It appears that no one takes education quite as seriously as the Shanghainese.
Every three years, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) administers its worldwide Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to measure how well a nation’s education system has been preparing its students for the global knowledge economy. Nations such as South Korea, Finland, and Singapore have traditionally topped the rankings, but, apparently, even they are no match for Shanghai, which shoved the others into lower positions in its very first year of participation in the programme, in 2009.
When I was in Paris last week, I decided to drop in on Andreas Schleicher, the programme’s architect, to get his views on PISA and Shanghai’s education system. Dr. Schleicher, who was recently profiled in the Atlantic Monthly, had some very interesting things to say about both.
According to Schleicher, Shanghai’s education system is distinctive and superior—and not just globally, but also nationally. Hong Kong, Beijing, and ten Chinese provinces participated in the 2009 PISA, but their results reflected education systems that were still the same-old knowledge acquisition models, whereas Shanghai had progressed to equipping students with the ability to interpret and extrapolate information from text and apply it to real world situations—what we would normally refer to as ‘creativity.’ Twenty-six percent of Shanghai 15 year-olds could demonstrate advanced problem-solving skills, whereas the OECD average is 3 percent.
So how did Shanghai create the world’s best education system?
First, the Shanghai municipal government believes that the most effective way to raise the human capital it needs for the global knowledge economy is by focusing on raising the overall quality of its education system rather than investing in elite schools. ‘Students of privilege will do well wherever they are, and more resources directed at them won’t improve them that much,’ Schleicher explained. ‘But more attention and investment will greatly improve disadvantaged students.’
Lacking adequate capital, Shanghai decided to rely on the expertise of its best principals and teachers to reform its failing schools. The Shanghai government promised career advancement opportunities and autonomy if educators could turn around such schools, and this policy has been stunningly successful. According to Schleicher, 70 percent of Shanghai students are ‘resilient,’ meaning that they have stronger math, reading, and science skills than their socio-economic background would suggest.
‘There’s real interest and engagement between teachers and students,’ Schleicher said. ‘Every Shanghai classroom has high demands yet offers extensive support.’ There’s an expectation and a demand that every student can succeed, and teachers regularly collaborate to improve student performance.
According to Schleicher, what’s truly impressive about Shanghai schools is how they focus on collaborative and creative learning. Instead of force-feeding knowledge and information to students, teachers motivate them to learn for themselves, and the curriculum emphasizes student-centred learning. For example, in one math class visited by Schleicher, the teacher threw out a complex problem that provoked classroom discussion as to how to best arrive at a possible solution.
Schleicher is quite upbeat about Shanghai’s global economic prospects. Today, the United States may be the leader in creativity and innovation, but that’s because it made university education universally available 40 years ago, Schleicher argued. Now that the United States is failing to invest properly in public education, its prospects are dim. Shanghai is in the reverse position. PISA reveals that Shanghai is creating for itself a skilled workforce, and that’s a ‘significant advantage,’ he told me.
Now might seem a good time to make my usual round of snide and sarcastic comments, but I actually agree with Schleicher about Shanghai’s economic prospects. Each time I visit Shanghai, I’m amazed by—especially compared with Beijing—how well-managed and orderly the city is, and by how industrious and honest the people are. Chinese like to joke that Shanghai is closer to the shores of Europe than it is to China, and Shanghai schools have set themselves apart from the rest of the country.
Shanghai has the world’s best education system because Shanghainese, more than anyone else in China, take education seriously—perhaps way too seriously. The Shanghai municipal government will invest 22.4 billion yuan annually on its schools, whereas the Chinese national government will invest 299.2 billion yuan for all of China. And then there’s the individual parental investment: During a child’s elementary school years, Shanghai parents will annually spend on average of 6,000 yuan on English and math tutors and 9,600 yuan on weekend activities, such as tennis and piano. During the high school years, annual tutoring costs shoot up to 30,000 yuan and the cost of activities doubles to 19,200 yuan.
This early investment is to prepare Shanghai students for study at US colleges and universities. In 2005, 110,000 Shanghai students participated in the national college entrance examination (the gaokao). By 2010, as more and more Shanghainese chose the United States for college, that number dwindled down to 67,000. This year, only 61,000 Shanghainese participated in the gaokao. (By comparison, in Yunnan Province, where most families cannot afford to study overseas, students participating in the gaokao increased from 170,000 in 2005 to 220,000 in 2010.) Shanghai parents are giving their children the best of both education worlds: a Shanghai kindergarten to grade 12 education and a US higher education.
And most Shanghainese students who’ve studied abroad will return to Shanghai. After all, Shanghai is the financial capital of the world’s second largest economy. But, more important, Shanghai is adopting Western standards and practices throughout its society and economy so that its overseas-returned students can put their new knowledge and experience to effective use immediately.
The Shanghainese obsession with education has guaranteed their bright city a brighter future. Shanghai is well-positioned to dominate globally as an innovation and knowledge economy, Schleicher told me.
Now, if Shanghainese could just care a little more about the quality of their food…
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Thinking Right (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Last November, the Institute of International Education announced that there were now almost 130,000 Chinese students studying on American campuses, making them the largest international contingent. While this represents a significant cash flow out of China, Beijing supports this trend because the Chinese economy is in desperate need of globally educated Chinese.
The rapid increase in the number of Chinese students in America, however, is leading to significant changes in China's secondary-education system. With Beijing's official backing, and facing increasing demand from parents, public schools in China's largest cities are heading toward a two-track system—the traditional stream that prepares students for the national college-entrance examination (the gaokao), and a new one that prepares them for the SAT Reasoning Test and the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl. Some of China's very best public schools, where the smartest and wealthiest students congregate, will one day become international in focus. Get prepared: A wave of young Chinese students is about to wash across America.
But there's a problem. For most Chinese students, secondary education means lectures and memorization and cramming for exams. Other skills—like communication, critical thinking, and speaking English—get slighted. As a result, these students often show up in freshman classes unprepared for the challenge of an American college education.
English presents their biggest problem, and the problem is deceptive. Most colleges carefully screen Chinese applicants using test scores and essays, even interviews at times. They admit applicants qualified on paper who often struggle after enrollment. What has gone wrong? Colleges use criteria that are easily fudged—SAT cram schools and ghostwritten essays are fixtures throughout China—and at first glance, unreliable tests and essays are the prime suspects. And no doubt they deserve some of the blame: The file of many a Chinese applicant is a manufactured confection.
Yet the real language problem is a more subtle one, and one that's not really a language problem at all. It's a thinking problem. Because to read and write and analyze English like a native speaker, Chinese students first have to start thinking like a native speaker. This is difficult when they've long been trained to think in Chinese.
In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, the Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf writes that brain scans of native English and Chinese speakers show that each group relies on different mental processes to read. English is phonological, so English readers can sound out words when they read; written Chinese is not, so hundreds of mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects can use the same written script. English speakers access audio-sensory parts of their brain to "hear" a text, while Chinese speakers use visual-sensory parts to "see" a text, she explains. To teach a Chinese person to read well in English thus entails a significant rewiring of the brain, and while science says this is possible, there's nothing quick or easy or fun about it.
There's another complication. Westerners and Chinese have different mind-sets, and even fluent English-speaking Chinese can misinterpret English texts. In The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why, the social psychologist Richard Nisbett explains that Western civilization emphasizes debate and logic, while Chinese civilization prefers harmony and groupthink. Good English builds a formal structure of Aristotelian logic, while good Chinese demonstrates a chaotic stream-of-consciousness beauty.
I've worked with Chinese students at Shenzhen High School and now at Peking University High School, in Beijing, who intend to head abroad. I've seen how our students have been trained to read a Chinese text like they're taking a walk in the woods, as a free, spontaneous, and emotional experience. They've been taught to admire the whole of the vision—the trees, the sky, the stream—then breathe the fresh autumn air and delight at suddenly seeing a jaybird. This is an appropriate technique for reading Chinese, but not for reading English, which demands a more structured approach. The traditional Chinese curriculum does not teach concepts such as thesis, logic, support, evidence, and structure.
Thus we teach our students that reading an English text is like heading out in a big city: The walk has to be planned, deliberate, and meticulous, or it will end in an alley of confusion. In our classes, students start by drawing a road map, representing the structure of the text, then identify the destination, representing the text's thesis, and finally check the soundness of the route by analyzing the text's logic, evidence, and support.
We teach our students to identify the thesis and then draw the road map so they can appreciate the tightness and coherence of the structure. We teach them that each paragraph represents one coherent idea and ask them to highlight the first sentence of the paragraph in yellow and the last sentence in red. We then ask them to draw boxes around pronouns so that they can identify the subject, underline synonyms to identify the theme, and circle new vocabulary to understand the meaning. We ask them to group related words and phrases into bubbles, which helps develop their vocabulary. Finally, we ask them to summarize each paragraph in one simple sentence. By using this technique, our students can see the structure of the text and understand the flow of the thesis.
Although our reading program is a work in progress, we have seen some dramatic improvements over the semester it has been in place. At the outset, our students wrote quickly and haphazardly, producing incomprehensible homework. Now that they've begun to change their approach to reading a text, they're turning in well-argued and well-structured five-paragraph essays. And just as important, they've become more observant and reflective.
There is a message here for colleges about to be flooded with Chinese undergraduates: Most of these students are going to need English-language assistance. And the traditional remedial-English curriculum is not going to help them much. They are going to need remedial courses tailored to the Chinese mind, courses that change the way they think and give them the opportunity to thrive in an American academic environment unfettered by a mind-set in Chinese.
The rapid increase in the number of Chinese students in America, however, is leading to significant changes in China's secondary-education system. With Beijing's official backing, and facing increasing demand from parents, public schools in China's largest cities are heading toward a two-track system—the traditional stream that prepares students for the national college-entrance examination (the gaokao), and a new one that prepares them for the SAT Reasoning Test and the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl. Some of China's very best public schools, where the smartest and wealthiest students congregate, will one day become international in focus. Get prepared: A wave of young Chinese students is about to wash across America.
But there's a problem. For most Chinese students, secondary education means lectures and memorization and cramming for exams. Other skills—like communication, critical thinking, and speaking English—get slighted. As a result, these students often show up in freshman classes unprepared for the challenge of an American college education.
English presents their biggest problem, and the problem is deceptive. Most colleges carefully screen Chinese applicants using test scores and essays, even interviews at times. They admit applicants qualified on paper who often struggle after enrollment. What has gone wrong? Colleges use criteria that are easily fudged—SAT cram schools and ghostwritten essays are fixtures throughout China—and at first glance, unreliable tests and essays are the prime suspects. And no doubt they deserve some of the blame: The file of many a Chinese applicant is a manufactured confection.
Yet the real language problem is a more subtle one, and one that's not really a language problem at all. It's a thinking problem. Because to read and write and analyze English like a native speaker, Chinese students first have to start thinking like a native speaker. This is difficult when they've long been trained to think in Chinese.
In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, the Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf writes that brain scans of native English and Chinese speakers show that each group relies on different mental processes to read. English is phonological, so English readers can sound out words when they read; written Chinese is not, so hundreds of mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects can use the same written script. English speakers access audio-sensory parts of their brain to "hear" a text, while Chinese speakers use visual-sensory parts to "see" a text, she explains. To teach a Chinese person to read well in English thus entails a significant rewiring of the brain, and while science says this is possible, there's nothing quick or easy or fun about it.
There's another complication. Westerners and Chinese have different mind-sets, and even fluent English-speaking Chinese can misinterpret English texts. In The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why, the social psychologist Richard Nisbett explains that Western civilization emphasizes debate and logic, while Chinese civilization prefers harmony and groupthink. Good English builds a formal structure of Aristotelian logic, while good Chinese demonstrates a chaotic stream-of-consciousness beauty.
I've worked with Chinese students at Shenzhen High School and now at Peking University High School, in Beijing, who intend to head abroad. I've seen how our students have been trained to read a Chinese text like they're taking a walk in the woods, as a free, spontaneous, and emotional experience. They've been taught to admire the whole of the vision—the trees, the sky, the stream—then breathe the fresh autumn air and delight at suddenly seeing a jaybird. This is an appropriate technique for reading Chinese, but not for reading English, which demands a more structured approach. The traditional Chinese curriculum does not teach concepts such as thesis, logic, support, evidence, and structure.
Thus we teach our students that reading an English text is like heading out in a big city: The walk has to be planned, deliberate, and meticulous, or it will end in an alley of confusion. In our classes, students start by drawing a road map, representing the structure of the text, then identify the destination, representing the text's thesis, and finally check the soundness of the route by analyzing the text's logic, evidence, and support.
We teach our students to identify the thesis and then draw the road map so they can appreciate the tightness and coherence of the structure. We teach them that each paragraph represents one coherent idea and ask them to highlight the first sentence of the paragraph in yellow and the last sentence in red. We then ask them to draw boxes around pronouns so that they can identify the subject, underline synonyms to identify the theme, and circle new vocabulary to understand the meaning. We ask them to group related words and phrases into bubbles, which helps develop their vocabulary. Finally, we ask them to summarize each paragraph in one simple sentence. By using this technique, our students can see the structure of the text and understand the flow of the thesis.
Although our reading program is a work in progress, we have seen some dramatic improvements over the semester it has been in place. At the outset, our students wrote quickly and haphazardly, producing incomprehensible homework. Now that they've begun to change their approach to reading a text, they're turning in well-argued and well-structured five-paragraph essays. And just as important, they've become more observant and reflective.
There is a message here for colleges about to be flooded with Chinese undergraduates: Most of these students are going to need English-language assistance. And the traditional remedial-English curriculum is not going to help them much. They are going to need remedial courses tailored to the Chinese mind, courses that change the way they think and give them the opportunity to thrive in an American academic environment unfettered by a mind-set in Chinese.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Little Emperor Syndrome (Diplomat)
There’s no consensus on the best parenting style, but, thanks to Amy Chua, at least we know that Chinese and American parents are different. But is that really the case?
In her book Factory Girls, with a picture from her family album, Leslie T. Chang illustrates the traditional Chinese model of parenting:
‘My grandfather returned to China in the summer of 1927 (after seven years in the United States). On his first day home, his father organized a celebration in the village for his favourite son, who had brought honour to the family by going all the way to America. On the second day, the patriarch took out a wooden rod called a jiafa – used in traditional households to discipline children and servants – and beat him with it. In America, his son had switched from studying literature to mining engineering without parental approval, never mind that his father was 7,000 miles away and understood nothing of the American university system. In a Chinese family, a father’s word was law. The beating was so severe that my grandfather could not sit down for several days.’
For Chinese, children are merely an extension of the father, and a child’s main virtue is his obedience. In contrast, American parents will usually nurture their child’s individual ambition and talent. Or at least that’s according to David Halberstam’s book The Amateurs, which profiles the US 1984 Olympic rowing team, and thus offers a snapshot of American aristocratic values and culture. The book’s protagonist is Tiff Wood, a Boston Beacon Hill Brahmin whose striving for individual excellence and distinction is incubated by family privilege and status:
‘(The 11-year-old Tiff Wood and his father Richard Wood) had gone mountain climbing in New Hampshire, and very high up they had come to a tiny pool of water that was at most 20 feet in diameter. The water was absolutely ice cold. Above it stood a very steep mountain cliff, perhaps 30 feet high. Anyone diving from it to the pool would have to make an almost perfect dive or be splattered on the rocks. Richard Wood had taken one look at the cliff and known exactly what was going to happen. Tiff was going to want to dive in, but the pool was so small that he could easily miss it. “It’d really be something to dive in from there,” Tiff had said. “I think I’ll pass,” Richard Wood had said. He had watched as Tiff had measured the distance and he thought, Do I tell him not to do it? He had decided, no, he could not forbid him, and Tiff had made one dive and done it cleanly, a dive into water that no one in his right mind would want to swim in in the first place.’
Richard Wood’s parenting could not be more different from Leslie Chang’s great-grandfather’s parenting, and these two examples seem to confirm the Chinese and American parenting stereotypes. But, in her Atlantic Monthly article ‘How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,’ the therapist and mother Lori Gottlieb implies that Richard Wood’s parenting is now a thing of the past. American parents are obsessed with their kids’ happiness and success, Gottlieb writes, and ‘parental overinvestment is contributing to a burgeoning generational narcissism that’s hurting our kids.’
Living in a self-reinforcing bubble of constant praise and achievement, Gottlieb argues, upper class American children are unprepared for the real world where they will no longer be the centre of the universe: they can’t deal with those who are negative and demanding (their boss), those who can’t appreciate their uniqueness (their colleagues), and those who don’t share their belief that the world will stop revolving without them (everyone except their parents). They’ll drift from job to job, but it’ll be okay because mommy and daddy will be there to write checks for everything: the Manhattan East Village apartment, yoga classes, car insurance, the independent documentary project, and eventually the therapy sessions.
Reading Gottlieb’s article, I couldn’t help but take a red pen, underline sentence after sentence, and write in the margins, ‘OMG – these are my students’ parents!’
You would think that as director of the Peking University High School International Division in the tiger den of Beijing, I’d be fighting ferociously for my life against Tiger Parents. I wish! The upper class Chinese parents we deal with are like those described in Gottlieb’s article: over-protective, refusing to even consider the possibility of failure or adversity for their child.
Our students’ marks hover on average around 60 percent, and in response their parents don’t harangue their child to do better but rather call us to complain that our curriculum is too difficult. ‘You need to encourage students by giving higher marks,’ remarked one parent. When we organized a one-week canoeing trip in the United States, one parent complained that canoeing would be too dangerous. And then when he realized that the trip would also involve mosquitoes, sunburn, crappy food, and physical exertion, he anxiously called us everyday. Even those parents who seemed hard and demanding would just melt at the thought of their child in tears over a failed test or a broken fingernail.
‘Little emperor syndrome’ is a pervasive social phenomenon in China attributed to the one-child policy and the abysmal poverty today’s parents experienced during the Cultural Revolution. But I think Gottlieb’s reason for why American parents spoil their child applies equally to Chinese parents: the spiritual emptiness in society today, and using one’s child to fill this void. Like American parents, Chinese parents hope their child succeeds, but what they really want is for their cute and dependent child to be always so.
And by seeking meaning in their child, as Lori Gottlieb warns in her article, Chinese and American parents doom their child to a life of meaninglessness.
In her book Factory Girls, with a picture from her family album, Leslie T. Chang illustrates the traditional Chinese model of parenting:
‘My grandfather returned to China in the summer of 1927 (after seven years in the United States). On his first day home, his father organized a celebration in the village for his favourite son, who had brought honour to the family by going all the way to America. On the second day, the patriarch took out a wooden rod called a jiafa – used in traditional households to discipline children and servants – and beat him with it. In America, his son had switched from studying literature to mining engineering without parental approval, never mind that his father was 7,000 miles away and understood nothing of the American university system. In a Chinese family, a father’s word was law. The beating was so severe that my grandfather could not sit down for several days.’
For Chinese, children are merely an extension of the father, and a child’s main virtue is his obedience. In contrast, American parents will usually nurture their child’s individual ambition and talent. Or at least that’s according to David Halberstam’s book The Amateurs, which profiles the US 1984 Olympic rowing team, and thus offers a snapshot of American aristocratic values and culture. The book’s protagonist is Tiff Wood, a Boston Beacon Hill Brahmin whose striving for individual excellence and distinction is incubated by family privilege and status:
‘(The 11-year-old Tiff Wood and his father Richard Wood) had gone mountain climbing in New Hampshire, and very high up they had come to a tiny pool of water that was at most 20 feet in diameter. The water was absolutely ice cold. Above it stood a very steep mountain cliff, perhaps 30 feet high. Anyone diving from it to the pool would have to make an almost perfect dive or be splattered on the rocks. Richard Wood had taken one look at the cliff and known exactly what was going to happen. Tiff was going to want to dive in, but the pool was so small that he could easily miss it. “It’d really be something to dive in from there,” Tiff had said. “I think I’ll pass,” Richard Wood had said. He had watched as Tiff had measured the distance and he thought, Do I tell him not to do it? He had decided, no, he could not forbid him, and Tiff had made one dive and done it cleanly, a dive into water that no one in his right mind would want to swim in in the first place.’
Richard Wood’s parenting could not be more different from Leslie Chang’s great-grandfather’s parenting, and these two examples seem to confirm the Chinese and American parenting stereotypes. But, in her Atlantic Monthly article ‘How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,’ the therapist and mother Lori Gottlieb implies that Richard Wood’s parenting is now a thing of the past. American parents are obsessed with their kids’ happiness and success, Gottlieb writes, and ‘parental overinvestment is contributing to a burgeoning generational narcissism that’s hurting our kids.’
Living in a self-reinforcing bubble of constant praise and achievement, Gottlieb argues, upper class American children are unprepared for the real world where they will no longer be the centre of the universe: they can’t deal with those who are negative and demanding (their boss), those who can’t appreciate their uniqueness (their colleagues), and those who don’t share their belief that the world will stop revolving without them (everyone except their parents). They’ll drift from job to job, but it’ll be okay because mommy and daddy will be there to write checks for everything: the Manhattan East Village apartment, yoga classes, car insurance, the independent documentary project, and eventually the therapy sessions.
Reading Gottlieb’s article, I couldn’t help but take a red pen, underline sentence after sentence, and write in the margins, ‘OMG – these are my students’ parents!’
You would think that as director of the Peking University High School International Division in the tiger den of Beijing, I’d be fighting ferociously for my life against Tiger Parents. I wish! The upper class Chinese parents we deal with are like those described in Gottlieb’s article: over-protective, refusing to even consider the possibility of failure or adversity for their child.
Our students’ marks hover on average around 60 percent, and in response their parents don’t harangue their child to do better but rather call us to complain that our curriculum is too difficult. ‘You need to encourage students by giving higher marks,’ remarked one parent. When we organized a one-week canoeing trip in the United States, one parent complained that canoeing would be too dangerous. And then when he realized that the trip would also involve mosquitoes, sunburn, crappy food, and physical exertion, he anxiously called us everyday. Even those parents who seemed hard and demanding would just melt at the thought of their child in tears over a failed test or a broken fingernail.
‘Little emperor syndrome’ is a pervasive social phenomenon in China attributed to the one-child policy and the abysmal poverty today’s parents experienced during the Cultural Revolution. But I think Gottlieb’s reason for why American parents spoil their child applies equally to Chinese parents: the spiritual emptiness in society today, and using one’s child to fill this void. Like American parents, Chinese parents hope their child succeeds, but what they really want is for their cute and dependent child to be always so.
And by seeking meaning in their child, as Lori Gottlieb warns in her article, Chinese and American parents doom their child to a life of meaninglessness.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
How China Kills Creativity (Diplomat)
Nowadays people may admire China’s economy, but not Chinese creativity. Chinese architecture and art, music and movies are derivative, and many a Chinese enterprise is merely a carbon copy of an American one. China’s best schools may produce the world’s best test-takers, but the United States’ best schools produce the world’s most creative talent.
In his book The Social Animal, David Brooks outlines the four-step learning process that teaches students to be creative: knowledge acquisition (research), internalization (familiarity with material), self-questioning and examination (review and discussion), and the ordering and mastery of this knowledge (thesis formulation and essay writing).
However, this isn’t a linear process, Brooks points out, which means that the learner ‘(surfs) in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together – first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then wilfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product.’
‘The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step,’ David Brooks continues. ‘By the end, (the learner) was seeing the world around him in a new way.’
But what permits our brains to turn a chaotic sea of random facts and knowledge into an island of calm understanding? Believe it or not, it’s our emotions that permit us ultimately to become creative thinkers. In his book The Accidental Mind, the neuroscientist David J. Linden explains how emotions organize our memories:
‘In our lives, we have a lot of experiences and many of these we will remember until we die. We have many mechanisms for determining which experiences are stored (where were you on 9/11?) and which are discarded (what did you have for dinner exactly 1 month ago?). Some memories will fade with time and some will be distorted by generalization (can you distinctly remember your seventeenth haircut?). We need a signal to say, “This is an important memory. Write this down and underline it.” That signal is emotion. When you have feelings of fear or joy or love or anger or sadness, these mark your experiences as being particularly meaningful…These are the memories that confer your individuality. And that function, memory indexed by emotion, more than anything else, is what a brain is good for.’
What this means is that memories are ultimately emotional experiences, and that effectively learning must involve the learner emotionally. The very best US schools are seen as such because they inspire their students to be curious, interested, and excited; China’s very best schools gain their reputation by doing the opposite.
Thinking is the conscious effort of applying our memories to understand a new external stimulus, and creativity is asserting individual control over this process to create a synthesis between memory and stimuli. In other words, thinking is really about applying previous emotional experiences to understand a new emotional experience, whilst creativity is the mixing of old and new emotional experiences to a create an entirely new and original emotional experience.
The best US education institutions endow students with creativity by providing a relaxed and secure learning environment in which students share in the refined emotional experiences of humanity by reading books and developing the logic necessary to share in collective emotional experiences through debate and essay writing. A dynamic learning environment allows students at many US schools to feel joy and despair, frustration and triumph, and it’s these ups and downs that encode the creative learning process into our neural infrastructure and make it so transformative.
A Chinese school is both a stressful and stale place, forcing students to remember facts in order to excel in tests. Neuroscientists know that stress hampers the ability of the brain to convert experience into memory, and psychologists know that rewarding students solely for test performance leads to stress, cheating, and disinterest in learning. But ultimately, the most harmful thing that a Chinese school does, from a creativity perspective, is the way in which it separates emotion from memory by making learning an unemotional experience.
Whatever individual emotions Chinese students try to bring into the classroom, they are quickly stamped out. As I have previously written, from the first day of school, students who ask questions are silenced and those who try to exert any individuality are punished. What they learn is irrelevant and de-personalized, abstract and distant, further removing emotion from learning. If any emotion is involved, it’s pain. But the pain is so constant and monotonous (scolding teachers, demanding parents, mindless memorization, long hours of sitting in a cramped classroom) that it eventually ceases to be an emotion.
To understand the consequences of Chinese pedagogy, consider the example of ‘Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian journalist born in 1886, who could remember everything,’ whom David Brooks writes about in The Social Animal:
‘In one experiment, researchers showed Shereshevskii a complex formula of thirty letters and numbers on a piece of paper. Then they put the paper in a box and sealed it for fifteen years. When they took the paper out, Shereshevskii could remember it exactly…Shereshevskii could remember, but he couldn’t distil. He lived in a random blizzard of facts, but could not organize them into repeating patterns. Eventually he couldn’t make sense of metaphors, similes, poems, or even complex sentences.’
Shereshevskii had a neural defect that prohibited his brain from prioritizing, synthesizing, and controlling his memories to permit him to formulate an understanding of self and the world. Like many a Chinese student today, he could experience, but he could not feel.
Chinese schools are producing a nation of Shereshevskiis, students with photographic memory and instant recall, but who can never be creative.
In his book The Social Animal, David Brooks outlines the four-step learning process that teaches students to be creative: knowledge acquisition (research), internalization (familiarity with material), self-questioning and examination (review and discussion), and the ordering and mastery of this knowledge (thesis formulation and essay writing).
However, this isn’t a linear process, Brooks points out, which means that the learner ‘(surfs) in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together – first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then wilfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product.’
‘The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step,’ David Brooks continues. ‘By the end, (the learner) was seeing the world around him in a new way.’
But what permits our brains to turn a chaotic sea of random facts and knowledge into an island of calm understanding? Believe it or not, it’s our emotions that permit us ultimately to become creative thinkers. In his book The Accidental Mind, the neuroscientist David J. Linden explains how emotions organize our memories:
‘In our lives, we have a lot of experiences and many of these we will remember until we die. We have many mechanisms for determining which experiences are stored (where were you on 9/11?) and which are discarded (what did you have for dinner exactly 1 month ago?). Some memories will fade with time and some will be distorted by generalization (can you distinctly remember your seventeenth haircut?). We need a signal to say, “This is an important memory. Write this down and underline it.” That signal is emotion. When you have feelings of fear or joy or love or anger or sadness, these mark your experiences as being particularly meaningful…These are the memories that confer your individuality. And that function, memory indexed by emotion, more than anything else, is what a brain is good for.’
What this means is that memories are ultimately emotional experiences, and that effectively learning must involve the learner emotionally. The very best US schools are seen as such because they inspire their students to be curious, interested, and excited; China’s very best schools gain their reputation by doing the opposite.
Thinking is the conscious effort of applying our memories to understand a new external stimulus, and creativity is asserting individual control over this process to create a synthesis between memory and stimuli. In other words, thinking is really about applying previous emotional experiences to understand a new emotional experience, whilst creativity is the mixing of old and new emotional experiences to a create an entirely new and original emotional experience.
The best US education institutions endow students with creativity by providing a relaxed and secure learning environment in which students share in the refined emotional experiences of humanity by reading books and developing the logic necessary to share in collective emotional experiences through debate and essay writing. A dynamic learning environment allows students at many US schools to feel joy and despair, frustration and triumph, and it’s these ups and downs that encode the creative learning process into our neural infrastructure and make it so transformative.
A Chinese school is both a stressful and stale place, forcing students to remember facts in order to excel in tests. Neuroscientists know that stress hampers the ability of the brain to convert experience into memory, and psychologists know that rewarding students solely for test performance leads to stress, cheating, and disinterest in learning. But ultimately, the most harmful thing that a Chinese school does, from a creativity perspective, is the way in which it separates emotion from memory by making learning an unemotional experience.
Whatever individual emotions Chinese students try to bring into the classroom, they are quickly stamped out. As I have previously written, from the first day of school, students who ask questions are silenced and those who try to exert any individuality are punished. What they learn is irrelevant and de-personalized, abstract and distant, further removing emotion from learning. If any emotion is involved, it’s pain. But the pain is so constant and monotonous (scolding teachers, demanding parents, mindless memorization, long hours of sitting in a cramped classroom) that it eventually ceases to be an emotion.
To understand the consequences of Chinese pedagogy, consider the example of ‘Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian journalist born in 1886, who could remember everything,’ whom David Brooks writes about in The Social Animal:
‘In one experiment, researchers showed Shereshevskii a complex formula of thirty letters and numbers on a piece of paper. Then they put the paper in a box and sealed it for fifteen years. When they took the paper out, Shereshevskii could remember it exactly…Shereshevskii could remember, but he couldn’t distil. He lived in a random blizzard of facts, but could not organize them into repeating patterns. Eventually he couldn’t make sense of metaphors, similes, poems, or even complex sentences.’
Shereshevskii had a neural defect that prohibited his brain from prioritizing, synthesizing, and controlling his memories to permit him to formulate an understanding of self and the world. Like many a Chinese student today, he could experience, but he could not feel.
Chinese schools are producing a nation of Shereshevskiis, students with photographic memory and instant recall, but who can never be creative.
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