Wang was not playing by the rules of the game. He was not kowtowing to local officials, refused to let in the stupid and lazy children of the rich and powerful, and refused to boast the school’s national examination scores. What Principal Wang was doing was trying to reduce the number of Shenzhen Middle School’s entering class from 800 to 600 so that he could improve the quality of education, trying to obtain the right to select a quarter of the school’s entering class so that the students would fit the school’s free and open culture. In the eyes of local officials, Principal Wang Zheng was simply not doing his job.
What really annoyed and angered Shenzhen parents, teachers, and officials the most was that Principal Wang was permitting teenagers to be teenagers. Parents expected their children to serve as vessels for their hopes and aspirations, but now they could see that, under Principal Wang’s tutelage, they were developing a mind and a personality of their own.
Chinese society and culture always had an inexplicable, suffocating fear of teenagers. They were responsible for the May Fourth movement, the Cultural Revolution, and most recently the 1989 Tiananmen movement. This fear has manifested itself in the oppressive nature of China’s education system.
If there’s one inviolable fact about human society it’s diversity and difference. China is a nation that built a great wall to keep people and ideas out, and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that China would construct an education system dedicated to making its 1.3 billion people think and behave the same. And what’s truly astonishing is the system’s effectiveness: Chinese do, more or less, think the same, which is to say they don’t think at all. To suggest that Chinese students are stereotypes isn’t really accurate: they’re more like carbon copies.
There aren’t that many adjectives to describe Chinese students: they’re polite and respectful, hardworking and obedient. On the other hand, Shenzhen Middle School students are open and curious, stubborn and opinionated. They can be funny and generous, but also dark and cynical. They are sometimes sweet and caring, and other times they’re rude and contemptuous. They’re bold and creative, but they can also be narcissists and megalomaniacs.
In other words, Shenzhen Middle School kids are teenagers, and whatwascourageous and visionary about Principal Wang is that instead of trying to mould his students in his image,he permittedthem to grow as human beings, discover their individuality, and pursue their own destiny. He permittedthem to succeed and to fail, to love and to hate, to be passionate and to be frustrated. Ultimately, he permitted students to win or to lose.
Next week I’d like to explain why, in my opinion, Principal Wang’s top students are poised for extraordinary success in Chinese society.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Shenzhen Spring
Shenzhen municipality in south China’s Guangdong Province formally announced the appointment of Wang Zheng as principal of its flagship public high school in April, 2002. Shenzhen’s mayor himself flew to Beijing to invite Peking University High School’s vice principal to take up this position, and Wang Zheng’s appointment was seen as a triumph and coup d’état for a booming metropolis less renowned for its schools and culture than for its sweatshop factories and foot massage parlours.
Wang Zheng and Shenzhen at first seemed like an odd couple: the former was the scion of a distinguished Beijing family of educators, and the latter a fishing village plucked from obscurity by Deng Xiaoping’s decision in the late 1970s to test the free market in four special economic zones. But both shared an irrepressible and irreversible belief in reform.
Without reform, Shenzhen wouldn’t have existed. Deng Xiaoping’s unleashing of China’s entrepreneurial energy lured the bold and the daring to Shenzhen. There were some who wanted to escape a sordid past and there were some who wanted to construct a sordid future. But whether they were schemers or dreamers, pirates or builders, speculators or visionaries, they made Shenzhen a dynamic and wealthy (if corrupt and chaotic) boomtown. By the late 1980s, it was a Mecca for migrants, the best place in China for the hardworking poor, unencumbered by local prejudice and protectionism where they could rise to join China’s fledging middle-class. The inherent instability of reform and the resulting 1989 Tiananmen protests threatened Shenzhen’s economic liberalization, prompting Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in the spring of 1992; for better or worse, Shenzhen was China’s future, and there would be no turning back.
Ten years later, Wang Zheng arrived at Shenzhen Middle School, determined to enact a series of education reforms that would strike Chinese education out of its complacent and stagnant state. Wang Zheng’s grandfather had been an education pioneer as well: as China’s first professor of psychology he brought Freud to China before the Communists came to power and suppressed the field of psychology. Both of Wang Zheng’s parents were university professors, and he went to elementary school during the Cultural Revolution, too young to participate as a Red Guard but old enough to spend his afternoons harvesting wheat and raising pigs.
He studied at Peking University High School where his head teacher read her class Les Miserables, and he and his classmates biked downtown to spend their lunch money to attend the opera. He tested into Peking University’s prestigious physics department where he built his own superconductor. Whereas his classmates went to graduate school in the United States and then onto lucrative careers on Wall Street, Wang Zheng returned to Peking University High School to teach physics for 8 years before becoming vice-principal for another 8 years. He was 36 years-old when he became principal of Shenzhen Middle School, the youngest person ever to be appointed principal of an elite high school in China (details of Principal Wang’s student days can be found here).
Wang Zheng accepted the Shenzhen position because he had ambitious reform plans, and Shenzhen—bloated with capital, but starved of intellect—welcomed this white knight of education reform. Principal Wang went to work right away. He had staff meetings that lasted until evening, and then until dusk—prompting the other school administrators to remind him that, unlike him, they had families. The principal’s large, spacious, and ornate office became a storage room, and he worked out of the conference room until four in the morning. He went on study tours to the Raffles School in Singapore and to the Dalton School in New York, and while he didn’t bother to buy chocolate and souvenirs he did bring back ideas that he would implement with fury and zeal.
In 2002, the year of its 55th anniversary, Shenzhen Middle School was still a traditional Chinese high school, where head teachers shepherded a class of 50 students in studying for the national examination. They took the same lectures from 7:30am until 4:30pm from Monday to Sunday, and for homework they did multiple choice tests. Shenzhen Middle School was at best a glorified test preparation centre, at worst a factory that transformed teenagers into study machines.
Principal Wang launched a war of liberation for the soul and future of his students. He eliminated the head teacher system, and adopted a Western-style credit system where students, with the help of advisors and tutors, designed their own course schedule depending on their strengths and interests. He reduced class sizes from 50 to 25, and when teachers protested he had contractors split the class into two by building a wall. He specialized classrooms, and replaced multiple-choice examinations with written examinations. He brought debate and discussion into the classroom, and students had to give presentations and do research projects.
To realize his vision of choice and diversity on the Chinese high school campus, Principal Wang Zheng created four different streams, which in practice meant four schools within a school. Stream 1 was the traditional Chinese curriculum, stream 2 was the new curriculum that Principal Wang was implementing, stream 3 was the Olympiad class, and stream 4 was for students planning to study abroad. Rather than focusing on China’s top national universities Principal Wang encouraged students to study in the United States and in Japan, and to test into arts and sports institutes.
By far, Principal Wang Zheng’s biggest impact was on student life. He divided the students into eight different houses, and each house had its own student management system. With the house system, imposing and intimidating Shenzhen Middle School (with a campus the size of three city blocks and 2,400 students spread over three grades) became friendly and intimate. Helping the lowerclassmen adapt to this new education system were the Prefects, upperclassmen mentors who liked to organize surprise birthday parties for the lowerclassmen. And organizing activities and competitions among the houses was student government.
Student life was vibrant and diverse, but its most striking characteristic was that it was entirely student-built and managed. Student cadres were not just the glorified hall monitors found at other Chinese schools—they were democratically elected representatives who served the interests of their classmates. They solicited corporate sponsors for basketball and soccer tournaments (one student was so charming that he received $30,000 from China Mobile). They organized masquerade balls and ‘American Idol’ competitions. On December 31st of each year hundreds of volunteers stayed up all night to organize the school’s annual winter carnival; on New Year’s Day, over 100,000 Shenzhen residents would come to buy goods and play games, listen to concerts and watch performances.
Shenzhen Middle School was a place where students could pursue their interests and passions, and Principal Wang provided them with encouragement and resources. For the school’s science and math whizzes, he built state-of-the-art laboratories, and invited his former Peking University professors to tutor them: the result was that every year, Shenzhen Middle School would win at least one international Olympiad gold medal. The school boasted the nation’s best choir, Guangdong Province’s best orchestra and art department. And students were free to start their own clubs and organize their own time; one student received a scholarship to Brown University after talking on the phone for half an hour about his intense love of break-dancing, and another received a scholarship to Hampshire College after organizing an Internet website exposing unfair and unreasonable people and practices at Shenzhen Middle School. (Unfortunately, I was one of his targets, but more about that in future writings.) Indeed, during Principal Wang’s tenure, students matriculated at Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, Duke, MIT, and other prestigious American universities, which admired the openness and boldness, diversity and individuality of Shenzhen Middle School students.
China’s top national universities also thought highly of Shenzhen Middle School. Shenzhen Middle School students didn’t score astronomically high on the national examination, but they brought an intense passion to their studies that made them excel academically. Principal Wang’s students also took on organizational, management, and leadership roles, and made their respective university campuses more vibrant and interesting. Progressive universities such as Peking University and Zhejiang University were especially fond of Shenzhen Middle School students, and actively recruited them. While the national examination score was still the main criterion for entrance into university, China’s key universities have been unhappy with the terrible quality of the students, and have implemented experimental policies—such as conducting interviews and looking at resumes—to improve their student pool, and when it came to interviews and resumes Shenzhen Middle School’s outspoken and opinionated students stood out. Each year 80 students from Guangdong Province will be admitted into Peking University, and almost half of them will be from Shenzhen Middle School. (To put that in perspective, Shenzhen Middle School has an applicant pool of 800 students whereas Guangdong province has an applicant pool of 50,000 students.)
For many people, Principal Wang Zheng’s reforms seemed a triumph of progressive practices. The national media celebrated Principal Wang’s reforms, principals and education officials came touring, and in November 2009 at a high-level Ministry of Education conference, Principal Wang Zheng was invited to speak on his reforms, a clear indication of national support for Principal Wang Zheng’s reforms. With even Premier Wen Jiabao calling for national curriculum reform it seemed as though Shenzhen Middle School would be constantly in the national spotlight, and Principal Wang’s reforms would be studied nationally.
But by February 2010, after eight years at the helm of Shenzhen Middle School, Principal Wang Zheng was replaced by an administrator who quickly began to dismantle his reforms. While the nation supported Principal Wang’s reforms, the city of Shenzhen did not. In my next article, I will discuss why the city of Shenzhen itself turned against the man they brought in to reform their education system.
Wang Zheng and Shenzhen at first seemed like an odd couple: the former was the scion of a distinguished Beijing family of educators, and the latter a fishing village plucked from obscurity by Deng Xiaoping’s decision in the late 1970s to test the free market in four special economic zones. But both shared an irrepressible and irreversible belief in reform.
Without reform, Shenzhen wouldn’t have existed. Deng Xiaoping’s unleashing of China’s entrepreneurial energy lured the bold and the daring to Shenzhen. There were some who wanted to escape a sordid past and there were some who wanted to construct a sordid future. But whether they were schemers or dreamers, pirates or builders, speculators or visionaries, they made Shenzhen a dynamic and wealthy (if corrupt and chaotic) boomtown. By the late 1980s, it was a Mecca for migrants, the best place in China for the hardworking poor, unencumbered by local prejudice and protectionism where they could rise to join China’s fledging middle-class. The inherent instability of reform and the resulting 1989 Tiananmen protests threatened Shenzhen’s economic liberalization, prompting Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in the spring of 1992; for better or worse, Shenzhen was China’s future, and there would be no turning back.
Ten years later, Wang Zheng arrived at Shenzhen Middle School, determined to enact a series of education reforms that would strike Chinese education out of its complacent and stagnant state. Wang Zheng’s grandfather had been an education pioneer as well: as China’s first professor of psychology he brought Freud to China before the Communists came to power and suppressed the field of psychology. Both of Wang Zheng’s parents were university professors, and he went to elementary school during the Cultural Revolution, too young to participate as a Red Guard but old enough to spend his afternoons harvesting wheat and raising pigs.
He studied at Peking University High School where his head teacher read her class Les Miserables, and he and his classmates biked downtown to spend their lunch money to attend the opera. He tested into Peking University’s prestigious physics department where he built his own superconductor. Whereas his classmates went to graduate school in the United States and then onto lucrative careers on Wall Street, Wang Zheng returned to Peking University High School to teach physics for 8 years before becoming vice-principal for another 8 years. He was 36 years-old when he became principal of Shenzhen Middle School, the youngest person ever to be appointed principal of an elite high school in China (details of Principal Wang’s student days can be found here).
Wang Zheng accepted the Shenzhen position because he had ambitious reform plans, and Shenzhen—bloated with capital, but starved of intellect—welcomed this white knight of education reform. Principal Wang went to work right away. He had staff meetings that lasted until evening, and then until dusk—prompting the other school administrators to remind him that, unlike him, they had families. The principal’s large, spacious, and ornate office became a storage room, and he worked out of the conference room until four in the morning. He went on study tours to the Raffles School in Singapore and to the Dalton School in New York, and while he didn’t bother to buy chocolate and souvenirs he did bring back ideas that he would implement with fury and zeal.
In 2002, the year of its 55th anniversary, Shenzhen Middle School was still a traditional Chinese high school, where head teachers shepherded a class of 50 students in studying for the national examination. They took the same lectures from 7:30am until 4:30pm from Monday to Sunday, and for homework they did multiple choice tests. Shenzhen Middle School was at best a glorified test preparation centre, at worst a factory that transformed teenagers into study machines.
Principal Wang launched a war of liberation for the soul and future of his students. He eliminated the head teacher system, and adopted a Western-style credit system where students, with the help of advisors and tutors, designed their own course schedule depending on their strengths and interests. He reduced class sizes from 50 to 25, and when teachers protested he had contractors split the class into two by building a wall. He specialized classrooms, and replaced multiple-choice examinations with written examinations. He brought debate and discussion into the classroom, and students had to give presentations and do research projects.
To realize his vision of choice and diversity on the Chinese high school campus, Principal Wang Zheng created four different streams, which in practice meant four schools within a school. Stream 1 was the traditional Chinese curriculum, stream 2 was the new curriculum that Principal Wang was implementing, stream 3 was the Olympiad class, and stream 4 was for students planning to study abroad. Rather than focusing on China’s top national universities Principal Wang encouraged students to study in the United States and in Japan, and to test into arts and sports institutes.
By far, Principal Wang Zheng’s biggest impact was on student life. He divided the students into eight different houses, and each house had its own student management system. With the house system, imposing and intimidating Shenzhen Middle School (with a campus the size of three city blocks and 2,400 students spread over three grades) became friendly and intimate. Helping the lowerclassmen adapt to this new education system were the Prefects, upperclassmen mentors who liked to organize surprise birthday parties for the lowerclassmen. And organizing activities and competitions among the houses was student government.
Student life was vibrant and diverse, but its most striking characteristic was that it was entirely student-built and managed. Student cadres were not just the glorified hall monitors found at other Chinese schools—they were democratically elected representatives who served the interests of their classmates. They solicited corporate sponsors for basketball and soccer tournaments (one student was so charming that he received $30,000 from China Mobile). They organized masquerade balls and ‘American Idol’ competitions. On December 31st of each year hundreds of volunteers stayed up all night to organize the school’s annual winter carnival; on New Year’s Day, over 100,000 Shenzhen residents would come to buy goods and play games, listen to concerts and watch performances.
Shenzhen Middle School was a place where students could pursue their interests and passions, and Principal Wang provided them with encouragement and resources. For the school’s science and math whizzes, he built state-of-the-art laboratories, and invited his former Peking University professors to tutor them: the result was that every year, Shenzhen Middle School would win at least one international Olympiad gold medal. The school boasted the nation’s best choir, Guangdong Province’s best orchestra and art department. And students were free to start their own clubs and organize their own time; one student received a scholarship to Brown University after talking on the phone for half an hour about his intense love of break-dancing, and another received a scholarship to Hampshire College after organizing an Internet website exposing unfair and unreasonable people and practices at Shenzhen Middle School. (Unfortunately, I was one of his targets, but more about that in future writings.) Indeed, during Principal Wang’s tenure, students matriculated at Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, Duke, MIT, and other prestigious American universities, which admired the openness and boldness, diversity and individuality of Shenzhen Middle School students.
China’s top national universities also thought highly of Shenzhen Middle School. Shenzhen Middle School students didn’t score astronomically high on the national examination, but they brought an intense passion to their studies that made them excel academically. Principal Wang’s students also took on organizational, management, and leadership roles, and made their respective university campuses more vibrant and interesting. Progressive universities such as Peking University and Zhejiang University were especially fond of Shenzhen Middle School students, and actively recruited them. While the national examination score was still the main criterion for entrance into university, China’s key universities have been unhappy with the terrible quality of the students, and have implemented experimental policies—such as conducting interviews and looking at resumes—to improve their student pool, and when it came to interviews and resumes Shenzhen Middle School’s outspoken and opinionated students stood out. Each year 80 students from Guangdong Province will be admitted into Peking University, and almost half of them will be from Shenzhen Middle School. (To put that in perspective, Shenzhen Middle School has an applicant pool of 800 students whereas Guangdong province has an applicant pool of 50,000 students.)
For many people, Principal Wang Zheng’s reforms seemed a triumph of progressive practices. The national media celebrated Principal Wang’s reforms, principals and education officials came touring, and in November 2009 at a high-level Ministry of Education conference, Principal Wang Zheng was invited to speak on his reforms, a clear indication of national support for Principal Wang Zheng’s reforms. With even Premier Wen Jiabao calling for national curriculum reform it seemed as though Shenzhen Middle School would be constantly in the national spotlight, and Principal Wang’s reforms would be studied nationally.
But by February 2010, after eight years at the helm of Shenzhen Middle School, Principal Wang Zheng was replaced by an administrator who quickly began to dismantle his reforms. While the nation supported Principal Wang’s reforms, the city of Shenzhen did not. In my next article, I will discuss why the city of Shenzhen itself turned against the man they brought in to reform their education system.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
The Trouble with Teens (Diplomat)
There’s an old joke that goes like this: seven Chinese walk into a room, and ten political parties come out. Everyone says that Chinese are terrible managers, and an ordinary Chinese office will have more political drama than Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Clinton household combined. Western managers know that Chinese have issues co-operating, and have spent tens of millions of dollars in corporate training to attempt to rectify this issue. But unlike the problem of process, co-operation is much harder to instil in Chinese because of a fundamental failing in China’s high schools.
Consider the life of an American high school student. He may play on a sports team, participate in student council, volunteer, date, and work part-time at McDonald’s. School can be a popularity contest, a jungle, a prison or just a nuisance, depending on your social designation. Teachers and parents, meanwhile, have resigned themselves to their minimal influence over these stubborn and rebellious teenagers, and will just seek to prevent pregnancies and drug abuse. The teenage years are an endless drama: fights with parents over curfew, acne, not making the football team or cheerleading squad, break-ups, depression, anorexia, Waiting for Godot anxiety, the prom.
Now consider the life of a Chinese teenager. He’ll study at his boarding school, and study when he’s locked at home on the weekends. His parents’ apartment and a classroom that looks like a prison cell are the boundaries of his experience and imagination. Chinese parents see their only child as a vessel for their aspirations and retirement plan; teachers see their students as test scores and possible financial rewards. The meaning and purpose of life are clear and simple: study hard, get a high score on the national examination, and become a mid-level bureaucrat.
Parents may not like the American teenager’s rebelliousness, and teachers may not like his lack of focus, but psychologists will explain that for the teenager his most important task is to construct a self-narrative that will become the basis of his identity, and permit him to engage the world as an independent human being. He ceases to yearn for the approval of his parents and teachers, and instead seeks the approval of his peers. He takes unnecessary risks (betting he could eat 10 hamburgers at once) and places himself in constant danger (actually trying to eat 10 hamburgers at once). He has exhilarating triumphs (getting a date with a cheerleader) and abysmal tragedies (the cheerleader cancels). He faces impossible obstacles (his mother) and deadly challenges (calculus class). He will seek allies (he’ll read The Fountainhead) and seek the meaning of life (he’ll re-read The Fountainhead). His memory takes all this epic drama from his teenage years and writes his very own Aeneid (so please excuse him if his memory doesn’t have room to store the periodic table, and only gets a B+ in chemistry).
Yes, in the process of formulating his identity, the teenager may be a selfish jerk, but the same process equips him with ‘empathy’ and the growing self-awareness that he is a selfish jerk.
By placing himself in different roles in different situations (a student, an employee, a friend, a collaborator, a lover) the teenager is exploring and pushing the boundaries and limits of the world, and developing the social consciousness and skills necessary to navigate this world. He discovers he can’t make the world conform to his worldview (his employer is really going to fire him if he’s late again, and his girlfriend is really going to dump him if he doesn’t stop hitting on her best friend), and so compromises and slowly learns to adjust his worldview to conform with the world. Pain and consequences force him to reflect on his self-centred stubborn ways. As slowly but as surely as a glacier, he learns to accept the validity and legitimacy of other viewpoints: his thinking will often become nuanced and tolerant, more open and welcoming of diversity and difference. And he stops recommending The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to all his friends.
This symbiotic development of identity and empathy are what educators call the ‘socialization’process: a teenager’s passionate and vehement search for identity will be calmed and rounded-out by the development of empathy, which will allow him to enter society as a citizen and to co-operate with others.
The crucial first step in this process is that teenagers be permitted to take risks and make mistakes, be stubborn and unreasonable, and just be the anti-social misfits that they naturally are. But Chinese families and schools don’t permit even make-up and dating, let alone risks and dangers, triumphs and tragedies, obstacles and challenges.
Boys and girls are not permitted to be near one meter of each other on school grounds, there’s a regulation haircut and school uniform, and there’s no mobile phone service and Internet access. All the students dress, look, act and think the same, and an administrator’s greatest pride is to see his 1000 students do calisthenics in synch on the soccer field. Walls and gates limit the movement of students, security cameras and the eyes of teachers track students, and if it were possible administrators would implant a signalling device on each student. If all this is still not enough to depress and stress out the Chinese teenager, then the head teacher and/or parent will now and then remind him that he’s worthless and useless.
The result of all this unreasonable and unnecessary repression is that Chinese students are remarkably polite and well-behaved. But at the end of their schooling they won’t be able to write their own Aeneid, (thoughmaybe the more literary among them can write The Tale of Peter Rabbit). They will matriculate at a top university, but they will lack sympathy and empathy, which will hinder them from developing and managing personal and professional relationships; they won’t understand trust and tolerance, only power and fear. They may rise to a top management position, but lacking in self-understanding and self-reflection they’ll curse and criticize their subordinates, making the workplace a cold stagnant repressive regime.
Having skipped the tumultuous teenage years, Chinese are forever doomed to live as teenagers all their lives. Whereas Americans may be stubborn, moody, quick to anger, insecure, impetuous, condescending, extreme, and paranoid in their teenage years, Chinese may suffer from these psychological issues all their lives. The psychologists who wrote Reviving Ophelia, Raising Cain, and Real Boys may not be happy with how American families and schools are distorting the emotional development of children, but if they came to China they’d faint inhorror and despair.
In education, permitting high school students the space and time to develop their individuality so that they may learn empathy and become happy and healthy citizens is the highest and more urgent priority. This is common sense among American educators, but in China, thinking along these lines—that students have the right to develop as human beings, and that this process is long, painful, traumatic, and ultimately necessary for everyone’s good—requires a visionary reformer.
In September 2008, I was fortunate enough to be hired by arguably China’s one and only visionary reformer in education, Principal Wang Zheng of Shenzhen Middle School. When I arrived at the school’s large sprawling campus I couldn’t possibly suspect that for the past six years the tree-lined quiet campus was actually the site of a long, traumatic, intensifying battle for the soul and destiny of China’s youth.
Next I’d like to discuss Principal Wang Zheng’s reforms and efforts to turn his students into citizens, and the opposition to his education project.
Consider the life of an American high school student. He may play on a sports team, participate in student council, volunteer, date, and work part-time at McDonald’s. School can be a popularity contest, a jungle, a prison or just a nuisance, depending on your social designation. Teachers and parents, meanwhile, have resigned themselves to their minimal influence over these stubborn and rebellious teenagers, and will just seek to prevent pregnancies and drug abuse. The teenage years are an endless drama: fights with parents over curfew, acne, not making the football team or cheerleading squad, break-ups, depression, anorexia, Waiting for Godot anxiety, the prom.
Now consider the life of a Chinese teenager. He’ll study at his boarding school, and study when he’s locked at home on the weekends. His parents’ apartment and a classroom that looks like a prison cell are the boundaries of his experience and imagination. Chinese parents see their only child as a vessel for their aspirations and retirement plan; teachers see their students as test scores and possible financial rewards. The meaning and purpose of life are clear and simple: study hard, get a high score on the national examination, and become a mid-level bureaucrat.
Parents may not like the American teenager’s rebelliousness, and teachers may not like his lack of focus, but psychologists will explain that for the teenager his most important task is to construct a self-narrative that will become the basis of his identity, and permit him to engage the world as an independent human being. He ceases to yearn for the approval of his parents and teachers, and instead seeks the approval of his peers. He takes unnecessary risks (betting he could eat 10 hamburgers at once) and places himself in constant danger (actually trying to eat 10 hamburgers at once). He has exhilarating triumphs (getting a date with a cheerleader) and abysmal tragedies (the cheerleader cancels). He faces impossible obstacles (his mother) and deadly challenges (calculus class). He will seek allies (he’ll read The Fountainhead) and seek the meaning of life (he’ll re-read The Fountainhead). His memory takes all this epic drama from his teenage years and writes his very own Aeneid (so please excuse him if his memory doesn’t have room to store the periodic table, and only gets a B+ in chemistry).
Yes, in the process of formulating his identity, the teenager may be a selfish jerk, but the same process equips him with ‘empathy’ and the growing self-awareness that he is a selfish jerk.
By placing himself in different roles in different situations (a student, an employee, a friend, a collaborator, a lover) the teenager is exploring and pushing the boundaries and limits of the world, and developing the social consciousness and skills necessary to navigate this world. He discovers he can’t make the world conform to his worldview (his employer is really going to fire him if he’s late again, and his girlfriend is really going to dump him if he doesn’t stop hitting on her best friend), and so compromises and slowly learns to adjust his worldview to conform with the world. Pain and consequences force him to reflect on his self-centred stubborn ways. As slowly but as surely as a glacier, he learns to accept the validity and legitimacy of other viewpoints: his thinking will often become nuanced and tolerant, more open and welcoming of diversity and difference. And he stops recommending The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to all his friends.
This symbiotic development of identity and empathy are what educators call the ‘socialization’process: a teenager’s passionate and vehement search for identity will be calmed and rounded-out by the development of empathy, which will allow him to enter society as a citizen and to co-operate with others.
The crucial first step in this process is that teenagers be permitted to take risks and make mistakes, be stubborn and unreasonable, and just be the anti-social misfits that they naturally are. But Chinese families and schools don’t permit even make-up and dating, let alone risks and dangers, triumphs and tragedies, obstacles and challenges.
Boys and girls are not permitted to be near one meter of each other on school grounds, there’s a regulation haircut and school uniform, and there’s no mobile phone service and Internet access. All the students dress, look, act and think the same, and an administrator’s greatest pride is to see his 1000 students do calisthenics in synch on the soccer field. Walls and gates limit the movement of students, security cameras and the eyes of teachers track students, and if it were possible administrators would implant a signalling device on each student. If all this is still not enough to depress and stress out the Chinese teenager, then the head teacher and/or parent will now and then remind him that he’s worthless and useless.
The result of all this unreasonable and unnecessary repression is that Chinese students are remarkably polite and well-behaved. But at the end of their schooling they won’t be able to write their own Aeneid, (thoughmaybe the more literary among them can write The Tale of Peter Rabbit). They will matriculate at a top university, but they will lack sympathy and empathy, which will hinder them from developing and managing personal and professional relationships; they won’t understand trust and tolerance, only power and fear. They may rise to a top management position, but lacking in self-understanding and self-reflection they’ll curse and criticize their subordinates, making the workplace a cold stagnant repressive regime.
Having skipped the tumultuous teenage years, Chinese are forever doomed to live as teenagers all their lives. Whereas Americans may be stubborn, moody, quick to anger, insecure, impetuous, condescending, extreme, and paranoid in their teenage years, Chinese may suffer from these psychological issues all their lives. The psychologists who wrote Reviving Ophelia, Raising Cain, and Real Boys may not be happy with how American families and schools are distorting the emotional development of children, but if they came to China they’d faint inhorror and despair.
In education, permitting high school students the space and time to develop their individuality so that they may learn empathy and become happy and healthy citizens is the highest and more urgent priority. This is common sense among American educators, but in China, thinking along these lines—that students have the right to develop as human beings, and that this process is long, painful, traumatic, and ultimately necessary for everyone’s good—requires a visionary reformer.
In September 2008, I was fortunate enough to be hired by arguably China’s one and only visionary reformer in education, Principal Wang Zheng of Shenzhen Middle School. When I arrived at the school’s large sprawling campus I couldn’t possibly suspect that for the past six years the tree-lined quiet campus was actually the site of a long, traumatic, intensifying battle for the soul and destiny of China’s youth.
Next I’d like to discuss Principal Wang Zheng’s reforms and efforts to turn his students into citizens, and the opposition to his education project.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
False Consciousness (Diplomat)
Taking up where I left off yesterday on the shortcomings of the national examination system, it's clear to me that, as Marxists would like to say, Chinese suffer from ‘false consciousness.’ They honestly believe, despite all the scientific, empirical, and anecdotal evidence to the contrary, that China’s high schools provide the best education in the world. Moreover, in a society overflowing with corruption and dishonesty and injustice, Chinese believe that the national examination system is fair and honest and just, and represents the best and only chance of an ordinary child improving his lot in life.
Chinese know that even the lotteries and the equity markets are rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, so why would they believe that the national examination system is incorruptible? People write these tests, and these same people have sons and daughters, family and friends, patrons and superiors—and in China guanxi rules. And if the rich and powerful can strip state assets, gamble with public funds, and monopolize entire industries I’d think they can easily get national examination questions and answers. When it comes to the national examination, Chinese suffer from a national self-delusion.
This self-delusion is borne out of self-interest and pride. Chinese may resent the system, but they believe the costs of not conforming are too high: failure to get into university means political, social, and economic marginalization. If there’s a 50 percent chance a fresh university graduate cannot find employment then there’s a 100 percent chance that a non-university degree holder cannot. There’s also the face issue: all parents talk about with friends and colleagues is their child’s schooling and university prospects. If a child fails to get into university the parents lose face among friends, family, and colleagues, and that would be like death to them. In education, like in most other areas, herd mentality trumps all.
But this doesn’t explain how a system that actively encourages individual and amoral competition can prevent itself from implosion. The answer lies in the specific organizational structure of the Chinese education system, a structure borne out of the Chinese Communist Party’s roots and which is mirrored and copied throughout Chinese society. In this organization structure one type of individual is ultimately responsible for stability, conformity, and orthodoxy in the system: the head teacher I discussed this week.
Chinese know that even the lotteries and the equity markets are rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, so why would they believe that the national examination system is incorruptible? People write these tests, and these same people have sons and daughters, family and friends, patrons and superiors—and in China guanxi rules. And if the rich and powerful can strip state assets, gamble with public funds, and monopolize entire industries I’d think they can easily get national examination questions and answers. When it comes to the national examination, Chinese suffer from a national self-delusion.
This self-delusion is borne out of self-interest and pride. Chinese may resent the system, but they believe the costs of not conforming are too high: failure to get into university means political, social, and economic marginalization. If there’s a 50 percent chance a fresh university graduate cannot find employment then there’s a 100 percent chance that a non-university degree holder cannot. There’s also the face issue: all parents talk about with friends and colleagues is their child’s schooling and university prospects. If a child fails to get into university the parents lose face among friends, family, and colleagues, and that would be like death to them. In education, like in most other areas, herd mentality trumps all.
But this doesn’t explain how a system that actively encourages individual and amoral competition can prevent itself from implosion. The answer lies in the specific organizational structure of the Chinese education system, a structure borne out of the Chinese Communist Party’s roots and which is mirrored and copied throughout Chinese society. In this organization structure one type of individual is ultimately responsible for stability, conformity, and orthodoxy in the system: the head teacher I discussed this week.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Education Games (Diplomat)
China’s national examination system, in which students’ aggregate score in six subjects over three days of examinations determine their university placement, is both brilliantly simple and devastatingly effective. China’s entire education system revolves around the national examination, which tests students’ ability to memorize and regurgitate, and willingness to recite orthodoxy. All schooling, from kindergarten onwards, is a prelude to that climactic meeting with destiny, and afterwards students forget what they’ve memorized, and cruise through university playing video games.
This system has made Chinese students literate and knowledgeable, but it also has also too many times made them incompetent and stupid. Let me emphasize this: the people best known for their respect for education and love of knowledge have constructed an education system that makes Chinese students, the very same hardworking and brilliant students who dominate international mathematics competitions and science laboratories, incompetent and stupid.
Consider this analogy: the teenage body. How do we grow it to be fit and strong during the crucial years of puberty? A personal trainer would advise an exercise regime supplemented by good nutrition, fresh air, adequate sleep, and a positive attitude. The body needs to exert itself in order to develop properly, and a diverse and holistic, multi-functional and constant exercise regime is the most effective: a morning run, an afternoon game of tennis, and a long evening stroll. Also make sure to eat small but frequent meals of fruits and vegetables, whole grain bread and skinless chicken. Fresh air cleanses and rejuvenates the body, so make sure to enjoy the outdoors and sleep with the window open. A good night’s sleep after a good work-out promotes the growth of muscles. What’s also important is a cheerful outlook and positive attitude, as the body can’t grow properly if exposed to too much stress and negativity.
What neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered about this well-known knowledge about what benefits physical development also applies equally to mental development: strenuous exercise, a nutritious diet, fresh air, a good night’s rest, and high self-esteem all help develop the brain’s memory, puzzle-solving, and cognitive functions. As David Linden’s The Accidental Mind and Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself document, we are half-nature and half-nurture, and our brains need external stimuli in order to develop properly. There’s no evidence that listening to Mozart while sleeping and visiting the Metropolitan Museum on Sundays will make a child more intelligent than his genes will permit, but there’s plenty of evidence that sitting a child in front of a TV in a smoke-filled dark room all day will retard his mental development.
So consider a typical day in the life of a Chinese high school student. He is locked in a sterile white room, being lectured to from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, when he is expected to do homework and memorize textbooks. He’ll usually go to bed around eleven, but if he’s ‘smart and hardworking’ enough to test into one of China’s elite high schools his ‘dedicated and responsible’ teachers will give him so much homework that he will collapse out of exhaustion at three in the morning. On weekends he’ll lock himself in his room and play ‘Counterstrike,’ but if his parents are ‘loving and enlightened’ then he’ll go to weekend mathematics and English classes to get that one or two percentage edge over his classmates. He has neither an appetite nor interest outside class; in class he doesn’t ask questions or stare outside the window (although he may be asleep), so focused and committed is he on making his parents, his teachers, and his country proud. After three years of this exacting regime his body will be frail and weak, and his mind will be exhausted and stunted. After he passes the national examination he’ll quickly forget everything he’s memorized, and he’ll spend his university days improving his ‘Counterstrike’ skills, which is his one and only passion.
He won’t know how to question and to think. He won’t know how to sustain an intelligent conversation or seek self-improvement. His head will be stuffed with trivial knowledge, and he won’t know how to send a polite and effective e-mail. He’ll be socially awkward, and have the maturity of a 12-year-old. But he’ll have passed the national examination and will have hopefully mastered ‘Counterstrike’ —and so when looking for work he’ll expect a lot of responsibility and a big pay cheque.
If all China’s national examination system did was make many Chinese students incompetent, then I guess that wouldn’t be so bad. There is, after all, a gifted and talented cohort of Chinese students, as multinationals and US graduate schools can attest to, who survive the system. But there’s in fact a much more fearsome problem with the national examination: it trains students to be utilitarian and unethical.
In his book Drive, Daniel Pink writes how countless psychological studies show that rewarding employees for results can be dangerous: this approach blinds them into short-term narrow goals (thus decreasing their creativity), encourages unethical behavior, and ultimately lowers their morale as well as commitment to their job. Mr. Pink compares this reward mechanism to a drug that will jolt workers into performing fast before ultimately depressing them and lowering their self-esteem.
In reading the book I thought that Mr. Pink could have been describing China’s education system. Effective parents and educators know that they shouldn't reward a child for his performance on tests, but rather should offer positive specific feedback for effort and attitude. But in China, all that matters are test scores, and students have been indoctrinated to see their point of pride, raison d’être, and even their identity as their test scores. That’s why Chinese students, contrary to popular perception, see learning as pointless, hate studying, and commonly cheat on tests.
China’s national examination system stunts the physical, emotional, and mental development of students, making them anti-social and ultimately unemployable. Moreover, because this system encourages individual competition in a zero sum game, it fosters unethical and short-sighted behavior among students, behavior that is an inherent instability in the system. But, as employment prospects for fresh university students grow dimmer and cheating becomes even more rampant, the system has only more grown more entrenched and stronger, to the point where elementary school children now must stay up until midnight to do homework.
How is this possible? I’ll cover that tomorrow.
This system has made Chinese students literate and knowledgeable, but it also has also too many times made them incompetent and stupid. Let me emphasize this: the people best known for their respect for education and love of knowledge have constructed an education system that makes Chinese students, the very same hardworking and brilliant students who dominate international mathematics competitions and science laboratories, incompetent and stupid.
Consider this analogy: the teenage body. How do we grow it to be fit and strong during the crucial years of puberty? A personal trainer would advise an exercise regime supplemented by good nutrition, fresh air, adequate sleep, and a positive attitude. The body needs to exert itself in order to develop properly, and a diverse and holistic, multi-functional and constant exercise regime is the most effective: a morning run, an afternoon game of tennis, and a long evening stroll. Also make sure to eat small but frequent meals of fruits and vegetables, whole grain bread and skinless chicken. Fresh air cleanses and rejuvenates the body, so make sure to enjoy the outdoors and sleep with the window open. A good night’s sleep after a good work-out promotes the growth of muscles. What’s also important is a cheerful outlook and positive attitude, as the body can’t grow properly if exposed to too much stress and negativity.
What neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered about this well-known knowledge about what benefits physical development also applies equally to mental development: strenuous exercise, a nutritious diet, fresh air, a good night’s rest, and high self-esteem all help develop the brain’s memory, puzzle-solving, and cognitive functions. As David Linden’s The Accidental Mind and Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself document, we are half-nature and half-nurture, and our brains need external stimuli in order to develop properly. There’s no evidence that listening to Mozart while sleeping and visiting the Metropolitan Museum on Sundays will make a child more intelligent than his genes will permit, but there’s plenty of evidence that sitting a child in front of a TV in a smoke-filled dark room all day will retard his mental development.
So consider a typical day in the life of a Chinese high school student. He is locked in a sterile white room, being lectured to from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, when he is expected to do homework and memorize textbooks. He’ll usually go to bed around eleven, but if he’s ‘smart and hardworking’ enough to test into one of China’s elite high schools his ‘dedicated and responsible’ teachers will give him so much homework that he will collapse out of exhaustion at three in the morning. On weekends he’ll lock himself in his room and play ‘Counterstrike,’ but if his parents are ‘loving and enlightened’ then he’ll go to weekend mathematics and English classes to get that one or two percentage edge over his classmates. He has neither an appetite nor interest outside class; in class he doesn’t ask questions or stare outside the window (although he may be asleep), so focused and committed is he on making his parents, his teachers, and his country proud. After three years of this exacting regime his body will be frail and weak, and his mind will be exhausted and stunted. After he passes the national examination he’ll quickly forget everything he’s memorized, and he’ll spend his university days improving his ‘Counterstrike’ skills, which is his one and only passion.
He won’t know how to question and to think. He won’t know how to sustain an intelligent conversation or seek self-improvement. His head will be stuffed with trivial knowledge, and he won’t know how to send a polite and effective e-mail. He’ll be socially awkward, and have the maturity of a 12-year-old. But he’ll have passed the national examination and will have hopefully mastered ‘Counterstrike’ —and so when looking for work he’ll expect a lot of responsibility and a big pay cheque.
If all China’s national examination system did was make many Chinese students incompetent, then I guess that wouldn’t be so bad. There is, after all, a gifted and talented cohort of Chinese students, as multinationals and US graduate schools can attest to, who survive the system. But there’s in fact a much more fearsome problem with the national examination: it trains students to be utilitarian and unethical.
In his book Drive, Daniel Pink writes how countless psychological studies show that rewarding employees for results can be dangerous: this approach blinds them into short-term narrow goals (thus decreasing their creativity), encourages unethical behavior, and ultimately lowers their morale as well as commitment to their job. Mr. Pink compares this reward mechanism to a drug that will jolt workers into performing fast before ultimately depressing them and lowering their self-esteem.
In reading the book I thought that Mr. Pink could have been describing China’s education system. Effective parents and educators know that they shouldn't reward a child for his performance on tests, but rather should offer positive specific feedback for effort and attitude. But in China, all that matters are test scores, and students have been indoctrinated to see their point of pride, raison d’être, and even their identity as their test scores. That’s why Chinese students, contrary to popular perception, see learning as pointless, hate studying, and commonly cheat on tests.
China’s national examination system stunts the physical, emotional, and mental development of students, making them anti-social and ultimately unemployable. Moreover, because this system encourages individual competition in a zero sum game, it fosters unethical and short-sighted behavior among students, behavior that is an inherent instability in the system. But, as employment prospects for fresh university students grow dimmer and cheating becomes even more rampant, the system has only more grown more entrenched and stronger, to the point where elementary school children now must stay up until midnight to do homework.
How is this possible? I’ll cover that tomorrow.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Head Teacher as Commissar (Diplomat)
A senior three classroom in an elite Chinese high school is like Wonderland in the Orwellian year of 1984. From seven in the morning until midnight, in a sterile and dim room, fifty students slump over and memorize the textbooks piled thickly on top of their desks. They look sullen and defeated, but rallying them are red banners, flying from the white dilapidated walls, with the slogans ‘Impossible is Nothing’ and ‘Fight Together in the War for Our Future.’ Above the front blackboard there’s a Chinese flag as well a countdown to the national examination in June: 155 days.
I’ve often talked to students in their final year of high school, and each time, even though everyone just repeats the same message, I still can’t believe my ears. I’m expecting them to tell me how depressed and angry they are, and how all this memorization is crushing and pointless. I’m expecting them to tell me they’d prefer a more sane, humane, and just system of selecting students for China’s top universities—like drawing names randomly out of a box. I’m expecting them to tell me how much they hate their parents and teachers for mutilating their individuality and creativity like this. I’m expecting them to tell me that they hate their classmates, and plan to poison their high-achieving roommate.
But that’s not what these students tell me. They all tell me that they’re happy and fulfilled, and find life meaningful and purposeful. They all tell me that the national examination is a rite of passage that builds character and will only make you stronger (if it doesn’t kill you). They all tell me it’s the love and devotion of their parents and teachers that’s driving them to be their best. And they all tell me (and by now I’m no longer sure where I am) that all the students love and support each other.
What’s memorable about these conversations is how much they invoke the language of war and love, and how everyone repeats the same message. Their eyes and their words exude faith and devotion: they’ve surrendered themselves to a higher inexplicable cause, and in return they don’t have to bear the agony of thought and the responsibility of choice. In other words, a senior three classroom sounds and feels like a cult, and at the head of this cult is the ‘banzhuren’ or ‘head teacher.’
In the organizational structure of a Chinese classroom the head teacher is responsible for 50 students’ study, behavior, and thought for three years. This organization is repeated from kindergarten to university, and from Beijing to Tibet. Back when the Communist Party was a revolutionary movement, a political commissar was responsible for the discipline and orthodoxy of each Party cell, and a ‘head teacher’ is basically the political commissar of a cell of 50 students. In Chinese high schools, having students study hard is not enough – correct thinking is the ultimate goal.
To that end, for all three years of high school, 50 students will play and study, eat and sleep together, all under the keen eye and strong hand of their head teacher. He is responsible for motivating these students to keep focus and memorize relentlessly, and he’s rewarded financially by parents, school administrators, and government officials if his cell does well or if one of the cell members does exceptionally well (for example, if his student is the top scorer in the city). That ultimately means somehow persuading teenagers that memorizing useless facts and propaganda are so important they must suppress their natural urges to play, to date, to ask questions, to disobey, to be independent, and to seek an individual identity.
That’s certainly no easy task, and a successful head teacher combines the realpolitik of Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ with the tactics of Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’. He’ll encourage mutual suspicion and animosity among his students so they’re incapable of co-operation and become dependent on his authority, but not so much as to harm the class’s unity of thought and purpose. He’ll arbitrarily change favourites and engage in random, inexplicable behavior to keep the students insecure and constantly seeking his approval. He’ll invoke the language of love and war in his passionate Monday morning speeches to his troops because teenagers are moody and extreme, and this language can most effectively arouse and manipulate them. Wrapped in this language of love and war every one of his actions is selfless and honourable: if he makes them do homework until three it’s because war demands sacrifice, and if he curses them it’s because he loves them so much it hurts. And if he’s effective the head teacher will achieve a miracle of contradictions in his classroom: an individuality and divergence of interest but conformity and convergence of thought. All thinking alike but incapable of co-operation, Chinese students can now be classified either as ‘selfish sheep’ or ‘individualistic drones.’
The ‘banzhuren’ has the fate of 50 students in his hands, and with great power and enormous responsibility in China comes profit and opportunity. All Chinese parents know that their child’s future depends on their relationship with his head teacher. There’s a ritualized, complicated courting process that involves lavish dinners, extravagant praise, large red envelopes, and endless favours. If parents aren’t successful in this courting then the head teacher may very well decide to ignore their child; their child might as well go through school with a dunce cap permanently on his head.
And this corruption is fine with school administrators because the main goal of pedagogy is orthodoxy, and that’s why the head teacher is the anchor and pivot of the Chinese education system. Without the head teacher, there would be no discipline and order, no conformity and obedience in Chinese schools: the relentless selfish amoral utilitarianism fostered by the national examination system would overwhelm the school system. But with the head teacher there can never be individuality and diversity, freedom and choice in Chinese schools. The head teacher is that stubborn dam that keeps both the chaos of individuality and hope of reform out of schools.
But what if a visionary educator came along, and decided that reform was so necessary in China that he had to smash open that dam? What if he actually eliminated the head teacher system so he could pursue his pedagogical ideals? In Communist China’s 60 years of educating Chinese students there has exactly been one administrator in one public high school that has attempted education reform: Principal Wang Zheng at Shenzhen Middle School. And when he opened that box the chaos of choice, the confusion of freedom, and the conflict of change were all unleashed.
I’ve often talked to students in their final year of high school, and each time, even though everyone just repeats the same message, I still can’t believe my ears. I’m expecting them to tell me how depressed and angry they are, and how all this memorization is crushing and pointless. I’m expecting them to tell me they’d prefer a more sane, humane, and just system of selecting students for China’s top universities—like drawing names randomly out of a box. I’m expecting them to tell me how much they hate their parents and teachers for mutilating their individuality and creativity like this. I’m expecting them to tell me that they hate their classmates, and plan to poison their high-achieving roommate.
But that’s not what these students tell me. They all tell me that they’re happy and fulfilled, and find life meaningful and purposeful. They all tell me that the national examination is a rite of passage that builds character and will only make you stronger (if it doesn’t kill you). They all tell me it’s the love and devotion of their parents and teachers that’s driving them to be their best. And they all tell me (and by now I’m no longer sure where I am) that all the students love and support each other.
What’s memorable about these conversations is how much they invoke the language of war and love, and how everyone repeats the same message. Their eyes and their words exude faith and devotion: they’ve surrendered themselves to a higher inexplicable cause, and in return they don’t have to bear the agony of thought and the responsibility of choice. In other words, a senior three classroom sounds and feels like a cult, and at the head of this cult is the ‘banzhuren’ or ‘head teacher.’
In the organizational structure of a Chinese classroom the head teacher is responsible for 50 students’ study, behavior, and thought for three years. This organization is repeated from kindergarten to university, and from Beijing to Tibet. Back when the Communist Party was a revolutionary movement, a political commissar was responsible for the discipline and orthodoxy of each Party cell, and a ‘head teacher’ is basically the political commissar of a cell of 50 students. In Chinese high schools, having students study hard is not enough – correct thinking is the ultimate goal.
To that end, for all three years of high school, 50 students will play and study, eat and sleep together, all under the keen eye and strong hand of their head teacher. He is responsible for motivating these students to keep focus and memorize relentlessly, and he’s rewarded financially by parents, school administrators, and government officials if his cell does well or if one of the cell members does exceptionally well (for example, if his student is the top scorer in the city). That ultimately means somehow persuading teenagers that memorizing useless facts and propaganda are so important they must suppress their natural urges to play, to date, to ask questions, to disobey, to be independent, and to seek an individual identity.
That’s certainly no easy task, and a successful head teacher combines the realpolitik of Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ with the tactics of Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’. He’ll encourage mutual suspicion and animosity among his students so they’re incapable of co-operation and become dependent on his authority, but not so much as to harm the class’s unity of thought and purpose. He’ll arbitrarily change favourites and engage in random, inexplicable behavior to keep the students insecure and constantly seeking his approval. He’ll invoke the language of love and war in his passionate Monday morning speeches to his troops because teenagers are moody and extreme, and this language can most effectively arouse and manipulate them. Wrapped in this language of love and war every one of his actions is selfless and honourable: if he makes them do homework until three it’s because war demands sacrifice, and if he curses them it’s because he loves them so much it hurts. And if he’s effective the head teacher will achieve a miracle of contradictions in his classroom: an individuality and divergence of interest but conformity and convergence of thought. All thinking alike but incapable of co-operation, Chinese students can now be classified either as ‘selfish sheep’ or ‘individualistic drones.’
The ‘banzhuren’ has the fate of 50 students in his hands, and with great power and enormous responsibility in China comes profit and opportunity. All Chinese parents know that their child’s future depends on their relationship with his head teacher. There’s a ritualized, complicated courting process that involves lavish dinners, extravagant praise, large red envelopes, and endless favours. If parents aren’t successful in this courting then the head teacher may very well decide to ignore their child; their child might as well go through school with a dunce cap permanently on his head.
And this corruption is fine with school administrators because the main goal of pedagogy is orthodoxy, and that’s why the head teacher is the anchor and pivot of the Chinese education system. Without the head teacher, there would be no discipline and order, no conformity and obedience in Chinese schools: the relentless selfish amoral utilitarianism fostered by the national examination system would overwhelm the school system. But with the head teacher there can never be individuality and diversity, freedom and choice in Chinese schools. The head teacher is that stubborn dam that keeps both the chaos of individuality and hope of reform out of schools.
But what if a visionary educator came along, and decided that reform was so necessary in China that he had to smash open that dam? What if he actually eliminated the head teacher system so he could pursue his pedagogical ideals? In Communist China’s 60 years of educating Chinese students there has exactly been one administrator in one public high school that has attempted education reform: Principal Wang Zheng at Shenzhen Middle School. And when he opened that box the chaos of choice, the confusion of freedom, and the conflict of change were all unleashed.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Education: Thinking Process (Diplomat)
As a Chinese public high school curriculum director, every day I have an organizational meeting with my Chinese staff, teach a class to my Chinese students, and then close the day with a curriculum meeting with my US faculty.
Last week I asked my Chinese staff to write two reports.
First, I wanted a marketing plan for our English summer programme. The week before, as my staff furiously took notes, I had outlined the parameters and goals, focus and direction of the programme. I then opened the floor to questions, comments, and suggestions, but my staff stayed reticent. After two days my staff handed me a report that was word for word what I had articulated that previous meeting.
I also asked my staff to report on the trend of Chinese students going abroad to US high schools, and I expected a bullet-point one-page summary of background information and facts. What I received was a thick disorganized booklet of Internet print-outs. There was neither an executive summary nor a table of contents, and I had to wade through information that was neither sourced nor cross-referenced.
When I went to my English class, my students turned in their homework, which was a re-writing of an essay into a five-paragraph essay. A couple of students did not put their names on their homework, and every one of the twelve had been careless and sloppy: grammar and spelling mistakes abounded, but so did simple punctuation and capitalization errors. Instead of teaching, I spent the class going through their grammar mistakes, only to discover that they knew these mistakes—they just didn’t check their work.
I ended the day with a curriculum meeting with my US faculty, four fresh-faced university graduates. For two months, we’d been teaching our students the five-paragraph essay, and I handed them some essay models. There were questions and discussion about direction and methodology, and after that they began marking the essays and planning their classes. After a semester together we had a smooth working pattern whereby I would set the parameters and goals, and they would cater the material to their individual teaching style and the needs and level of their students.
What I’ve just described is instantly recognizable to Western-educated managers in bi-cultural offices in Beijing, Tokyo, or Seoul. Yes, we all find our local staff honest and loyal, hardworking and responsible. But it seems that they constantly need supervision and micromanagement. It seems that if you give a Chinese a test to conquer or an assembly line task to master through repetition he’ll do fine. But in tasks that involve judgment and discretion he will be at a loss.
Western observers say that Chinese lack ‘independence and initiative’ and ‘critical thinking skills.’ Both are true, but another explanation is that Chinese don’t understand ‘process.’ In a society where students’ futures are determined by their ability to get the right answers quickly in three days of multiple-choice examinations, ‘process’ is in fact an alien concept.
In contrast, a Western curriculum emphasizes process over results. In science class, students conduct labs by asking a question, building a hypothesis, experimenting, observing, and drawing a conclusion. In English and history classes, students write a research paper by planning, researching, assessing and analyzing information, formulating a thesis, writing an outline, and editing drafts. Even in a mathematics examination, students are expected to show their work processes. Process is time-consuming and frustrating, and high school teachers and college professors drill it into us until it becomes force of habit.
That’s why my US faculty was able to work independently and effectively once I provided them with sufficient guidance. By giving them the first step (the essay models), the end goal (ensure students understand the structure of the five-paragraph essay), the means (read the essay line by line, and discuss relations among the constituent parts) they knew how to do the rest.
Not so with my Chinese staff. When I asked them to develop a marketing plan I asked them to do Internet searches on existing summer programmes, and to talk to our students and parents on how they sought and selected summer programmes. I would then expect them to compile a list of possible strategies, and do a cost analysis of each strategy. If they followed this process—asking questions, seeking multiple sources, and analyzing the information—then they would discover that the most effective marketing was constant messaging in Internet education chat rooms, while at the same time asking our students and parents to promote the program in their networks.
This was what I clarified to them in our next meeting, and I told them to construct a list of Internet chat rooms where we could promote the programme. I told them to study carefully as many chat rooms and Internet sites as possible. Because I had emphasized process over and over this time they provided me with a useful and relevant list of over two dozen Internet sites, ranked by popularity.
With my Chinese students I spent a week teaching them the process of editing. I divided them into two groups, and had each group correct a student’s five-paragraph essay. I then had the two groups correct each other’s corrections. I gave them an editing check-list, and made sure that these exceptionally hardworking and intelligent students slowly and methodically went through the check-list one:
1. Is my name on the homework?
2. Is my homework dated?
3. Is there a capitalized title?
4. Does the structure of the homework make sense and follow a logical order?
5. Does a topic sentence introduce each paragraph? Does the topic sentence summarize the paragraph?
6. Do I use the principles of balance and parallelism?
7. Do I use simple words and simple sentences?
8. Do I limit my use of adjectives?
9. Do I leave 5 spaces at the start of each paragraph?
10. Do I capitalize all my words at the start of each sentence?
11. Do I punctuate properly? Do I leave two spaces after a period, and one space after one comma?
12. Are there spelling mistakes? Do I use correct American spelling?
13. Are there grammar mistakes?
14. Do I maintain consistency of tenses?
For students used to rapid-fire 45-minute lectures, this exercise in the re-reading of a one-page essay searching for mistakes that may or may not be there seemed tiring and pointless. But in class I made them do it, hoping that through constant practice and emphasis they will develop the proper study habits – patience and discipline, precision and meticulousness – that will turn them into successful professionals in the global marketplace.
Process is, of course, only one part of the equation. There’s also co-operation and communication, and ultimately everything is mingled together. I’ll discuss co-operation and communication in detail, but in my next post I’d first like to introduce the pivot and anchor of China’s education system: the head teacher.
Last week I asked my Chinese staff to write two reports.
First, I wanted a marketing plan for our English summer programme. The week before, as my staff furiously took notes, I had outlined the parameters and goals, focus and direction of the programme. I then opened the floor to questions, comments, and suggestions, but my staff stayed reticent. After two days my staff handed me a report that was word for word what I had articulated that previous meeting.
I also asked my staff to report on the trend of Chinese students going abroad to US high schools, and I expected a bullet-point one-page summary of background information and facts. What I received was a thick disorganized booklet of Internet print-outs. There was neither an executive summary nor a table of contents, and I had to wade through information that was neither sourced nor cross-referenced.
When I went to my English class, my students turned in their homework, which was a re-writing of an essay into a five-paragraph essay. A couple of students did not put their names on their homework, and every one of the twelve had been careless and sloppy: grammar and spelling mistakes abounded, but so did simple punctuation and capitalization errors. Instead of teaching, I spent the class going through their grammar mistakes, only to discover that they knew these mistakes—they just didn’t check their work.
I ended the day with a curriculum meeting with my US faculty, four fresh-faced university graduates. For two months, we’d been teaching our students the five-paragraph essay, and I handed them some essay models. There were questions and discussion about direction and methodology, and after that they began marking the essays and planning their classes. After a semester together we had a smooth working pattern whereby I would set the parameters and goals, and they would cater the material to their individual teaching style and the needs and level of their students.
What I’ve just described is instantly recognizable to Western-educated managers in bi-cultural offices in Beijing, Tokyo, or Seoul. Yes, we all find our local staff honest and loyal, hardworking and responsible. But it seems that they constantly need supervision and micromanagement. It seems that if you give a Chinese a test to conquer or an assembly line task to master through repetition he’ll do fine. But in tasks that involve judgment and discretion he will be at a loss.
Western observers say that Chinese lack ‘independence and initiative’ and ‘critical thinking skills.’ Both are true, but another explanation is that Chinese don’t understand ‘process.’ In a society where students’ futures are determined by their ability to get the right answers quickly in three days of multiple-choice examinations, ‘process’ is in fact an alien concept.
In contrast, a Western curriculum emphasizes process over results. In science class, students conduct labs by asking a question, building a hypothesis, experimenting, observing, and drawing a conclusion. In English and history classes, students write a research paper by planning, researching, assessing and analyzing information, formulating a thesis, writing an outline, and editing drafts. Even in a mathematics examination, students are expected to show their work processes. Process is time-consuming and frustrating, and high school teachers and college professors drill it into us until it becomes force of habit.
That’s why my US faculty was able to work independently and effectively once I provided them with sufficient guidance. By giving them the first step (the essay models), the end goal (ensure students understand the structure of the five-paragraph essay), the means (read the essay line by line, and discuss relations among the constituent parts) they knew how to do the rest.
Not so with my Chinese staff. When I asked them to develop a marketing plan I asked them to do Internet searches on existing summer programmes, and to talk to our students and parents on how they sought and selected summer programmes. I would then expect them to compile a list of possible strategies, and do a cost analysis of each strategy. If they followed this process—asking questions, seeking multiple sources, and analyzing the information—then they would discover that the most effective marketing was constant messaging in Internet education chat rooms, while at the same time asking our students and parents to promote the program in their networks.
This was what I clarified to them in our next meeting, and I told them to construct a list of Internet chat rooms where we could promote the programme. I told them to study carefully as many chat rooms and Internet sites as possible. Because I had emphasized process over and over this time they provided me with a useful and relevant list of over two dozen Internet sites, ranked by popularity.
With my Chinese students I spent a week teaching them the process of editing. I divided them into two groups, and had each group correct a student’s five-paragraph essay. I then had the two groups correct each other’s corrections. I gave them an editing check-list, and made sure that these exceptionally hardworking and intelligent students slowly and methodically went through the check-list one:
1. Is my name on the homework?
2. Is my homework dated?
3. Is there a capitalized title?
4. Does the structure of the homework make sense and follow a logical order?
5. Does a topic sentence introduce each paragraph? Does the topic sentence summarize the paragraph?
6. Do I use the principles of balance and parallelism?
7. Do I use simple words and simple sentences?
8. Do I limit my use of adjectives?
9. Do I leave 5 spaces at the start of each paragraph?
10. Do I capitalize all my words at the start of each sentence?
11. Do I punctuate properly? Do I leave two spaces after a period, and one space after one comma?
12. Are there spelling mistakes? Do I use correct American spelling?
13. Are there grammar mistakes?
14. Do I maintain consistency of tenses?
For students used to rapid-fire 45-minute lectures, this exercise in the re-reading of a one-page essay searching for mistakes that may or may not be there seemed tiring and pointless. But in class I made them do it, hoping that through constant practice and emphasis they will develop the proper study habits – patience and discipline, precision and meticulousness – that will turn them into successful professionals in the global marketplace.
Process is, of course, only one part of the equation. There’s also co-operation and communication, and ultimately everything is mingled together. I’ll discuss co-operation and communication in detail, but in my next post I’d first like to introduce the pivot and anchor of China’s education system: the head teacher.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Education in China (Diplomat)
Following is the first in a weekly series on education in China by Jiang Xueqin, an administrator in a public progressive high school in China who specializes in education reform:
Everyone knows that the Chinese people are industrious and hardworking. So what if I were to say that Chinese workers are sloppy and careless? Everyone knows that Chinese students study hard and love knowledge. So what if I were to say Chinese students are lazy and anti-intellectual? Everyone knows that Chinese are logical and rational. So what if I were to say that Chinese are too emotional in their writing, and resort to demagoguery in their debating? Everyone knows that Chinese are conformist and obedient. So what if I were to say that Chinese are too individualistic and incapable of co-operation? Everyone knows that China’s economy is roaring, and China has engaged the world. So what if I were to say that China’s education system is hurting China’s economy and internationalization?
And what if I were to say that China’s much vaunted education system is actually making Chinese students stupid? Most people would think I was either strange or ignorant. But here’s an undeniable fact about life in China today: multinationals and Chinese entrepreneurs complain they can’t staff their operations, yet more than half of this year’s Chinese university graduates cannot find work.
In my experience, China is a land of contradictions and paradoxes, and my life is also one of contradictions and paradoxes. I grew up poor in Toronto, studied English at Yale College, reported on China’s poor for US media, and now educate the children of China’s elite.
In September 2008, Shenzhen Middle School, China’s most progressive public high school, hired me to establish a program for Chinese students who plan to enrol as undergraduates in US colleges and universities. I was formerly an English teacher in Beijing, formerly the China correspondent for the Washington-based Chronicle of Higher Education, and once made a documentary on minority schoolchildren called ‘Children of Blessing.’ But my main qualification, China being China, was that I was good friends with Wang Zheng, Principal of Shenzhen Middle School.
In my two years as international curriculum director I’ve learned a lot about East and West. I don’t want to suggest my perspective is the best or even an accurate one on China. But it’s a strange and interesting one. Every second of my life I struggle with the chaos and conflicts of East meeting West. I have a Chinese staff happy with taking orders and an US faculty determined to participate in decision-making. Our goal is to prepare Chinese students reared in a stifling and conformist, test-oriented and results-focused school for the open and free, diverse and individualistic culture of the US college campus. I thought that teaching English would be enough, but we’ve discovered that Chinese students need to learn a new culture, a new worldview, and a new attitude. I think and act like an American, but because I speak and look Chinese my superiors treat me like a Chinese–and that creates all sorts of chaos and confusion.
In this new blog I’d like to share my experiences and observations about China’s schools, and hope I can provide new insight to the countless number of Western businessmen, diplomats, journalists, scholars, and educators scratching their heads over China. I plan to discuss how China’s education system ignores process, which explains why Chinese students don’t put their name on their homework and also why Chinese professionals write such lame reports. I’d like to talk about China’s failure to focus on co-operation skills, and how that translates into psychological problems later in life. And I’ll also write about how China’s educators ignore developing communication skills, and how that hinders China’s ability to interface with the world.
Everyone knows that the Chinese people are industrious and hardworking. So what if I were to say that Chinese workers are sloppy and careless? Everyone knows that Chinese students study hard and love knowledge. So what if I were to say Chinese students are lazy and anti-intellectual? Everyone knows that Chinese are logical and rational. So what if I were to say that Chinese are too emotional in their writing, and resort to demagoguery in their debating? Everyone knows that Chinese are conformist and obedient. So what if I were to say that Chinese are too individualistic and incapable of co-operation? Everyone knows that China’s economy is roaring, and China has engaged the world. So what if I were to say that China’s education system is hurting China’s economy and internationalization?
And what if I were to say that China’s much vaunted education system is actually making Chinese students stupid? Most people would think I was either strange or ignorant. But here’s an undeniable fact about life in China today: multinationals and Chinese entrepreneurs complain they can’t staff their operations, yet more than half of this year’s Chinese university graduates cannot find work.
In my experience, China is a land of contradictions and paradoxes, and my life is also one of contradictions and paradoxes. I grew up poor in Toronto, studied English at Yale College, reported on China’s poor for US media, and now educate the children of China’s elite.
In September 2008, Shenzhen Middle School, China’s most progressive public high school, hired me to establish a program for Chinese students who plan to enrol as undergraduates in US colleges and universities. I was formerly an English teacher in Beijing, formerly the China correspondent for the Washington-based Chronicle of Higher Education, and once made a documentary on minority schoolchildren called ‘Children of Blessing.’ But my main qualification, China being China, was that I was good friends with Wang Zheng, Principal of Shenzhen Middle School.
In my two years as international curriculum director I’ve learned a lot about East and West. I don’t want to suggest my perspective is the best or even an accurate one on China. But it’s a strange and interesting one. Every second of my life I struggle with the chaos and conflicts of East meeting West. I have a Chinese staff happy with taking orders and an US faculty determined to participate in decision-making. Our goal is to prepare Chinese students reared in a stifling and conformist, test-oriented and results-focused school for the open and free, diverse and individualistic culture of the US college campus. I thought that teaching English would be enough, but we’ve discovered that Chinese students need to learn a new culture, a new worldview, and a new attitude. I think and act like an American, but because I speak and look Chinese my superiors treat me like a Chinese–and that creates all sorts of chaos and confusion.
In this new blog I’d like to share my experiences and observations about China’s schools, and hope I can provide new insight to the countless number of Western businessmen, diplomats, journalists, scholars, and educators scratching their heads over China. I plan to discuss how China’s education system ignores process, which explains why Chinese students don’t put their name on their homework and also why Chinese professionals write such lame reports. I’d like to talk about China’s failure to focus on co-operation skills, and how that translates into psychological problems later in life. And I’ll also write about how China’s educators ignore developing communication skills, and how that hinders China’s ability to interface with the world.
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