NYRB: "The Myth of Chinese Super Schools" by Diane Ravitch

[Jim__]

A review of Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World by Yong Zhao, born and educated in China. He does not recommend extensive testing as a way to educate students. An excerpt from the review:

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At this juncture comes the book that Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation’s governors and legislators need to read: Yong Zhao’s Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. Zhao, born and educated in China, now holds a presidential chair and a professorship at the University of Oregon. He tells us that China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But, he says, it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism. The imposition of standardized tests by central authorities, he argues, is a victory for authoritarianism. His book is a timely warning that we should not seek to emulate Shanghai, whose scores reflect a Confucian tradition of rote learning that is thousands of years old. Indeed, the highest-scoring nations on the PISA examinations of fifteen-year-olds are all Asian nations or cities: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Korea, Macao (China), and Japan.

Zhao explains that China has revered a centrally administered examination system for at least two thousand years as the sure path to professional esteem and a career in government. A system called keju lasted for thirteen hundred years, until 1905, when it was abolished by the emperor of the Qing dynasty. This system maintained Chinese civilization by requiring knowledge of the Confucian classics, based on memorization and writing about current affairs. There were local, provincial, and national examinations, each conferring privileges on the lucky or brilliant few who passed. Exam scores determined one’s rank in society. The keju was a means of social mobility, but for the ruling elite, it produced the most capable individuals for governing the country.

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China had all the elements necessary for an industrial revolution at least four hundred years before Great Britain, but keju diverted scholars, geniuses, and thinkers away from the study or exploration of modern science. The examination system, Zhao holds, was designed to reward obedience, conformity, compliance, respect for order, and homogeneous thinking; for this reason, it purposefully supported Confucian orthodoxy and imperial order. It was an efficient means of authoritarian social control. Everyone wanted to succeed on the highly competitive exams, but few did. Success on the keju enforced orthodoxy, not innovation or dissent. As Zhao writes, emperors came and went, but China had “no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution.”

Zhao says that China’s remarkable economic growth over the past three decades was due not to its education system, which still relies heavily on testing and rote memorization, but to its willingness to open its markets to foreign capital, to welcome Western technology, and to send students to Western institutions of higher education. The more that China retreats from central planning, the more its economy thrives. To maintain economic growth, he insists, China needs technological innovation, which it will never develop unless it abandons its test-based education system, now controlled by gaokao, the all-important college entrance exams. Yet this test-based education system is responsible for the high performance of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and East Asian nations on the international tests.

[Ampersand Unicode]

1. But aren't they really good at technology anyway?

Americans are graduating a glut of English and gender-studies majors who end up flipping burgers and bagging groceries. Meanwhile, the Chinese kids all seem to end up in engineering programs at MIT and Stanford, and not giving two Shih Tzus about Amy Tan novels. Heck, I read in the papers recently that some Chinese kid got his PhD in mathematics at 13.

They must be doing something right that we're not. A lot of our kids can't even read at the age of 13 while some Chinese kid is getting a math doctorate. Undergrad research papers about class struggle in the works of Charles Dickens don't exactly equate to, shall we say, "great expectations." You're lucky if you get a job stacking the holiday shelves at Barnes & Noble for a Cratchit's daily pittance.

It's not so much about making six figures as making enough to be comfortable and avoid poverty. STEM is the only way anyone is going to do that in this day and age. Not academia, not grade-school teaching, and certainly not the creative arts. We don't have a WPA-FP1 to give "starving artists" a leg up. Heck, we don't even give anything to our "warriors" anymore.