This afternoon I’ve stumbled across an interesting article (via Alec Ash) discussing the Chinese secondary and tertiary education system, a subject in which I’ve been interested since my days as a high school teacher in Lianyungang and Fuzhou. The basic conclusion? The Chinese system as it is designed fails to promote critical thinking skills.
Added to my own thoughts, here are a few reasons why this point of view has some merit:
- To a large extent Chinese high school education serves as a preparation for the all-important 高考, a mandatory exam encompassing several subjects which largely determines how Chinese students place in universities. The 高考 is many times more important than the SAT or ACT exams in the US. As a result, teachers teach to the exam and emphasize rote memorization above a broader understanding of the subject.
- Chinese teachers, like their counterparts everywhere else in the world, vary tremendously in quality. Yet in China teachers are hamstrung by an inability to devise their own curriculum, or to deviate from interpretations presented in textbooks. This restriction stifles the ability of students to think differently about familiar subjects. Even good teachers are forced to toe the party line.
- Chinese students of all ages waste an inordinate amount of time memorizing the political tenets of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Deng, and other politically correct thinkers. While I think it is important to some extent for students in China to learn the philosophical underpinnings of their nation’s founding, these courses make no effort to place Marxism or Communism in a broader global context and are almost universally regarded as tedious by the students.
- For my fourth point, I’ll relate an anecdote. For the better part of my first year teaching English, I would conclude each major point by asking my students if they had any questions. Silence. I’d ask, ‘are you sure?’. More silence. Finally, one of the sassier girls in the back yelled out, “no, no questions!”. It took me awhile before I learned that my students were wholly unaccustomed to raising their hands and asking their teacher for questions. Even months of my encouragement could not undo many years of educational passivity. The problem with this approach is that students tend to accept what they learn at face value rather than think critically about what they read. The notion that what teachers teach merely represent a particular point of view or interpretation hasn’t penetrated very deeply into the Chinese national psyche, and a lack of critical thinking skills results.
It is important to bear in mind the enormous challenges China has faced in bringing their system up to international standard. When the Communists assumed power in 1949 the vast majority of China’s hundreds-million strong peasantry were illiterate. Improving this number remains one of Mao’s greatest achievements. During my trips through the Yunnan countryside, surely one of the poorest regions in the country, I have seen many schoolchildren sitting in restaurants poring over exercise books. Better a flawed educational system, I would say, than none at all.
An additional challenge in China is the vast array of regional dialects spoken throughout the country. In addition to the better-known tongues such as Cantonese, Tibetan, and Uighur, there are immense differences in dialects between and even within provinces- I know that two people from opposite sides of Yunnan would speak mutually incomprehensible dialects. People raised in the countryside tend to speak only their dialect during their daily life; I’ve encountered many uneducated peasants who still today require an interpreter to speak to me- in Mandarin. It may seem funny to a laowai that signs plastered throughout Chinese schools ask students to speak Mandarin, but they are surely needed.
For this reason, I can see why a 高考 exists. Whatever its flaws, the exam does provide opportunities for students hailing from far-flung provinces to matriculate to the country’s best schools on their own merit. Having a nation-wide exam makes sense, but why not modify its content by de-emphasizing memorization and promoting critical thinking skills? I’d be delighted if one day I stepped in front of a classroom and had a room-full of students eagerly challenging my point of view.
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