When Shanghai placed first in the world in the OECD’s PISA student assessments last December, there was lots of talk about how the city now had ‘the world’s best schools.’ Nice headline, but it’s not the full story, as I learned from Andreas Schleicher, PISA’s architect, when he visited Beijing this past week.
After a breakfast meeting with our students, Schleicher shared some of his thoughts on Chinese education with Chinese reporters. He had just finished a week-long China trip, in which he spent most of his time in discussion with Shanghai’s education authorities.
During the press conference, a Chinese reporter asked Schleicher if Shanghai placing first on the PISA meant that Shanghai has the world’s best education system.
In response, Schleicher implied that Shanghai’s education system, while on the right track, needs more reforms.
Schleicher explained that, twenty years ago, the knowledge that students learned in schools would find them a good job and be applicable for the rest of his or her life but today, technology and the Internet have made knowledge readily available and thus cheap. What’s important then is the ability to sift through available knowledge, analyse it, and apply it to new situations. In this regard, Shanghai schools are doing well: according to Schleicher, 26 percent of Shanghai students demonstrated complex problem solving skills on the PISA, whereas the OECD average is 3 percent.
But to succeed in the constantly changing global economy today, Schleicher argued, students need to understand that learning is a life-long process, and thus they must possess a passion for learning as well as the ability to learn for themselves. And that’s where Shanghai falls down: 15 year-olds in OECD countries show more curiosity and initiative than Shanghai 15 year-olds, who from the first day of school have been made passive and stressed by too much homework and tests.
Chinese educators and parents may argue that childhood is a time to develop a strong foundation of knowledge. But Schleicher warned that OECD data suggest that if students haven’t yet developed self-learning skills and a passion for learning by age 15, then it’s unlikely they ever will.
A question here then is: Do Chinese schools make learning so unpleasant for students that they don’t want to learn anymore after they leave school? Anecdotal evidence suggests that’s the case: After they finish the national examination, Chinese students burn their textbooks, spend four years in college playing video games, and enter the workforce unprepared for the re-learning that their job requires.
What’s most important in today’s global economy is how innovation is transforming from an individual into a collaborative process. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, urban theorist Richard Florida explains that innovation now occurs when individuals with different skills and knowledge come together to share them in a way that produces new ideas and products:
‘Highly developed social skills…include persuasion, social perceptiveness, the capacity to bring the right people together on a project, the ability to help develop other people, and a keen sense of empathy. These are quintessential leadership skills needed to innovate, mobilize resources, build effective organizations, and launch new firms…social skills seem to grow ever more essential as local economies grow larger and more complex.’
Unfortunately, because of China’s test-oriented education system’s focus on individual merit and achievement, it’s not producing the individuals with strong social skills that China’s economy needs to transform from a manufacturing-based economy into an innovation-based one.
The good news is that Schleicher’s understanding of the limitations of China’s education system seems to be coming directly from Chinese education officials. The Chinese government’s growing concern with its school is why, overall, Schleicher is optimistic about the prospects for education reform in China.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Fast Food Education (The Diplomat)
I was recently invited to speak at an education conference in Kuala Lumpur, and while there I attended a panel on ‘world class’ education systems.
The first speaker was a Finnish diplomat, and in a brief presentation he explained what made Finland’s schools the envy of the world: The professional training and stature of Finnish teachers, the Lutheran culture of hard work, the pervasiveness of a reading culture, and a social commitment to leaving no child behind. The diplomat emphasized that Finland’s school system operated on the principles of flexibility and diversity: There was no one formula for successful schools, he said, and Finland trusts its teachers to know what’s best for their students.
Speaking next was a McKinsey consultant who, armed with data and graphs, insisted there was in fact one formula for successful schools: recruit top-performing students as teachers, improve instruction through collaboration among teachers, insist that every child succeeds, and bring in experienced visionaries with strong management skills to lead the schools.
The entire ballroom of Malaysian educators and policy makers sat entranced; the Finnish diplomat sank into his seat.
I was as concerned as the Finnish diplomat because I thought the idea of seeing schools as factories was wrong. Essentially, the theme of the two-day conference was how to create a top-down school system that would manufacture corporate drones to make Malaysia competitive in the global economy.
And such a mentality isn’t just taking shape in the authoritarian nation states of Southeast Asia, but also in the liberal enclaves of New York. In his New York Times magazine article ‘What if the Secret to Success is Failure?’ education writer Paul Tough looks at the movement in education to distil ‘character’ into its constituent parts, just like how scientists have been trying to locate, distil, and bottle the medicinal qualities of red wine and tomatoes.
Paul Tough looks at Dave Levin, co-founder of the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) schools, who applies McKinsey scientific management to the problem of inner city schooling. KIPP’s focus on discipline and self-control has gotten its poor minority students college scholarships, but only a third of them have graduated with a college degree. Dave Levin has discovered that character – persistence and resilience – were even more important than academic preparedness for success in college. So, with encouragement from positive psychology guru Martin Seligman, Dave Levin has devised a Character Point Average (CPA), which measures things such as zest, grit, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, and other stuff that’s supposed to turn KIPP students into future Dave Levins and Martin Seligmans.
This movement to locate, distil, and bottle the characteristics of success would be funny and silly, if it weren’t for the mentality behind it: That schools could be turned into McDonald’s, that each and every student could be standardized and manufactured for success, that each and every student ought to pass through an assembly line in which highly-credentialed and well-meaning teachers could stamp labels on the child.
Also profiled in Paul Tough’s New York Times article is Dominic Randolph, the 49-year-old headmaster of the posh Brooklyn private school Riverdale:
‘(Dominic Randolph felt lost at Harvard and) out of step with the power-tie careerism of the Reagan ’80s…After college, he moved for a couple of years to Italy, where he worked odd jobs and studied opera. It was an uncertain and unsettled time in his life, filled with plenty of failed experiments and setbacks and struggles. Looking back on his life, though, Randolph says that the character strengths that enabled him to achieve the success that he has...came out of those years of trial and error, of taking chances and living without a safety net.’
Randolph’s life reminds me of my own. I did well at Yale, but was so disillusioned with the United States’ crass materialism that I decided to make a career in China (yes, how ironic is that). What followed was a decade of wandering around pointlessly and anxiously, but I am now wiser and stronger because of it; I agree with Randolph that the school of hard knocks provides a far better education than the Ivy League.
But, unlike Randolph, the experience has left me with a deep suspicion of success and the material world that we live in. Yes, I hope that my students become successful one day, but it’s more important to me that they discover themselves as individuals.
And that doesn’t mean devising a curriculum to teach individuality. It means you let your students make their own mistakes and suffer the consequences; let them discover their own values but, as teachers, set a strong moral example for them to emulate; and above all let them define for themselves what success is and how to best achieve it.
But, as the Finnish diplomat discovered in Kuala Lumpur, this is becoming an increasingly obsolete message in our world because McKinsey can’t design a PowerPoint presentation around it, and because we can’t bottle and sell it.
The first speaker was a Finnish diplomat, and in a brief presentation he explained what made Finland’s schools the envy of the world: The professional training and stature of Finnish teachers, the Lutheran culture of hard work, the pervasiveness of a reading culture, and a social commitment to leaving no child behind. The diplomat emphasized that Finland’s school system operated on the principles of flexibility and diversity: There was no one formula for successful schools, he said, and Finland trusts its teachers to know what’s best for their students.
Speaking next was a McKinsey consultant who, armed with data and graphs, insisted there was in fact one formula for successful schools: recruit top-performing students as teachers, improve instruction through collaboration among teachers, insist that every child succeeds, and bring in experienced visionaries with strong management skills to lead the schools.
The entire ballroom of Malaysian educators and policy makers sat entranced; the Finnish diplomat sank into his seat.
I was as concerned as the Finnish diplomat because I thought the idea of seeing schools as factories was wrong. Essentially, the theme of the two-day conference was how to create a top-down school system that would manufacture corporate drones to make Malaysia competitive in the global economy.
And such a mentality isn’t just taking shape in the authoritarian nation states of Southeast Asia, but also in the liberal enclaves of New York. In his New York Times magazine article ‘What if the Secret to Success is Failure?’ education writer Paul Tough looks at the movement in education to distil ‘character’ into its constituent parts, just like how scientists have been trying to locate, distil, and bottle the medicinal qualities of red wine and tomatoes.
Paul Tough looks at Dave Levin, co-founder of the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) schools, who applies McKinsey scientific management to the problem of inner city schooling. KIPP’s focus on discipline and self-control has gotten its poor minority students college scholarships, but only a third of them have graduated with a college degree. Dave Levin has discovered that character – persistence and resilience – were even more important than academic preparedness for success in college. So, with encouragement from positive psychology guru Martin Seligman, Dave Levin has devised a Character Point Average (CPA), which measures things such as zest, grit, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, and other stuff that’s supposed to turn KIPP students into future Dave Levins and Martin Seligmans.
This movement to locate, distil, and bottle the characteristics of success would be funny and silly, if it weren’t for the mentality behind it: That schools could be turned into McDonald’s, that each and every student could be standardized and manufactured for success, that each and every student ought to pass through an assembly line in which highly-credentialed and well-meaning teachers could stamp labels on the child.
Also profiled in Paul Tough’s New York Times article is Dominic Randolph, the 49-year-old headmaster of the posh Brooklyn private school Riverdale:
‘(Dominic Randolph felt lost at Harvard and) out of step with the power-tie careerism of the Reagan ’80s…After college, he moved for a couple of years to Italy, where he worked odd jobs and studied opera. It was an uncertain and unsettled time in his life, filled with plenty of failed experiments and setbacks and struggles. Looking back on his life, though, Randolph says that the character strengths that enabled him to achieve the success that he has...came out of those years of trial and error, of taking chances and living without a safety net.’
Randolph’s life reminds me of my own. I did well at Yale, but was so disillusioned with the United States’ crass materialism that I decided to make a career in China (yes, how ironic is that). What followed was a decade of wandering around pointlessly and anxiously, but I am now wiser and stronger because of it; I agree with Randolph that the school of hard knocks provides a far better education than the Ivy League.
But, unlike Randolph, the experience has left me with a deep suspicion of success and the material world that we live in. Yes, I hope that my students become successful one day, but it’s more important to me that they discover themselves as individuals.
And that doesn’t mean devising a curriculum to teach individuality. It means you let your students make their own mistakes and suffer the consequences; let them discover their own values but, as teachers, set a strong moral example for them to emulate; and above all let them define for themselves what success is and how to best achieve it.
But, as the Finnish diplomat discovered in Kuala Lumpur, this is becoming an increasingly obsolete message in our world because McKinsey can’t design a PowerPoint presentation around it, and because we can’t bottle and sell it.
Monday, September 5, 2011
China's Black Swans (The Diplomat)
In Darren Aronofsky’s movie ‘Black Swan,’ Natalie Portman plays Nina, who has won the lead role in the New York Ballet Company’s new production of ‘Swan Lake.’ Nina dances the virginal white swan gracefully, but is clumsy when it comes to the passionate black swan. Sheltered by her failed ballerina mother and confined to their Manhattan apartment, Nina is encouraged by her director to discover her inner black swan. But in unearthing and unleashing her primal passions of jealousy and paranoia, contempt and hate, Nina ruptures her sanity. At the end of her perfect opening night performance, as the audience chants her name in rapture, Nina lies bleeding to death at the back of the stage.
Seeing that Nina has stabbed herself, her director asks ‘why?’ with a look of painful shock. ‘I wanted to be perfect,’ Nina whispers.
Nina was at the back of my mind as I sat in my office on the Sunday evening before the start of school. Seated with me around a conference table were a new student and her mother, as well as Rebecca, a student who has studied with us for a year now. Earlier that day, this new student’s mother had called me, anxiously telling me that her daughter wanted to drop out. Anxious myself over the start of school, I explained to the mother that her daughter was probably overcome with anxiety about enrolling in an unproven programme.
When we all convened that evening, this new student told us so herself. She’s never lived away from home, and she’s accustomed to strict competitive schools, where her classmates never even thought about dating, let alone discussing it in front of their roommates, which is what a couple of her new classmates did during the week of mandatory military training before the start of classes. For that one week, this new student was tormented by doubts and concerns: Will her new classmates be focused? Will her classmates’ bad habits infect her? Will teachers dumb down the material?
Rebecca was seated directly across from the new student, and explained to her that a year ago, she was sitting in exactly the same seat. A year later, she appreciates that the ability to remember someone’s name and befriend them is more important than the ability to memorize math equations and win math competitions. Before, Rebecca expected and demanded that all her classmates be just like her, but now understands that in a class with difference and diversity, she can learn as much from her classmates as from her teachers.
Perfection is a dangerous obsession, Rebecca explained to this new student. Rebecca mentioned a cousin who finished second on the gaokao in the province of Liaoning, and now that she’s out in the workforce she finds everything and everyone so revolting.
Empathy is central to a good English reading programme, and it’s important to help students as they struggle to understand the viewpoints of characters in books ranging from Michael Lewis’sMoneyball to John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids.
After a year, we’ve been surprised and inspired by how generous and compassionate the students have become. In junior high, Rebecca was in a class of over-achievers, and now and then she returns to see her classmates to find them still the same, while she’s transformed from fearing change and uncertainty to welcoming them. After a year, she’s a completely different person.
And that’s exactly what this new student is afraid of. That evening, she spoke passionately about her quest to be a brilliant painter, while showing utter contempt for her new classmates: ‘All the girls talk about is make-up and their boyfriends!’ she shouted at us. ‘And the boys – they want to hang out together on weekends. I can’t stand them!’
I sympathized with this new student’s artistic obsession, and so I patiently explained to her that being a brilliant artist is not just about devoting yourself single-mindedly to your art, as Nina had done in ‘Black Swan.’ It ultimately requires decades of open-ended inquiry and learning so that failure, change, and difference can mould you in a way that will permit you to import diverse modes of thinking into your art, and thus create something startling and striking.
Hearing these words, this new student’s face became less tense, and she slowly smiled.
I could have told her that we would introduce her to books and activities that would expand her comfort zone, and that we would teach her that empathy isn’t about losing your individuality. It is essentially about reaching out to others to import the lumber and the steel and the concrete from which to build the internal support for one’s mental architecture, from which individuality can stand and rise. Empathy constantly expands one’s mental framework, permitting the learning of new ideas, but also the marshalling of primal passions.
Nina went insane because she delved deeper and deeper into her innermost core of raging passions without the support that empathy could provide. Put simply, she fell off the edge because she had no friends to cling to.
But I didn’t say any of this because I could see she was smiling not because she was agreeing with me, but because I seemed to be begging her to stay. All her life, as a top student, she had been praised by her teachers and her parents, and this praise had only narrowed her mental framework to the point where it now risks implosion.
I had hoped that having Rebecca hold out her hand to this new student from across the table would bring her over. But it’s this new student’s choice whether to cross, and ultimately my responsibility is to those who have chosen to do so.
So I sent this new student and her mother away, knowing I’ll probably never see them again. And I began preparing my first lesson for the new semester.
Seeing that Nina has stabbed herself, her director asks ‘why?’ with a look of painful shock. ‘I wanted to be perfect,’ Nina whispers.
Nina was at the back of my mind as I sat in my office on the Sunday evening before the start of school. Seated with me around a conference table were a new student and her mother, as well as Rebecca, a student who has studied with us for a year now. Earlier that day, this new student’s mother had called me, anxiously telling me that her daughter wanted to drop out. Anxious myself over the start of school, I explained to the mother that her daughter was probably overcome with anxiety about enrolling in an unproven programme.
When we all convened that evening, this new student told us so herself. She’s never lived away from home, and she’s accustomed to strict competitive schools, where her classmates never even thought about dating, let alone discussing it in front of their roommates, which is what a couple of her new classmates did during the week of mandatory military training before the start of classes. For that one week, this new student was tormented by doubts and concerns: Will her new classmates be focused? Will her classmates’ bad habits infect her? Will teachers dumb down the material?
Rebecca was seated directly across from the new student, and explained to her that a year ago, she was sitting in exactly the same seat. A year later, she appreciates that the ability to remember someone’s name and befriend them is more important than the ability to memorize math equations and win math competitions. Before, Rebecca expected and demanded that all her classmates be just like her, but now understands that in a class with difference and diversity, she can learn as much from her classmates as from her teachers.
Perfection is a dangerous obsession, Rebecca explained to this new student. Rebecca mentioned a cousin who finished second on the gaokao in the province of Liaoning, and now that she’s out in the workforce she finds everything and everyone so revolting.
Empathy is central to a good English reading programme, and it’s important to help students as they struggle to understand the viewpoints of characters in books ranging from Michael Lewis’sMoneyball to John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids.
After a year, we’ve been surprised and inspired by how generous and compassionate the students have become. In junior high, Rebecca was in a class of over-achievers, and now and then she returns to see her classmates to find them still the same, while she’s transformed from fearing change and uncertainty to welcoming them. After a year, she’s a completely different person.
And that’s exactly what this new student is afraid of. That evening, she spoke passionately about her quest to be a brilliant painter, while showing utter contempt for her new classmates: ‘All the girls talk about is make-up and their boyfriends!’ she shouted at us. ‘And the boys – they want to hang out together on weekends. I can’t stand them!’
I sympathized with this new student’s artistic obsession, and so I patiently explained to her that being a brilliant artist is not just about devoting yourself single-mindedly to your art, as Nina had done in ‘Black Swan.’ It ultimately requires decades of open-ended inquiry and learning so that failure, change, and difference can mould you in a way that will permit you to import diverse modes of thinking into your art, and thus create something startling and striking.
Hearing these words, this new student’s face became less tense, and she slowly smiled.
I could have told her that we would introduce her to books and activities that would expand her comfort zone, and that we would teach her that empathy isn’t about losing your individuality. It is essentially about reaching out to others to import the lumber and the steel and the concrete from which to build the internal support for one’s mental architecture, from which individuality can stand and rise. Empathy constantly expands one’s mental framework, permitting the learning of new ideas, but also the marshalling of primal passions.
Nina went insane because she delved deeper and deeper into her innermost core of raging passions without the support that empathy could provide. Put simply, she fell off the edge because she had no friends to cling to.
But I didn’t say any of this because I could see she was smiling not because she was agreeing with me, but because I seemed to be begging her to stay. All her life, as a top student, she had been praised by her teachers and her parents, and this praise had only narrowed her mental framework to the point where it now risks implosion.
I had hoped that having Rebecca hold out her hand to this new student from across the table would bring her over. But it’s this new student’s choice whether to cross, and ultimately my responsibility is to those who have chosen to do so.
So I sent this new student and her mother away, knowing I’ll probably never see them again. And I began preparing my first lesson for the new semester.
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