In September 2000, I visited Yunnan Province’s Muga township in the green hills along the China-Burma border. I spent a month there researching minority education in China, focusing on the Lahu tribe, considered one of China’s ‘losing’ minorities for their failure to assimilate into the Chinese mainstream. As a Western-educated, politically correct journalist, I had decided the Lahu had refused Han Chinese schooling to protect their cultural identity.
But wouldn’t the Lahu prefer a better life? After all, if they insisted on community coherence over economic progress, then their society could ultimately fail and die, as Jared Diamond pointed out in his book Collapse.
I spent the next four years researching the Lahu, eventually directing a documentary about them called ‘Children of Blessing.’ During my research, I discovered that the stubborn determination of the Lahu not to fit in—by failing school, by refusing to learn Chinese, and by secluding themselves with poverty and ignorance in the hills—was matched by an intense self-hatred of that sub-group of Lahu who had assimilated.
In the parlance of game theory, both Lahu groups were employing strategies to maximize their individual outcome. Those Lahu who failed to fit in sought to maximize their survival by maximizing their allies; they emphasized community to avoid being abandoned, and made it taboo to be ‘Chinese.’ (Lahu kids were pressured to fail in school.) Those Lahu who did fit in had to justify abandoning their community, and to swear their loyalty to the Han Chinese mainstream.
This anthropological/sociological phenomenon isn’t unique to the Lahu. In 2006, when I was a UN official in Kabul, school burnings were commonplace in Afghanistan. The media reported that the culprits were Taliban fanatics determined to stop the modernization of Afghanistan, but I wondered if it might be village conservatives who sought to keep their youth by keeping them illiterate and ignorant of the outside world. And after reading Zhou Yeran’s profile of his Chinese classmates, I couldn’t help but see the similarities between the Chinese and the minority they love to mock so much—the Lahu.
Zhou was responding to a New York Times article ‘The China Education Boom on US Campuses’ that glorifies Chinese students studying in the United States. Zhou Yeran wrote that the majority of Chinese students aren’t like those profiled in the Times, and ‘don’t join debate teams, don’t go partying every weekend, and most certainly don’t convert to Mormonism.’ In fact, many are ‘are troubled, isolated or sleep-deprived.’
Here is Zhou’s account of one classmate: ‘During his three years studying in America, (he) had never made a single American friend…He spends most of his spare time in the dorm room, playing Counter Strike, doing homework and reading Japanese manga.’
Zhou also tracked down a Chinese student interviewed by theTimes:
‘(She) refuses to hang out with her Chinese classmates. When being interviewed by the New York Times she explained why. “They can’t talk,” she is quoted to say, “They can’t communicate with American people.”
‘Her Chinese peers, furious after reading the article, left angry messages on Zhao’s homepage. Many called her a “traitor.” Hurt and depressed by the harsh criticism, Zhao went to her American friends for a shoulder to cry on. They comforted her and told her not to worry, “We are your real friends, not them.”’
You would almost see the sparks fly if you were to put the two in the same room. It’s likely that the Chinese who can’t fit in will return to China, where they’ll help fuel Chinese prejudices about the United States (Americans discriminate against Chinese). And the Chinese who can fit in will stay in the US, where they’ll help fuel US prejudices about China (Chinese can’t speak English). Instead of helping bridge the Sino-America divide, Chinese students studying in the United States may make things worse.
A decade ago, when I was a patriotic Chinese, I would think the United States was at fault for being so culturally domineering. But after four years of the Lahu I’ve had some second thoughts.
I respected the Lahu for protecting their cultural identity, but I also found them impossible: whenever I visited the Lahu offered angry stares, their dogs were allowed to bark at me, and the kids hid behind sheds. The Lahu community was coherent, but a result more of fear and inertia than of love and loyalty: people just gossiped, neighbours fought, and villages never lacked lazy drunks. I could see why any ambitious Lahu would try to get away.
At the end of the day, it’s the high-achieving, outward-looking Lahu who are the community’s best chance of a better life for all. But if the community helped these ambitious Lahu leave in the hope that they return, there’s a good risk of abandonment. The Lahu are trapped in ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’: Trust is necessary for the Lahu community to advance, yet any risk of betrayal is unacceptable (no matter how great the rewards of trust). And, in the United States, Chinese students are often so imprisoned by their fears and insecurities that they choose to attack people like Zhao rather than try to see any truth in her words.
The Lahu’s Chinese neighbours tell me that the Lahu are a dying culture because they’re an insular, xenophobic community where people try to keep each other down rather than help each other up. But, if I were to show them Zhou’s article, could they say that the Chinese are that much different?
Monday, December 20, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
What Shanghai's PISAs Really Say (Diplomat)
Last week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, with Shanghai 15-year olds outperforming their peers from Singapore, South Korea, and Finland by a considerable margin in math, science, and reading ability. The world’s reaction was a bit over-the-top, with one American in the New York Times comparing Shanghai’s PISA results to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik.
For many Chinese and Westerners in China, there were two, simultaneous reactions. First, with generous government funding, some of China’s best universities, a dominant middle class, and a progressive and cosmopolitan culture, Shanghai was lauded as having China’s best education system, but people also noted it couldn’t be considered representative of China as a whole. (Chinese like to say that Shanghai is closer to Europe than it is to Beijing.) The second reaction was: How did Shanghai cheat?
Shanghai could have selected its 5000 best students to take the test, or it could have gotten early access to the test questions and prepped its students. The local teachers who graded PISA could have been generous, or just reported inflated scores. There could have been translation issues as well. Yet the New York Times reporter Sam Dillon scoured the details for evidence of cheating, and this was the best he could find: ‘Shanghai students apparently were told the test was important for China’s image and thus were more motivated to do well.’
Okay, so Shanghai took the test seriously—that’s it?
But what if I were to say that Shanghai taking the test seriously could in fact explain why it did so well? In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out that there’s a direct correlation between the ability to take tasks seriously and high test scores:
‘When students sit down to take the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.’
Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It’s possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving maths problems.
As a teacher, I think 90 percent of teaching is getting students to focus, listen, and concentrate in class. And if you think that’s easy, it’s obvious you’ve never dealt with 15 year-olds, who no matter their nationality or culture must deal with the rampaging confusion of adolescence: the onslaught of sexual awareness and a fast-growing body, the early search for identity and meaning, and the demands of parents and teachers. So, considering all this, it’s quite a bureaucratic feat to get the world’s 15 year-olds to even sit down for a test administered by an organization they’ve never heard of, let alone to take PISA seriously enough to want to do well on it.
In my school, we had a couple of students who by mid-term were failing, but once we threatened to fail them (in China, no one fails) went overnight from the bottom of the class to near the top because they suddenly focused in class and did their homework.
And I believe that those 5000 Shanghai students were even more motivated than my two students because Chinese take international competitions and their image abroad as life-or-death matters. Chinese can simultaneously be xenophobic, and desperate for international recognition and praise. Remember the 2008 Beijing Games, and that scary, manic determination to win the most gold medals? It seems as though China constantly needs these international awards—Olympic gold medals and PISA high scores—as much as it needs 8 percent GDP growth and new skyscrapers to validate itself in its own eyes.
Is it possible that China’s bureaucratic obsession with international awards and praise is to divert people’s attention from real-life problems—China’s unsustainable asset bubbles, endemic corruption and crime, the unemployment rate for university graduates—that show that China is in fact a house of cards just waiting to come tumbling down?
For many Chinese and Westerners in China, there were two, simultaneous reactions. First, with generous government funding, some of China’s best universities, a dominant middle class, and a progressive and cosmopolitan culture, Shanghai was lauded as having China’s best education system, but people also noted it couldn’t be considered representative of China as a whole. (Chinese like to say that Shanghai is closer to Europe than it is to Beijing.) The second reaction was: How did Shanghai cheat?
Shanghai could have selected its 5000 best students to take the test, or it could have gotten early access to the test questions and prepped its students. The local teachers who graded PISA could have been generous, or just reported inflated scores. There could have been translation issues as well. Yet the New York Times reporter Sam Dillon scoured the details for evidence of cheating, and this was the best he could find: ‘Shanghai students apparently were told the test was important for China’s image and thus were more motivated to do well.’
Okay, so Shanghai took the test seriously—that’s it?
But what if I were to say that Shanghai taking the test seriously could in fact explain why it did so well? In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out that there’s a direct correlation between the ability to take tasks seriously and high test scores:
‘When students sit down to take the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.’
Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It’s possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving maths problems.
As a teacher, I think 90 percent of teaching is getting students to focus, listen, and concentrate in class. And if you think that’s easy, it’s obvious you’ve never dealt with 15 year-olds, who no matter their nationality or culture must deal with the rampaging confusion of adolescence: the onslaught of sexual awareness and a fast-growing body, the early search for identity and meaning, and the demands of parents and teachers. So, considering all this, it’s quite a bureaucratic feat to get the world’s 15 year-olds to even sit down for a test administered by an organization they’ve never heard of, let alone to take PISA seriously enough to want to do well on it.
In my school, we had a couple of students who by mid-term were failing, but once we threatened to fail them (in China, no one fails) went overnight from the bottom of the class to near the top because they suddenly focused in class and did their homework.
And I believe that those 5000 Shanghai students were even more motivated than my two students because Chinese take international competitions and their image abroad as life-or-death matters. Chinese can simultaneously be xenophobic, and desperate for international recognition and praise. Remember the 2008 Beijing Games, and that scary, manic determination to win the most gold medals? It seems as though China constantly needs these international awards—Olympic gold medals and PISA high scores—as much as it needs 8 percent GDP growth and new skyscrapers to validate itself in its own eyes.
Is it possible that China’s bureaucratic obsession with international awards and praise is to divert people’s attention from real-life problems—China’s unsustainable asset bubbles, endemic corruption and crime, the unemployment rate for university graduates—that show that China is in fact a house of cards just waiting to come tumbling down?
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail (Wall Street Journal)
It's ironic that just as the world is appreciating the strengths of China's education system, Chinese are waking up to its weaknesses. These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests. For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.
On Tuesday, Shanghai's 15-year-olds topped the global league tables in reading, science and math in the Program for International Student Assessment, a test run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This comes as no surprise to anyone working in Chinese schools.
With its demanding parents, ambitious students, and test-obsessed culture, China's K-9 schooling is probably the most rigorous in the world. And Shanghai, an open and cosmopolitan city that is boundlessly ambitious and fiercely competitive, has always been China's K-9 education leader.
So China has no problem producing mid-level accountants, computer programmers and technocrats. But what about the entrepreneurs and innovators needed to run a 21st century global economy? China's most promising students still must go abroad to develop their managerial drive and creativity, and there they have to unlearn the test-centric approach to knowledge that was drilled into them.
The failings of a rote-memorization system are well-known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning. Chinese students burn themselves out testing into university, where many of them spend their time playing World of Warcraft.
Both multinationals and Chinese companies have the same complaints about China's university graduates: They cannot work independently, lack the social skills to work in a team and are too arrogant to learn new skills. In 2005, the consulting firm McKinsey released a report saying that China's current education system will hinder its economic development.
But don't the PISA results at least show that China's K-9 education is the best in the world, and that standardized testing, as U.S. President Barack Obama seems to believe, is necessary to improve American schools?
Not really. According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake. Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.
Even Shanghai educators admit they're merely producing competent mediocrity. The OECD report states, "[T]he dictates of the examinations have left students with little time and room for learning on their own. 'There is an opportunity cost in terms of time and space,' said [one experienced Shanghai educator]. 'Students grow with narrow margins' and are not fully prepared for their lives and work in the future. This is seen as a deep crisis, exacerbated by the reality of single-child families."
A consensus is growing that instead of vaulting the country past the West, China's schools are holding it back. They equip everybody with the basic knowledge to be functional in a socialist economy. But now that China is a market economy hoping to compete globally, it's jealous of America's ability to turn its brightest students into the world's best scientists and businesspeople.
Reform is on the horizon. This year the Chinese government released a 10-year plan including greater experimentation. China Central Television's main evening news program recently reported on Peking University High School's curricular reforms to promote individuality and diversity.
As director of Peking University High School's government-approved International Division, an experimental program to prepare students for study in America, I've attended meetings where Beijing's top education officials endorsed importing Western curricula. Nevertheless, it's safe to say China won't challenge America's leadership in education anytime soon.
Shanghai's stellar results on PISA are a symptom of the problem. Tests are less relevant to concrete life and work skills than the ability to write a coherent essay, which requires being able to identify a problem, break it down to its constituent parts, analyze it from multiple angles and assemble a solution in a succinct manner to communicate across cultures and time. These "critical thinking" skills are what Chinese students need to learn if they are to become globally competitive.
So the first step of education reform is trying to teach students who are good test takers to be good essay writers. To write well in English, students need to understand concepts such as thesis and argument, structure and support, coherence and flow, tone and audience, diction and syntax—concepts that are barely introduced in Chinese schools. One way we'll know we're succeeding in changing China's schools is when those PISA scores come down.
On Tuesday, Shanghai's 15-year-olds topped the global league tables in reading, science and math in the Program for International Student Assessment, a test run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This comes as no surprise to anyone working in Chinese schools.
With its demanding parents, ambitious students, and test-obsessed culture, China's K-9 schooling is probably the most rigorous in the world. And Shanghai, an open and cosmopolitan city that is boundlessly ambitious and fiercely competitive, has always been China's K-9 education leader.
So China has no problem producing mid-level accountants, computer programmers and technocrats. But what about the entrepreneurs and innovators needed to run a 21st century global economy? China's most promising students still must go abroad to develop their managerial drive and creativity, and there they have to unlearn the test-centric approach to knowledge that was drilled into them.
The failings of a rote-memorization system are well-known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning. Chinese students burn themselves out testing into university, where many of them spend their time playing World of Warcraft.
Both multinationals and Chinese companies have the same complaints about China's university graduates: They cannot work independently, lack the social skills to work in a team and are too arrogant to learn new skills. In 2005, the consulting firm McKinsey released a report saying that China's current education system will hinder its economic development.
But don't the PISA results at least show that China's K-9 education is the best in the world, and that standardized testing, as U.S. President Barack Obama seems to believe, is necessary to improve American schools?
Not really. According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake. Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.
Even Shanghai educators admit they're merely producing competent mediocrity. The OECD report states, "[T]he dictates of the examinations have left students with little time and room for learning on their own. 'There is an opportunity cost in terms of time and space,' said [one experienced Shanghai educator]. 'Students grow with narrow margins' and are not fully prepared for their lives and work in the future. This is seen as a deep crisis, exacerbated by the reality of single-child families."
A consensus is growing that instead of vaulting the country past the West, China's schools are holding it back. They equip everybody with the basic knowledge to be functional in a socialist economy. But now that China is a market economy hoping to compete globally, it's jealous of America's ability to turn its brightest students into the world's best scientists and businesspeople.
Reform is on the horizon. This year the Chinese government released a 10-year plan including greater experimentation. China Central Television's main evening news program recently reported on Peking University High School's curricular reforms to promote individuality and diversity.
As director of Peking University High School's government-approved International Division, an experimental program to prepare students for study in America, I've attended meetings where Beijing's top education officials endorsed importing Western curricula. Nevertheless, it's safe to say China won't challenge America's leadership in education anytime soon.
Shanghai's stellar results on PISA are a symptom of the problem. Tests are less relevant to concrete life and work skills than the ability to write a coherent essay, which requires being able to identify a problem, break it down to its constituent parts, analyze it from multiple angles and assemble a solution in a succinct manner to communicate across cultures and time. These "critical thinking" skills are what Chinese students need to learn if they are to become globally competitive.
So the first step of education reform is trying to teach students who are good test takers to be good essay writers. To write well in English, students need to understand concepts such as thesis and argument, structure and support, coherence and flow, tone and audience, diction and syntax—concepts that are barely introduced in Chinese schools. One way we'll know we're succeeding in changing China's schools is when those PISA scores come down.
China's Future? In the Provinces (Diplomat)
I’ve been working in Beijing, China’s education and cultural centre, for six months now, and with each passing day I grow more nostalgic for Shenzhen, where the idea of culture is foot massage parlours. It’s easy for Beijingers to make fun of uncouth and uncultured, utilitarian and money-grabbing Shenzhen entrepreneurs, but in my two years in Shenzhen I had grown to love it for its openness, boldness, and progressiveness as much as for its good food, warm weather, and clean air.
Here’s what I know about Shenzhen. It’s the only place in China where someone can get generous funding and political support to reform the Chinese secondary school system. It wants to build a university called the Southern Institute of Science and Technology, and have Western administrators and professors run it. And it has ambitious plans to make Shenzhen the IT and innovation capital of China by educating effectively its citizenry (which means in the near future constructing more universities and sending students abroad on government scholarships). Shenzhen is China’s educational future, and it’s because Shenzhen is filled with uncouth and uncultured, utilitarian and money-grabbing entrepreneurs.
Let me explain why entrepreneurs with little education represent China’s best hope for education reform. First, entrepreneurs have a market mindset (as opposed to the bureaucratic mindset common in Beijing) so they care about what works, and it’s clear to them that the Chinese education system doesn’t work. Second,and more important, because Shenzhen is not well-known for its schools, it can build anew as it has little entrenched and vested interests opposed to experimentation and reform; as everyone knows, it’s cheaper, easier, and faster to build on virgin territory than to transform an existing city. Shenzhen, as a city with much immigration and little history, has no prejudices and endless ambitions.
It’s also important to understand thecrucial difference between a bureaucratic and a market mindset, and how it relates to education reform. In Beijing, parents tend to fall into one of three categories: government official, professor, or white-collar professional. If you think about it, government departments, universities, large Chinese enterprises, and multinationals are all bureaucracies where people rise based on their ability to accumulate credentials (getting advanced diplomas) and to cultivate patronage and guanxi (having a network of classmates in powerful positions). That’s why Beijing parents are so obsessed with getting their child into Peking and Tsinghua universities, and failing that into a top 50 USuniversity. That’s also why they care more about SAT and TOEFL scores (which will help their child get into a top American university) than about their child’s reading and writing ability (which will ensure that their child can handle the academic rigour of a top American university).
Running counter to the bureaucratic mindset is the market mindset, which has been nurtured in a highly competitive environment where one is awarded for ability, hard work, and performance. While I was in Shenzhen, I started the Foundation programme to educate junior high school students to become global citizens. I wanted the Foundation students to learn co-operation, communication, and critical thinking skills, but what I really did was put students into a room by themselves, gave them good teachers and a lot of English books, and expect them to learn to study by themselves without the pressure of grades and tests.
This is coincidentally a Chinese parent’s worst nightmare, and there was genuine concern that no one would come. I always imagined that it would be idealistic intellectuals interested in progressive education, but every one of the Foundation parents was a rags-to-riches entrepreneur who wanted their child to develop skills that would allow them to navigate and thrive in the global economy. More important, as managers concerned with results and performance, they’re looking first and foremost for competent workers, and so they know much to their chagrin the deficiencies of China’s education system (which has recently been discussed in-depth in the New York Times). Above all, what drives them is self-interest, not idealism: as entrepreneurs, they know for themselves first-hand that co-operation, communication, and critical thinking skills translate into cold hard cash in the global economy. (The Foundation parents were so happy with their child’s progress that they sent their students to study with me in Beijing when I moved up there.)
But, more importantly, the Foundation parents don’t presume to know how to educate their child, and so are willing to experiment and to listen with an open mind. This ismuch less often the casein Beijing, where there’s muchintellectual snobbery, and where there’s a mindset that if you don’t have at least twenty diplomas you’re not qualified to discuss education. Cementing the status quo are all the schools and education institutes thatsurvive on pride, prejudice, and inertia rather than thrive on openness, progressiveness, and innovation.
In the education world, Beijing is an old man sitting on his throne, high in the clouds, desperately demanding that the world stop turning. Far below the clouds is the clumsy youth whois Shenzhen, who learns to see by bumping into things and then changing direction, who learns to walk by falling down and getting up again, and who is forever moving forward because there’s nothing holding him back.
With its market mindset and humility, Shenzhen will boldly experiment, make mistakes, admit its mistakes, and then try again in the endless pursuit of whatever works. And that is why Shenzhen – and not Beijing – represents China’s educational future.
Here’s what I know about Shenzhen. It’s the only place in China where someone can get generous funding and political support to reform the Chinese secondary school system. It wants to build a university called the Southern Institute of Science and Technology, and have Western administrators and professors run it. And it has ambitious plans to make Shenzhen the IT and innovation capital of China by educating effectively its citizenry (which means in the near future constructing more universities and sending students abroad on government scholarships). Shenzhen is China’s educational future, and it’s because Shenzhen is filled with uncouth and uncultured, utilitarian and money-grabbing entrepreneurs.
Let me explain why entrepreneurs with little education represent China’s best hope for education reform. First, entrepreneurs have a market mindset (as opposed to the bureaucratic mindset common in Beijing) so they care about what works, and it’s clear to them that the Chinese education system doesn’t work. Second,and more important, because Shenzhen is not well-known for its schools, it can build anew as it has little entrenched and vested interests opposed to experimentation and reform; as everyone knows, it’s cheaper, easier, and faster to build on virgin territory than to transform an existing city. Shenzhen, as a city with much immigration and little history, has no prejudices and endless ambitions.
It’s also important to understand thecrucial difference between a bureaucratic and a market mindset, and how it relates to education reform. In Beijing, parents tend to fall into one of three categories: government official, professor, or white-collar professional. If you think about it, government departments, universities, large Chinese enterprises, and multinationals are all bureaucracies where people rise based on their ability to accumulate credentials (getting advanced diplomas) and to cultivate patronage and guanxi (having a network of classmates in powerful positions). That’s why Beijing parents are so obsessed with getting their child into Peking and Tsinghua universities, and failing that into a top 50 USuniversity. That’s also why they care more about SAT and TOEFL scores (which will help their child get into a top American university) than about their child’s reading and writing ability (which will ensure that their child can handle the academic rigour of a top American university).
Running counter to the bureaucratic mindset is the market mindset, which has been nurtured in a highly competitive environment where one is awarded for ability, hard work, and performance. While I was in Shenzhen, I started the Foundation programme to educate junior high school students to become global citizens. I wanted the Foundation students to learn co-operation, communication, and critical thinking skills, but what I really did was put students into a room by themselves, gave them good teachers and a lot of English books, and expect them to learn to study by themselves without the pressure of grades and tests.
This is coincidentally a Chinese parent’s worst nightmare, and there was genuine concern that no one would come. I always imagined that it would be idealistic intellectuals interested in progressive education, but every one of the Foundation parents was a rags-to-riches entrepreneur who wanted their child to develop skills that would allow them to navigate and thrive in the global economy. More important, as managers concerned with results and performance, they’re looking first and foremost for competent workers, and so they know much to their chagrin the deficiencies of China’s education system (which has recently been discussed in-depth in the New York Times). Above all, what drives them is self-interest, not idealism: as entrepreneurs, they know for themselves first-hand that co-operation, communication, and critical thinking skills translate into cold hard cash in the global economy. (The Foundation parents were so happy with their child’s progress that they sent their students to study with me in Beijing when I moved up there.)
But, more importantly, the Foundation parents don’t presume to know how to educate their child, and so are willing to experiment and to listen with an open mind. This ismuch less often the casein Beijing, where there’s muchintellectual snobbery, and where there’s a mindset that if you don’t have at least twenty diplomas you’re not qualified to discuss education. Cementing the status quo are all the schools and education institutes thatsurvive on pride, prejudice, and inertia rather than thrive on openness, progressiveness, and innovation.
In the education world, Beijing is an old man sitting on his throne, high in the clouds, desperately demanding that the world stop turning. Far below the clouds is the clumsy youth whois Shenzhen, who learns to see by bumping into things and then changing direction, who learns to walk by falling down and getting up again, and who is forever moving forward because there’s nothing holding him back.
With its market mindset and humility, Shenzhen will boldly experiment, make mistakes, admit its mistakes, and then try again in the endless pursuit of whatever works. And that is why Shenzhen – and not Beijing – represents China’s educational future.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Swallowing Reform Whole (Diplomat)
Last month I reported on how the Beijing education committee was encouraging its schools to build international divisions to help students study abroad. A couple of weeks later there was a follow-up, higher level meeting where they provided a specific reason why: ‘technology’ transfer. During the more than three hour meeting, Beijing’s top principals and government officials remarked on how international divisions benefited curriculum development and reform in schools by bringing in Western teachers and expertise.
Hearing this, you’d think that this was a meeting of progressive educators with a global mindset. Sadly, I couldn’t help but detect a nationalistic and xenophobic undertone to all of it. The Beijing principals proudly noted, for example, how Westerners were relegated to minor administrative posts (‘academic director’), and how they’d been taught to respect Chinese culture. ‘We are in control,’ one principal noted proudly.
Leaders from the Beijing education committee nodded approvingly, saying that Beijing’s top high schools should ‘swallow, digest, and absorb’ what’s useful and desirable from the Western curriculum in order to produce ‘globally competitive Chinese citizens’ (as distinct from ‘global citizens’). The principals also noted proudly how they were using international divisions to train their Chinese teachers on how to implement and manage a Western-style curriculum.
It seemed to me that Beijing’s top education officials saw public school international divisions as a conduit for technology transfer. It seemed these education ‘reformers’ had decided that building globally competitive high schools was as easy as creating ‘authentic’ Italian pizza parlours: You build the pizza parlours, invite Italians to make pizza as Chinese look on, adapt the pizza for Chinese tastes, and finally, as the coup de grace, kick all the Italians out of the country.
Of course, it’s a positive step forward to have Beijing’s top education officials promote education reform. But they seemed to have little sense of what education means, and no sense at all of what reform entails.
A system, especially one as calcified as the Beijing public school system, can only ‘swallow, digest, and absorb’ the familiar. A digestive tract will repel the unfamiliar, anything that could potentially shock or challenge the system. But it’s only by stomaching that initial pain and trauma that the new actually becomes familiar. China, on the other hand, doesn’t plan to adapt to what is new—it expects the new to adapt to China.
‘We’re encouraging reform and experimentation in public school international divisions’, Beijing’s top education officials seemed to be saying at the meeting, ‘but only if we maintain complete control, no mistakes are made, and the results are exactly what we anticipate’.
But change by its nature is shocking and traumatic, and the results of reform unpredictable and uncontrollable. I’ve written before about a radical education experiment that caused, to continue the digestive analogy, the school to vomit and spit out blood. But while things got out of control and mistakes were made, the experience taught students like Zhou Yeran to excel in the United States by not fearing failure.
The trauma from the Shenzhen experiment also shocked the management team into being a more cohesive unit that was able to quickly build a strong study abroad programme.
If it’s to truly become ‘globally competitive’ and reform education, China needs to swallow the new whole, and learn bear that initial pain and shock to its system. And it needs to let in not only Western teachers and curriculum, but Western schools and management. China’s best students may flock to these Western schools, but this shock to China’s education system can also shock its schools into being better.
China’s public high schools will only learn from the West if they learn to trust and empower Westerners instead of just putting them on display. If China is to engage the world, it must first learn to welcome it. Until then, Chinese students will have to just look forward to pizza drowned in sweet corn and mayonnaise.
Hearing this, you’d think that this was a meeting of progressive educators with a global mindset. Sadly, I couldn’t help but detect a nationalistic and xenophobic undertone to all of it. The Beijing principals proudly noted, for example, how Westerners were relegated to minor administrative posts (‘academic director’), and how they’d been taught to respect Chinese culture. ‘We are in control,’ one principal noted proudly.
Leaders from the Beijing education committee nodded approvingly, saying that Beijing’s top high schools should ‘swallow, digest, and absorb’ what’s useful and desirable from the Western curriculum in order to produce ‘globally competitive Chinese citizens’ (as distinct from ‘global citizens’). The principals also noted proudly how they were using international divisions to train their Chinese teachers on how to implement and manage a Western-style curriculum.
It seemed to me that Beijing’s top education officials saw public school international divisions as a conduit for technology transfer. It seemed these education ‘reformers’ had decided that building globally competitive high schools was as easy as creating ‘authentic’ Italian pizza parlours: You build the pizza parlours, invite Italians to make pizza as Chinese look on, adapt the pizza for Chinese tastes, and finally, as the coup de grace, kick all the Italians out of the country.
Of course, it’s a positive step forward to have Beijing’s top education officials promote education reform. But they seemed to have little sense of what education means, and no sense at all of what reform entails.
A system, especially one as calcified as the Beijing public school system, can only ‘swallow, digest, and absorb’ the familiar. A digestive tract will repel the unfamiliar, anything that could potentially shock or challenge the system. But it’s only by stomaching that initial pain and trauma that the new actually becomes familiar. China, on the other hand, doesn’t plan to adapt to what is new—it expects the new to adapt to China.
‘We’re encouraging reform and experimentation in public school international divisions’, Beijing’s top education officials seemed to be saying at the meeting, ‘but only if we maintain complete control, no mistakes are made, and the results are exactly what we anticipate’.
But change by its nature is shocking and traumatic, and the results of reform unpredictable and uncontrollable. I’ve written before about a radical education experiment that caused, to continue the digestive analogy, the school to vomit and spit out blood. But while things got out of control and mistakes were made, the experience taught students like Zhou Yeran to excel in the United States by not fearing failure.
The trauma from the Shenzhen experiment also shocked the management team into being a more cohesive unit that was able to quickly build a strong study abroad programme.
If it’s to truly become ‘globally competitive’ and reform education, China needs to swallow the new whole, and learn bear that initial pain and shock to its system. And it needs to let in not only Western teachers and curriculum, but Western schools and management. China’s best students may flock to these Western schools, but this shock to China’s education system can also shock its schools into being better.
China’s public high schools will only learn from the West if they learn to trust and empower Westerners instead of just putting them on display. If China is to engage the world, it must first learn to welcome it. Until then, Chinese students will have to just look forward to pizza drowned in sweet corn and mayonnaise.
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