NGO Illusions We Want to Believe (Diplomat)

With his international best-sellers Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson ascended to the peak of the NGO world. The books detail the mountain climber’s experience in building and expanding his charity, the Central Asia Institute, which builds schools for girls in remote and desperately poor regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Both books illuminate how an American – with the right mix of tenacity, cultural sensitivity, and political deft – can surmount the physical and cultural barriers of Pakistan and Afghanistan to effect positive change. Mortenson’s inspirational tales have become required reading for American schoolchildren who donate their lunch change to Afghan schoolgirls, and US soldiers deployed to fight the Taliban.

So tens of thousands of Mortenson’s fans, including myself, were left speechless when the writer Jon Krakauer, an early backer of Mortenson’s CAI, and the TV news magazine 60 Minutes suggested that Greg Mortenson fabricated certain aspects of his book and had CAI fund his book tours.

Megalomania, deception, and fraud are permanent features of both the publishing and development industries. Non-fiction is often the most fictional genre published by New York, and who could ever forget when Oprah Winfrey confronted James Frey on national TV over his memoir A Million Little Pieces, a book that she had previously promoted on her show? In 2006, as a Kabul-based United Nations public information officer, I interviewed a local Afghan who had founded an NGO to train local journalists. He was so young (only in his mid-twenties), so charismatic (he seemed in rapture when he talked about how he empowered his countrymen with the truth), and so patriotic (having been born and grown up in a devastated land, he was determined to re-build it), I thought it rude to ask the question I had wanted to ask the moment I stepped into his office: why is your personal office so big?

As development experts kept on telling me, NGO founders aren’t managers attuned to costs, but visionaries who inspire against hopelessness (the dictionary definition of both Pakistan and Afghanistan). Yes, training journalists and building schools seemed futile to some given the magnitude of Afghanistan’s problems – the ethnic divisions, the religious fanaticism, the impotence and corruption of government authority, the warlord-controlled drug trade and parliament, the abysmal poverty and tribal ignorance, the dearth of water and trees – but you have to start somewhere. In fact, the problems in Afghanistan were so overwhelming and disheartening that I found it took both extreme personal conviction and deception for anyone to even want to attempt to change anything there. (I left Afghanistan after six months.)

In their desire to maintain their own faith, as well as inspire others, NGO founders will sometimes play loose with the facts as well as with finances. Greg Mortenson is probably the world’s most famous development worker in an industry plagued by fraud and corruption, as well as interpersonal rivalry and jealousy. Why pick on one man when we’re unwilling to accept that the United Nations, the Red Cross, and most of the entire NGO and development world are self-serving fictions designed to make us drop pennies in a fountain? And if Mortenson lied to attract more readers, isn’t 60 Minutes exposing the lies in part in its quest for viewers?

When Oprah Winfrey confronted James Frey on her show, it was likely less about defending the truth than it was protecting her personal brand. And James Frey went willing to the tongue-lashing because he knew that it would increase his book sales (which it did).

I liked Greg Mortenson’s books, and plan to make Three Cups of Tea required reading for my Chinese students. I didn’t believe certain parts of the book, and really didn’t care for his project of building schools in Pakistan (it reminds me too much of China’s Hope Project, a notoriously corrupt and inept government-sanctioned charity to build schools in areas where children don’t have enough to eat). But I was inspired by his personal story, how mountain-climbing had endowed him with the virtues of patience and persistence, inner strength and faith – virtues that would make it possible for him to transform himself from a part-time nurse who lived in his car into one of the world’s most famous and successful social entrepreneurs.

Whatever the deception, I would still rather my students know this story of personal faith and triumph and not dwell on the corruption in all of us (and the apparent hopelessness of any country that ends with ‘-stan.’)

A book – in fact any piece of writing – is an act of deception and fraud. Writers pick memories out of context, and assemble it into a new narrative. Even if the memories were all objective and factual (which is impossible because our memories are coloured by our values and beliefs), the writer still deliberately assumes a false persona (‘the voice’) with which to create an intimate bond with anonymous readers.

In the end, we don’t admire writers for their ability to capture and present facts, but for their ability to weave a tapestry that reveals the human condition more beautifully, powerfully, and truthfully than a photograph.

And this is something that best-selling writer Jon Krakauer and the hugely successful producers of 60 Minutes should know more than anyone else.

The Games Adults Play (Diplomat)

One-third into the spring semester, and here at Peking University High School International Division we’ve held another teacher-parent conference. Last time around it was quite the disturbing drama. But at the latest conference, all the parents said their child had improved greatly: they now spent weekends reading English books rather than online. But there was just one problem: the students’ grades were too low, averaging around 60 percent.

One father, a lawyer, told me he supported maintaining these high standards, but wondered how such low grades would get his son into an American university. Another complained that despite his son’s English being better than his former classmates’, his grades were still lower.

The hard thing for people to see sometimes is that these high standards are keeping students taking notes in class, while the high-grade-but-lower-standards classes frequently see kids playing video games during lesson time.

Two days after the latest conference, I attended an international education ‘salon’ hosted by a Beijing newspaper. For three hours, a dozen Chinese private school principals waxed eloquently on pedagogy and education goals, and complained how gongli or ‘utilitarian’ parents were: parents just wanted the school to get their child into a top 100 American university, and didn’t care at all about their child’s development as a person. They talked a good game, but unfortunately, from what I’ve heard, their schools were no better than test-taking centres designed to send lazy kids to the States.

When I started in study abroad education three years ago, I naively hoped that US colleges and universities would help save the Chinese from themselves, but I soon saw that some American colleges and universities played a hypocritical game of their own. Rather than focus on education, more than a few US colleges and universities simply obsess over their US News & World Report ranking, which has tremendous financial implications. To break into the top 100 would mean applications from China instead of none at all, and to break into the top 50 would mean thousands of applications instead of hundreds.

The obsession with US News & World Report rankings translates into an obsession with numbers and statistics. Never before has there been such widespread contempt of the SAT, but never before has it mattered so much. Not only are many American colleges and universities pouring resources into increasing their application rates (‘selectivity’), they’re also using early admissions and partnering with favoured high schools to win over students (‘yield’). This obsession with statistics and rankings has led to an epidemic of grade inflation in American education so that an ‘A’ really is for effort. The upshot is that young American graduates expect to be the next Mark Zuckerberg if they work hard, and to be well-paid and well-treated if they choose to work at all.

I once thought that US college admissions promised an alternative to China’s national examination system, but now I wonder if American college admissions is just another numbers game that can be cheated. Chinese schools that fake transcripts, send their students to language schools for SAT and TOEFL classes, and subcontract to ‘consultants’ to write a student’s resume and application essays are merely playing a hypocritical game that US private and competitive public high schools have perfected with their grade inflation, Advanced Placement curriculum, and guidance office.

And as I’ve said before, many Chinese parents don’t seem to care that schools here are more interested in getting students into a US university than giving them a rounded education. Many rich Chinese spend much of their wealth on luxury apartments, luxury cars, and study abroad for their child, and I’ve discovered to my chagrin that in sending their child to Peking High International they think they’ve bought a BMW, with early April 2013 as a delivery date.

All this means that in the hypocritical game that many US universities, Chinese parents, and schools play, the real and only losers are students. In a meeting with students after the parent-teacher conference, I asked our students if they felt happy and free here, if they were learning as students and developing as individuals. Despite the low grades, every student answered in the affirmative.

Up to now, the students have been sheltered and protected, and in having no control of their life they never developed the desire to improve it. Now they can be free to succeed or to fail on their own, and that’s both empowering and terrifying.
And this is perhaps what really unnerves parents: that the most expensive luxury item they’ve invested in could one day be free to be happy without them.

Rock Climbing to Success (Diplomat)

For the past three years I’ve been working in Chinese education, and I’ve constantly mulled over two questions. First, what are the characteristics that make a successful student and person? Second, can the qualities of a successful student be taught?

Based on extensive reading and personal experience and observation, I’m confident that it’s the three related characteristics of patience, focus, and discipline that separate the best students from everyone else. The second question is much more confounding.

Over the past two years, we’ve tried a variety of experiments to instill patience, focus, and discipline in all our students. We’ve tried meditation and yoga (the students fall asleep in class). We’ve tried teaching them Texas Hold’em poker (the students don’t mind losing their parents’ money, and I don’t mind winning it from them). We’ve hired professional personal trainers to work with our students (the girls fake injuries to cut class), and built a kitchen to prepare healthy meals for our students (that still doesn’t stop them from gorging on ramen noodles).

There’s always the real and disturbing possibility that patience, focus, and discipline are genetic traits, and just can’t be taught. But if that’s the case, then schools are nothing more than, at best, glorified daycare centres and, at worst, juvenile detention centers.

I obviously don’t believe that these three traits are genetic because otherwise I wouldn’t be working in education today. But I am starting to grow frustrated.

For the past month, we’ve been pestering our students to meticulously read and re-read English essays, underlining words they don’t know and looking them up in the dictionary. We teach them that by focusing on every word while reading they will better comprehend the text as well as increase their overall English ability. Again, only our best students have the patience, focus, and discipline to complete the homework, and thus their English improvement has been by far the fastest.

In class, after again haranguing my students for failing to do their homework properly, I often wonder aloud why they have problems with patience, focus, and discipline. Is it because they’ve been educated in a test-oriented system that favours speed and memorization and regurgitation above everything else? Is it because they spend so much time indoors playing videogames and surfing the Internet? Is it because we live in an age of ‘multi-tasking,’ a myth that the brain can simultaneously focus on two or more activities when it just can’t?

Yes, it’s true that most teenagers are impatient, unfocused, and undisciplined, and it certainly doesn’t help matters that video games, the Internet, and fast food industries now profit from encouraging teenagers’ base instinct of instant gratification.

So if it’s the world the teenagers live in that’s the problem, then the world around them must be changed. Or at least for two weeks. That’s why we’re now promoting outdoor education activities. This July our students will hike for one week in Massachusetts, and canoe for another in Maine. Both of these activities are mandatory for graduation, and they will mark the start of a long-term project to use nature and outdoor activities to instill patience, focus, and discipline in our students.

Last week, I traveled to Yangshuo, Guangxi Province to learn to rock climb. Rock climbers are, if anything, patient, focused, and disciplined because they can die if they’re not. (Rock climbing is actually very safe – safer than drinking Chinese milk, anyway.)

The entire process of rock climbing – from checking the ropes and equipment to maneuvering up the rock to floating down from the top – is one slow graceful continuous movement that some have compared to ballet. The fear provoked by rock climbing focuses the mind on the moment. Discipline is the key to unlocking the intricate physical puzzle that is the rock: you must control your fear, and understand and work with your body. I’ve always admired rock climbers’ confidence, serenity, and grace, and it’s my theory that it’s developing good rock climbing habits that instills these qualities in them.

What I like best about rock climbing, from an education perspective, is that it’s a contained, defined goal where students just can’t cheat or slack off: they have to be patient, focused, and disciplined in order to get to the top. And learning to conquer their immediate, pounding fears will be a great achievement, awakening them to the full potential of their mind and empowering them with the confidence to undertake greater challenges (like read Anna Karenina).

Or at least that’s the theory. We just won’t know until we’ve tried it. That’s why we’re currently planning a one-week rock climbing course in Yangshuo, Guangxi – a mandatory course required for graduation.

I’ll keep you posted as to what happens.

The Decline of American Education (Diplomat)

For the past year now, I’ve pretty relentlessly criticized China’s education system. Doing so is easy and, I admit a little fun sometimes. Unfortunately, recently, I’ve been reading about an Asian-American woman who has made me think that perhaps China and the United States aren’t as different as I had naively hoped. Amy Chua may get her own movie and talk show one day, but it’s really Michelle Rhee who’s become the face of the future of US education.

A recent USA Today investigation revealed what appears to be significant cheating on standardized tests in Washington schools while Michelle Rhee was overseeing them as chancellor. Responding in the Huffington Post, Michelle Rhee denied cheating, and denied a cover-up. Rhee also accused USA Today of attacking teachers:

‘What some have concluded from this situation -- that we can't hold educators accountable for kids' academic progress because to do so might encourage cheating -- is insulting to teachers and principals. Educators are used to being under tremendous pressure. That pressure doesn't come from test taking. It comes from being responsible for young lives every single day. To imply that a large number of teachers would compromise their integrity severely underestimates and demeans the dedicated people who work so hard for kids.’


As probably the United States’ most famous education reformer, Michelle Rhee advocates using standardized tests to measure students’ learning, using incentives to boost teachers’ performance, and streamlining bureaucracy.

That all sounds good, but to see what these ‘reforms’ mean in practice watch the HBO series ‘The Wire,’ which explores urban decay in Baltimore, and is a parable of American decline in general. The show features local drug dealers and international mafia bosses, but it seems the show’s real villains are the self-serving bureaucrats in the police department and city hall who tinker with statistics to boost their political careers. The show’s heroes, a maverick group of police officers, know that statistics are the worst lies of all, and in refusing to play the game they’re sidelined, while those who do play are handsomely rewarded and promoted.

The USA Today investigation has forced the Washington D.C. school system to conduct its own cheating investigation. I have enough experience working in China’s education system of standardized tests and incentivized teaching to know that judging from the information available, cheating may well have been widespread in Washington. And I have enough experience to know that even if the investigation were to reach this conclusion, that would still not necessarily prevent Michelle Rhee from one day becoming America’s education czar and from implementing her ‘reforms’ at a national level.

Everyone can agree that US schools could be better, and there are long-term solutions that with political will and financial commitment can improve them. In terms of teachers, Americans need to learn from Finland, which invests heavily in properly training and compensating teachers. The United States needs to restore funding to many schools’ emaciated arts, music, and outdoor recreation programmes so that learning can be fun and experiential. The country also needs to acknowledge how video games, fast food, and the Internet are negatively impacting the mental, physical, and social development of children – and tackle head on how these powerful industries target children as consumers. Parents, for their part, need to impose high moral standards on their children, while empowering them with more choice and freedom in their lives. American culture needs to shift from one that watches ‘Jersey Shore’ to one that, well, doesn’t.

But the problem with long-term solutions that require political will and financial commitment is that they’re long-term solutions that require political will and financial commitment. Voters never want to pick up the tab, don’t want to be lectured on how to raise their children, and certainly don’t want to accept responsibility for their children’s failure. And politicians don’t want to do anything, but they especially don’t want to think beyond the next election cycle.

So the only viable option is Michelle Rhee, the personification of the quick political fix in American education.

Americans like to think they care first and foremost about their children, but in practice they too often show that they only care about themselves. In this regard, they’re no different from Chinese, and that’s what I find similar about both the American and Chinese education systems: the self-interested and self-serving hypocrisy that completely ignores the interests of children.

Why don’t American children want to learn? It’s because they hate hypocrisy more than algebra and alfalfa sprouts combined. When all young people see is the hypocrisy of adults – how school budgets are always the first to be cut in a financial crunch, how they have to cram for meaningless tests so their teachers can get a Christmas bonus and politicians can win elections, how adults discuss education reform without asking for their input – their natural and correct instinct is to tune out.

Children are smart enough to know that you can’t fix the schools if it’s really the society that’s broken. And the assured ascent of Michelle Rhee – whose career appears focused on pandering to politicians and tinkering with statistics – as their saviour will further convince American children that society is truly, irrevocably broken.