Shenzhen Daily has reported that a Shenzhen high school teacher has jumped out of the window of his 15th floor apartment after being accused of fraud.
According to Chinese media reports, on the afternoon August 22, a group of parents showed up at Shenzhen’s Xixiang Middle School, expecting to enrol their children. In late April, a teacher there named Wu Yongzhi had apparently promised places for 52 students in exchange for 1.18 million yuan ($185,000) in red envelopes. But on that hot August afternoon, Xixiang’s principal, Bao Qingping, said he knew nothing about this. Wu was reportedly called into the office, admitted fraud, and promised to make restitutions. The next morning, he jumped out the window.
The Chinese media is reporting it as a tragic case of individual greed gone awry, but on the school’s bulletin board, students defended Wu, saying he was the school’s most respected teacher and couldn’t have committed such fraud out of his own volition.
Others have pointed out the inconsistencies in media reports. How could he have convinced 52 parents on his own to turn over 1.18 million yuan? How was he able to present parents with contracts bearing official stamps and signatures from both the school and local education authority? Also, Wu didn’t need the money: he had an apartment, a car, and a 100,000 yuan annual salary. When Wu’s parents checked his bank account, they found it to be empty. Where had the 1.18 million yuan gone?
Some netizens argued that if Wu were a real criminal, he wouldn’t have been so contrite. He apologized profusely to parents, and emptied his bank account to pay back a portion of the money he had taken from them. He complained to his own parents that he was being hounded, and that his only way out was death. And then he killed himself.
So what really happened?
First, it’s important to understand how the Chinese high school admissions system works. Because of China’s compulsory education law, schooling up to grade nine is free and guaranteed, but students need to test into a senior high school. To fill revenue gaps, Chinese high schools are authorized to take a certain number of students whose test scores don’t meet the cut-off score, but who are willing to pay their way in. The quota is usually 5 to 10 percent of the student population, and the test scores can only be a few points lower than the cut-off score.
In theory, there’s heavy monitoring to ensure that schools don’t abuse this policy, but in practice this policy is so heavily abused that in many of China’s best high schools, one-third to one-half of all students pay their way in. This business is so lucrative that school authorities spend most of their work day secretly negotiating with parents.
But how did Wu, an admired and beloved teacher, get involved in this dirty game? He didn’t need the money, but he may well have wanted to advance his career, and thus had no choice but to play.
Rumours have spread on the Internet that Xixiang’s principal had taken a cut of teachers’ wages, appointed a relative to manage the school cafeteria, and secured jobs for unqualified cronies. If true, then Bao would be no different from many other Chinese high school principals, meaning that if Wu wanted to enter his inner circle, he would likely have had to prove his loyalty by volunteering for dirty assignments, such as getting 1.18 million yuan from parents.
Because selling high school places is so common in China, Wu probably would have thought it was a dirty but not risky job. But he was proved tragically wrong. We don’t know how the plan went awry, but there are reports that Bao angered a high-ranking official, who sent a team to investigate the school’s finances and admissions. If true, then Bao would have been under intense scrutiny, and thus would have had no choice but to turn away those 52 parents.
Now those parents would surely have known it was Bao and not Wu who had broken the agreement, but they wouldn’t risk offending a powerful principal. Wu could probably see that he would have to be the fall guy, because the local education authorities and the parents would line up behind the principal. And, given Wu’s social status and how much his students respected him, him going to jail was just not an option.
Reading Wu’s story I couldn’t help but think of Robert Wilkis, a Harvard graduate who dreamt of international development work, but ended up part of a Wall Street insider trading ring linked to junk bond king Michael Milken. As James Stewart recounts in Den of Thieves, the guilt-ridden Wilkis became trapped inside the ring out of loyalty and sympathy to the other participants, and when the police arrested everyone, he alone of all the culprits maintained his loyalty and sympathy, and was thus dealt with the most harshly even though he had benefited the least from the conspiracy.
Wu and Wilkis are both tragic characters. But the real tragedy is how the dens of thieves on Wall Street and in Chinese schools can and will continue to lure good people with a little ambition into destroying themselves.
Akira Kurosawa was right: The bad sleep well, indeed.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
China's Incognito Parents (Diplomat)
After a long and hard year in Beijing, I'm back in Toronto reading and reflecting. Before I left Beijing in early July, I had finished student recruitment. At the end of our admissions camp, we admitted 40 students, but the top half turned us down to attend other international divisions. Hurt and angry, I became even more so when my staff told me that many of our programme’s parents, even though they had praised our English reading programme, wanted us to focus on standardized test preparation in year two.
All summer, I struggled to explain these two major setbacks. I thought I had made a compelling case that the best way to learn English is by reading, and in so doing our students would thrive on the US college campus, and develop a life-long habit of reading English newspapers and books so they could succeed in the global economy. Otherwise, our students would enter college allergic to books, a disability and fear that would trap them in a Chinese bubble in both college and in life.
So why do Chinese parents insist on their children taking test prep courses rather than reading books to prepare for the SAT? Why are they so obsessed with getting their child into college when so many American and Chinese college graduates can’t find work? Why are our parents unhappy with our programme even though their child has become more motivated and diligent?
Ultimately, I can’t reconcile our parents’ thinking and their actions. I honestly believe our parents want the best possible education for their child, but I also see them hampering our efforts. What’s going on?
A new book Incognito by the neuroscientist David Eagleman offers an intriguing possibility – that I can’t figure out Chinese parents because their thinking is controlled by their conscious self, while their actions are controlled by their subconscious self. The conscious self is how we want to appear in public, but the subconscious self is the repository of our experiences and our emotions, and ultimately that’s where our true self lies.
David Eagleman explains that the conscious self is the CEO, while the subconscious is the corporation. The CEO sets goals and direction, but it’s the subconscious that plans, organizes, and executes. To accomplish its mission, the subconscious has many parts that arrange themselves as a ‘team of rivals’ that struggle for primacy while always working towards the goals established by the CEO, explains Eagleman. Evolution has discovered this to be the most efficient relationship for two reasons: plausible deniability (to maintain our social position and reputation), and effectiveness (to be able to obtain what is in our best self-interest).
Two concrete examples to illustrate the interplay between the conscious and subconscious can be found in William Cohan’s new book Money and Power, which explains how Goldman Sachs survived the 2008 sub-prime crisis. As its CEO Lloyd Blankfein became wary of Goldman’s sub-prime positions, the book suggests Goldman Sachs bundled the riskiest mortgages to create securities, sold them to clients, and bet that they would fail. What made such subterfuge possible is said to be the fact that Goldman Sachs was a ‘team of rivals,’ with the clear-eyed traders cynically shorting the securities, while the silver-tongued investment bankers first convinced themselves that the securities were great investments before selling them to their clients. If Blankfein had coordinated everything, the various departments couldn’t have worked together by working against each other, and he couldn’t have denied fraud allegations with a straight face, which is what he subsequently did.
Then consider the case of Hank Paulson, who was number two at Goldman Sachs when he along with John Thornton and John Thain launched a palace coup to topple Jon Corzine. Once in power, Paulson was supposed to gradually relinquish power to Thornton and Thain, but he is said to have discovered he liked having power so much he pushed out the two Johns.
According to this view, Paulson rose to the top because he let his Machiavellian auto-pilot take control while his conscious self-maintained a trusting, naïve veneer: If Paulson ever let on he had a greater ambition than selflessly serving the best interests of Goldman Sachs, he could have never ousted Corzine.
So let’s return to Chinese parents, and figure out not who they think they are, but who they really are. After a year of dealing with our Chinese parents, here’s how I think they think: ‘I love and want what’s best for my child. College in America will prepare my child for the global economy, and he’s fortunate to be learning creativity and critical thinking skills at Peking High International. Yes, Mr. Jiang may be a bit too naïve and idealistic, but I trust him to have the best interest of my child at heart.’
But what does their subconscious believe? The trick to understanding their subconscious is not to peer inside their mental landscape because it’s a ‘team of rivals’ designed to mislead and beguile. The trick is to see the Chinese landscape they’ve witnessed these past 50 years, and the emotions they’ve absorbed as life lessons: the disillusionment brought on by the tyrannical chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the fear wrought by the uncertainty and inequality of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the greed created by the corruption and moral bankruptcy of Jiang Zemin’s China, and now the angry pride unleashed by China’s dizzying and intoxicating economic rise.
At a subconscious level, here’s what our programme’s parents really believe: ‘I succeeded because of my ability to maintain and manage guanxi, not because of critical thinking skills and creativity. My child will succeed based on his ability to conform to Chinese society and to obey me. My child will study in the United States to meet other rich and powerful Chinese. That my child crams for the SAT rather than read books and that he lives in a Chinese bubble will prove to me and to Chinese society that he’s a loyal and obedient Chinese, and that will ensure his transition back to China after he’s bored with the bright lights of New York and the blackjack tables of Las Vegas. Why should my child learn English and American cultural values when China is superior to the West? Creativity and critical thinking skills are Western imports, and ought to be distrusted as dangerous influences.’
So while consciously our Chinese parents are supportive of our pedagogy (they have no choice), they will subconsciously do whatever they can to sabotage our efforts, including complaining about how much their child reads in English, arranging SAT prep classes on weekends, and questioning our pedagogy to other parents who are considering enrolling.
And this sabotage can only become more blatant and destructive, as our programme matures and strengthens. So what do I do now? Um, I don’t know – maybe my subconscious can figure something out.
P.S. In last week’s posting, two readers commented that the posting was intellectually lazy. In hindsight, I now see the posting was a rant, so thanks to my readers for keeping me intellectually honest.
All summer, I struggled to explain these two major setbacks. I thought I had made a compelling case that the best way to learn English is by reading, and in so doing our students would thrive on the US college campus, and develop a life-long habit of reading English newspapers and books so they could succeed in the global economy. Otherwise, our students would enter college allergic to books, a disability and fear that would trap them in a Chinese bubble in both college and in life.
So why do Chinese parents insist on their children taking test prep courses rather than reading books to prepare for the SAT? Why are they so obsessed with getting their child into college when so many American and Chinese college graduates can’t find work? Why are our parents unhappy with our programme even though their child has become more motivated and diligent?
Ultimately, I can’t reconcile our parents’ thinking and their actions. I honestly believe our parents want the best possible education for their child, but I also see them hampering our efforts. What’s going on?
A new book Incognito by the neuroscientist David Eagleman offers an intriguing possibility – that I can’t figure out Chinese parents because their thinking is controlled by their conscious self, while their actions are controlled by their subconscious self. The conscious self is how we want to appear in public, but the subconscious self is the repository of our experiences and our emotions, and ultimately that’s where our true self lies.
David Eagleman explains that the conscious self is the CEO, while the subconscious is the corporation. The CEO sets goals and direction, but it’s the subconscious that plans, organizes, and executes. To accomplish its mission, the subconscious has many parts that arrange themselves as a ‘team of rivals’ that struggle for primacy while always working towards the goals established by the CEO, explains Eagleman. Evolution has discovered this to be the most efficient relationship for two reasons: plausible deniability (to maintain our social position and reputation), and effectiveness (to be able to obtain what is in our best self-interest).
Two concrete examples to illustrate the interplay between the conscious and subconscious can be found in William Cohan’s new book Money and Power, which explains how Goldman Sachs survived the 2008 sub-prime crisis. As its CEO Lloyd Blankfein became wary of Goldman’s sub-prime positions, the book suggests Goldman Sachs bundled the riskiest mortgages to create securities, sold them to clients, and bet that they would fail. What made such subterfuge possible is said to be the fact that Goldman Sachs was a ‘team of rivals,’ with the clear-eyed traders cynically shorting the securities, while the silver-tongued investment bankers first convinced themselves that the securities were great investments before selling them to their clients. If Blankfein had coordinated everything, the various departments couldn’t have worked together by working against each other, and he couldn’t have denied fraud allegations with a straight face, which is what he subsequently did.
Then consider the case of Hank Paulson, who was number two at Goldman Sachs when he along with John Thornton and John Thain launched a palace coup to topple Jon Corzine. Once in power, Paulson was supposed to gradually relinquish power to Thornton and Thain, but he is said to have discovered he liked having power so much he pushed out the two Johns.
According to this view, Paulson rose to the top because he let his Machiavellian auto-pilot take control while his conscious self-maintained a trusting, naïve veneer: If Paulson ever let on he had a greater ambition than selflessly serving the best interests of Goldman Sachs, he could have never ousted Corzine.
So let’s return to Chinese parents, and figure out not who they think they are, but who they really are. After a year of dealing with our Chinese parents, here’s how I think they think: ‘I love and want what’s best for my child. College in America will prepare my child for the global economy, and he’s fortunate to be learning creativity and critical thinking skills at Peking High International. Yes, Mr. Jiang may be a bit too naïve and idealistic, but I trust him to have the best interest of my child at heart.’
But what does their subconscious believe? The trick to understanding their subconscious is not to peer inside their mental landscape because it’s a ‘team of rivals’ designed to mislead and beguile. The trick is to see the Chinese landscape they’ve witnessed these past 50 years, and the emotions they’ve absorbed as life lessons: the disillusionment brought on by the tyrannical chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the fear wrought by the uncertainty and inequality of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the greed created by the corruption and moral bankruptcy of Jiang Zemin’s China, and now the angry pride unleashed by China’s dizzying and intoxicating economic rise.
At a subconscious level, here’s what our programme’s parents really believe: ‘I succeeded because of my ability to maintain and manage guanxi, not because of critical thinking skills and creativity. My child will succeed based on his ability to conform to Chinese society and to obey me. My child will study in the United States to meet other rich and powerful Chinese. That my child crams for the SAT rather than read books and that he lives in a Chinese bubble will prove to me and to Chinese society that he’s a loyal and obedient Chinese, and that will ensure his transition back to China after he’s bored with the bright lights of New York and the blackjack tables of Las Vegas. Why should my child learn English and American cultural values when China is superior to the West? Creativity and critical thinking skills are Western imports, and ought to be distrusted as dangerous influences.’
So while consciously our Chinese parents are supportive of our pedagogy (they have no choice), they will subconsciously do whatever they can to sabotage our efforts, including complaining about how much their child reads in English, arranging SAT prep classes on weekends, and questioning our pedagogy to other parents who are considering enrolling.
And this sabotage can only become more blatant and destructive, as our programme matures and strengthens. So what do I do now? Um, I don’t know – maybe my subconscious can figure something out.
P.S. In last week’s posting, two readers commented that the posting was intellectually lazy. In hindsight, I now see the posting was a rant, so thanks to my readers for keeping me intellectually honest.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Mind Triathlon vs Jersey Shore (Diplomat)
This summer, the staff and students of Peking University High School International Division travelled to the northeast of the United States for three weeks of language learning, two weeks of hiking and canoeing, and a week of touring American colleges and universities. I spent 10 days at an education conference in Africa and a week in Paris before joining everyone in Boston.
My staff and I had organized six weeks in the United States because we believed opening new vistas for our students would be transformational. What we didn’t expect when we sent our students to experience the US is for some of our students to start behaving like Americans, which is what happened.
My smile at seeing everyone dissipated once I saw the frowns of the faces of my three staff. One of the staff was a former student of mine now studying at the University of Wisconsin who had spent her summer organizing the college visits, and who was mortified when the students fell asleep at a college information session.
The remaining two had started with me at Shenzhen High School, and went with me to Peking University High School because of our shared ideals. Instead of spending the summer with their families in Shenzhen, the two were chaperoning our 28 students. Instead of saying ‘thank you,’ our students wouldn’t sleep at night, and were so rowdy that they kept my staff up. For the week-long canoeing trip, my staff, as per my instruction, divided the best friends and couples; in response, some students complained angrily. One of my teachers, the one closest to the students, broke down in tears.
I had forbidden the students from taking mobile phones and electronic devices to America so that they would be fully immersed in the experience. When I first arrived and saw one of my students listening to music on his iPhone, I sternly asked, ‘Did I not tell you not to bring your iPhone to America?’ He responded matter-of-factly, ‘I bought a new one here.’ And he was far from alone: many students view their college visits as a shopping expedition for the newest Apple products, my staff had told me.
Seeing how lazy, indifferent, and disrespectful our students had become in six weeks, my staff and I had to question why we would want to send them to the US for four years. Our programme’s purpose is to educate bicultural students who have the best qualities of East and West: a strong work ethic and a love of learning, as well as individuality and a passion for life. What we were seeing in Boston was the worst qualities of East and West festering in our students: group-think and materialism, as well as selfishness and callowness.
It was silly of me to place so much faith in US education because I really should know better. At Yale, I was upset by how seminar discussions were hijacked by classmates who didn’t do the reading (and who didn’t do much reading at all) but who insisted on expressing their uninformed opinion anyway. Yalies modestly asked questions to show how they knew it all, and thought they were at Yale to enlighten it.
Previously, I had thought it was just Yale that nurtured the solipsism and narcissism of its students, but six months ago I discovered that this ‘education’ is all too commonplace in the United States. When I was in Austin, Texas teaching a classroom of fifth-graders beginners’ Mandarin, the students peppered me with random questions, and seeing my frustration simmer, one of the fifth-graders blurted out, ‘We need to ask you questions because our teacher would fail us otherwise.’
At Peking University High School International Division, our students constantly challenge me because that’s what teenagers do. There’s always a cacophony of complaints: there’s not enough classes and homework, there’s too much; math class is too hard, it’s too easy; there isn’t enough vocabulary drilling, there’s not enough reading. And in response, we challenge our students to think beyond their entitled and selfish teenage selves, and consider our perspective and limitations as a new programme: that we must, with limited resources and experience, educate to the best of our ability students of varying competence and motivation, and that we aim to be open and transparent, but that we must also be strict and fair. We want our students to understand choice and consequence, yet we must walk a fine balance because neither their parents nor Chinese society has much tolerance for individuality and mistakes. Above all, we teach our students that to be free individuals they must appreciate and cherish the social bonds that make us all human.
So it was with great dismay and alarm that in Boston I discovered our students had left understanding and empathy back in Beijing with their mobile phones, and had refused to buy American versions. Our American partners had nothing but praise for our students, and I could see how this praise, mixed with American permissiveness, had made the students complacent while undermining the authority of my staff.
American teachers believe their mandate is two-fold: to educate creative thinkers, and to prepare their students to function in a liberal democracy. But learning to understand a different perspective is the intellectual equivalent of participating in a triathlon, whereas expressing your own is like watching ‘Jersey Shore.’ And, as the recent American political debate over the debt ceiling revealed, it’s exactly those who cling the most selfishly to their ideological purity (the Tea Party republicans) who are the greatest threat to the functioning of a liberal democracy.
Teaching teenagers to challenge authority and to think highly of themselves is to appeal to their basest instincts. American popular culture is so dangerously addictive because it appeals to the 16 year-old in all of us: Michael Bay movies, Tom Clancy novels, and Fox TV shows do nothing but confirm and make concrete our prejudice and paranoia that we are right, and it’s only by defying the entire world that can we save it. What’s murderously dangerous is when this juvenile thinking spills from the silver screen into the hallowed halls of the United States Congress.
Adult human beings are so because they fight against their worst instincts, and those of teenagers. Our student couples and best friends were angry about being broken up for the canoeing trip, but in the end they did see that we teachers had their best interest at heart, and that by doing so they could meet and bond with others. Yes, some students spent their time in the United States listening to their Chinese pop music, updating their account on renren.com (China’s Facebook), and calling their parents every night. But there were also some students who cherished every moment of their time in America, and told me how happy they were with the arrangements. It was something that they’ll remember forever, they told me.
Not quite a ‘thank you.’ But it’s a start.
My staff and I had organized six weeks in the United States because we believed opening new vistas for our students would be transformational. What we didn’t expect when we sent our students to experience the US is for some of our students to start behaving like Americans, which is what happened.
My smile at seeing everyone dissipated once I saw the frowns of the faces of my three staff. One of the staff was a former student of mine now studying at the University of Wisconsin who had spent her summer organizing the college visits, and who was mortified when the students fell asleep at a college information session.
The remaining two had started with me at Shenzhen High School, and went with me to Peking University High School because of our shared ideals. Instead of spending the summer with their families in Shenzhen, the two were chaperoning our 28 students. Instead of saying ‘thank you,’ our students wouldn’t sleep at night, and were so rowdy that they kept my staff up. For the week-long canoeing trip, my staff, as per my instruction, divided the best friends and couples; in response, some students complained angrily. One of my teachers, the one closest to the students, broke down in tears.
I had forbidden the students from taking mobile phones and electronic devices to America so that they would be fully immersed in the experience. When I first arrived and saw one of my students listening to music on his iPhone, I sternly asked, ‘Did I not tell you not to bring your iPhone to America?’ He responded matter-of-factly, ‘I bought a new one here.’ And he was far from alone: many students view their college visits as a shopping expedition for the newest Apple products, my staff had told me.
Seeing how lazy, indifferent, and disrespectful our students had become in six weeks, my staff and I had to question why we would want to send them to the US for four years. Our programme’s purpose is to educate bicultural students who have the best qualities of East and West: a strong work ethic and a love of learning, as well as individuality and a passion for life. What we were seeing in Boston was the worst qualities of East and West festering in our students: group-think and materialism, as well as selfishness and callowness.
It was silly of me to place so much faith in US education because I really should know better. At Yale, I was upset by how seminar discussions were hijacked by classmates who didn’t do the reading (and who didn’t do much reading at all) but who insisted on expressing their uninformed opinion anyway. Yalies modestly asked questions to show how they knew it all, and thought they were at Yale to enlighten it.
Previously, I had thought it was just Yale that nurtured the solipsism and narcissism of its students, but six months ago I discovered that this ‘education’ is all too commonplace in the United States. When I was in Austin, Texas teaching a classroom of fifth-graders beginners’ Mandarin, the students peppered me with random questions, and seeing my frustration simmer, one of the fifth-graders blurted out, ‘We need to ask you questions because our teacher would fail us otherwise.’
At Peking University High School International Division, our students constantly challenge me because that’s what teenagers do. There’s always a cacophony of complaints: there’s not enough classes and homework, there’s too much; math class is too hard, it’s too easy; there isn’t enough vocabulary drilling, there’s not enough reading. And in response, we challenge our students to think beyond their entitled and selfish teenage selves, and consider our perspective and limitations as a new programme: that we must, with limited resources and experience, educate to the best of our ability students of varying competence and motivation, and that we aim to be open and transparent, but that we must also be strict and fair. We want our students to understand choice and consequence, yet we must walk a fine balance because neither their parents nor Chinese society has much tolerance for individuality and mistakes. Above all, we teach our students that to be free individuals they must appreciate and cherish the social bonds that make us all human.
So it was with great dismay and alarm that in Boston I discovered our students had left understanding and empathy back in Beijing with their mobile phones, and had refused to buy American versions. Our American partners had nothing but praise for our students, and I could see how this praise, mixed with American permissiveness, had made the students complacent while undermining the authority of my staff.
American teachers believe their mandate is two-fold: to educate creative thinkers, and to prepare their students to function in a liberal democracy. But learning to understand a different perspective is the intellectual equivalent of participating in a triathlon, whereas expressing your own is like watching ‘Jersey Shore.’ And, as the recent American political debate over the debt ceiling revealed, it’s exactly those who cling the most selfishly to their ideological purity (the Tea Party republicans) who are the greatest threat to the functioning of a liberal democracy.
Teaching teenagers to challenge authority and to think highly of themselves is to appeal to their basest instincts. American popular culture is so dangerously addictive because it appeals to the 16 year-old in all of us: Michael Bay movies, Tom Clancy novels, and Fox TV shows do nothing but confirm and make concrete our prejudice and paranoia that we are right, and it’s only by defying the entire world that can we save it. What’s murderously dangerous is when this juvenile thinking spills from the silver screen into the hallowed halls of the United States Congress.
Adult human beings are so because they fight against their worst instincts, and those of teenagers. Our student couples and best friends were angry about being broken up for the canoeing trip, but in the end they did see that we teachers had their best interest at heart, and that by doing so they could meet and bond with others. Yes, some students spent their time in the United States listening to their Chinese pop music, updating their account on renren.com (China’s Facebook), and calling their parents every night. But there were also some students who cherished every moment of their time in America, and told me how happy they were with the arrangements. It was something that they’ll remember forever, they told me.
Not quite a ‘thank you.’ But it’s a start.
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