Growing up in China, one of my favorite conversational topics is to complain about its education system. For context, I have 16 years of survival experience and, even though it has been more than a decade since I graduated from high school, I still have regular nightmares about failing an important exam or being punished for talking too loud during a class break (both of which have actually happened). Hence, I do consider myself a subject expert. In addition, as much as I wished, I had never, by any stretch of the imagination, been a rebel at school or anything that faintly resembled one. Instead, I had always been obedient, deferential, hard-working (but not always because I wanted to), and, despite having achieved nothing particularly spectacular, altogether a model student. In fact, it was not until years later, after having discovered all kinds of alternative education systems (and having finally learned about critical thinking), did I start to look at mine critically and question its validity. To begin, has it managed to grow my interests in learning? No. Has it taught me how to learn a new subject efficiently and effectively? No, except maybe through rote learning and grit. Has it taught me to think critically and form a well-rounded and multi-faceted opinion? Hahahaha… Has it taught me to be curious and open-minded? Why bother given that one has no say in what to learn next? Has it helped me realize my full potential? If one’s potential is only measured by the test results, I suppose in my case, it did all it could. Has it prepared me for life after schools like career and emotional intelligence? Nope, it’s by design out of scope. And finally, has it taught me to be a kind, just, ethical, and useful citizen to the society? Well, I was fortunate enough to have some exceptional teachers who have influenced me beyond my studies and motivated me to be first and foremost a good person, but I have also met a few from whom I learned that one needs to pay respect to the authority even if it doesn’t deserve any. So the answer is mixed.
Before going any further, I think it’s worth noting that many of my opinions on the school system in China may very well apply to those elsewhere, but since I’ve only had experience in the former, I’m going to focus on what I know the best.
For background information, in China, education is mandatory from elementary school to middle school (9 years in total). At the end of the middle school, all students are subject to a very important exam known as 中考 that will decide whether they can advance to high school and, more importantly, to which high school as the quality of schools vary significantly. If students fail this exam, they can choose to either go to a technical high school to learn specific occupational skills (as opposed to academic) or end their education since it’s no longer mandatory. For those who manage to get in an academic high school, they will spend another three years sweating away until they face another, even more important, exam known as 高考 to determine what college they can get in (if at all). I can not emphasize enough the significance of 高考. Ask just about any Chinese who has sat this exam and it is guaranteed that they will give you a dramatic recount of how gruesome, stressful, painful, exhausting, soul-crushing, and altogether nightmarish the whole experience is, and how it is possibly still the hardest thing they have ever had to go through in life. (If you don’t have anyone to give you a first-hand testimony, you can check out these YouTube documentaries.) In my experience, throughout my 3 years in high school, we were literally locked up in school from 8 am to 10 pm every day for 6 days a week. Hence, it is no surprise that, once the exam is over, the students go crazy. Aside from the normal partying, drinking, and playing video games for days without sleeping, there are also all sorts of cathartic rituals like destroying textbooks. To many of us, except those who decide to spend another year to retake the exam, our mission as a student is accomplished.
But is it? What has the world’s arguably toughest education system managed to teach us? And what has it failed to?
I’ll start with the positives. In my opinion, what it absolutely succeeded to teach us is a growth mindset and the value of hard work, which did not become evident to me until I moved to the US and discovered the American style of education, in which teachers and parents, through repeated encouragement, strive to instill a sense of self-confidence on the students’ own intelligence. In this system, children are frequently being told to be smart and special despite the size of the actual achievement. As a result, many children grow up to be confident and self-assured but only in their comfort zones. What is lacking is a growth mindset, a term coined by Dr. Carol Dweck, in which students do not rely on their established sense of intelligence and, instead, “believe they can get smarter” and “understand that effort makes them stronger,” and thereby unafraid to take on new challenges. In particular, researchers found that “telling children they are smart encourages a fixed mindset, whereas praising hard work and effort cultivates a growth mindset.” This, inadvertently or not, is the biggest achievement of the Chinese education, which takes it to an extreme. Growing up, I have very rarely heard anyone praising us to be smart. Instead, we were told that being smart can only help us in the short term and, to achieve long-term success, we have to bite the bullet and work our asses off. In fact, the Chinese culture itself values and glorifies hard work (or hardship in general). From a very young age, when our western peers were reading about princes and princesses, we were told to read all sorts of supposedly inspiring stories of ancient people who, despite their humble roots, managed to become literary giants or prestigious government officials (the two were often equivalent), all thanks to their determination and hard work. Even today in modern China, everyone loves a good motivational fairytale like this. Self-made millionaires like Jack Ma are practically national heroes, who inspire a generation of young entrepreneurs to put in a ridiculous amount of hours to beat their competitors on perseverance, which, according to the education we received, guarantees eventual success.
But does it? Does the mindset work in all circumstances? Like most of the strategic guidance, it only works in a culture where the majority of the people share the same belief. In China, for sure. But in a different culture where spontaneity, boldness, and quick-wittedness are valued, people who prefer to quietly sweat away in the background are viewed rather unfavorably. Like many Chinese immigrants to America, I have years of my own experience on this possibly biggest cultural shock between the two countries. After having been taught for years to be modest, discreet, and simply to shut up and work, we naturally fall into the classic stereotype of Asians who speak the least and work the hardest, hoping that our American bosses would one day notice our hard work and compensate us accordingly, which, we both know, almost never happens. Instead, in our performance reviews, we are being labeled accordingly as model employees but lone wolves who lack communication and cooperation skills (which has literally been my own feedback for years). Some of us (me included for a while) consequently developed negative sentiment towards some of our coworkers who seem to be technically inferior but disproportionately appreciated due to their outspoken nature. But is it really unfair or is it in fact a cultural misunderstanding? If it’s mostly the latter, do we need to change ourselves in order to play the new game? Is it worth it? This, again, contradicts another traditional value of ours that denounces utilitarianism (despite the fact that many of us are paradoxically ultra-utilitarian). At the end of the day, this is neither a criticism to the American work culture nor one to the Chinese education. Instead, this is simply another reminder that, in the age of globalization, sometimes it serves nothing to guard one’s own values and traditions.
Now I’ll move on to the negatives. First and foremost, our education failed to teach us critical thinking, which is not totally surprising because it directly contradicts our value of consensus and our emphasis on communitarianism. Unlike certain western education in which students are taught that their voices matter and that it’s important to develop one’s own opinions on everything, in ours, we are taught that there is a single standard answer to just about everything, not just to scientific facts, but also to subjective matters like how we should feel about and critique a piece of artwork or a historical event. For example, I vividly remember that all our exams on literature include questions like “what do you think the author tried to express in this passage?” Despite the suggestive phrasing, the first thing we learned was that it was absolutely a trick question in that it cared nothing about what we think. Instead, there were always a set number of key points that we were expected hit and, if we missed any of them, we would lose points accordingly. (Not to mention that many of the points were derived out of context by educators and were used to propagate a certain political doctrine.) Unsurprisingly, under this rigid system, creativity and imagination are discouraged and penalized while conformity and imitation are strictly reinforced. That being said, I do believe that Chinese are among the most passionate and creative people in the world. It’s just that, when it comes to formal education en masse, it has become an unspoken rule that one needs to tune those qualities down in order to survive and profit from the system. As my high school teacher frankly pointed out to us discontented adolescents, “You want to change the school system? First follow the rules to get a diploma. Only then will people listen to you.” The question though is how many of us would still remember to, care to, or even able to after finally gaining a voice, and even so, whether we would in fact be heard.
Second, it failed to help us develop interests and curiosity in new subjects. This obviously depends on the teachers but, being measured solely by their students’ test performance, many teachers choose to jump straight into the test preparation mode without bothering to demonstrate to us why a certain subject is interesting and worth learning. After all, why should we care? We have to study it one way or the other. However, we are not robots waiting obediently to be trained and external pressure and immediate rewards rarely guarantee profound learning in the long run. Take me as an example, personally, I disliked math throughout my school years because I simply did not see the point of learning it other than the fact that it was a stable in every single exam. It was not until, rather ironically, I became a data scientist and decided to give the subject another chance did I start to discover its joy. I remember reading books like How Not to Be Wrong and The Joy of x years after school and wondering how come none of my math teachers ever attempted to present the seemingly complex subject in such an accessible and entertaining way. Well, because at the end of the day, no one cares about how you learned anything, whether with an insatiable curiosity and self-motivation or, as in my case, with reluctance and bitterness, as long as you know how to solve those obscure and lifeless problems in an exam paper. This is of course not to say that math is of interest to none of my classmates. In fact, plenty of them are passionate and gifted in it and had discovered its joy long before I did. But the problem is such incredible passion, gift, and joy should not be only limited to them. What about the rest of us to whom these qualities do not come naturally? Too bad, you just have to find a way to persevere or, if you can, develop some interests yourself. I may sound entitled but isn’t that the school’s job? Such mentality inherently prohibits continuous learning. Why would anyone still hit the books after 高考? In the end, what was enforced and ingrained in me is that many of what I was learning were dull and meaningless but I just had to power through them so that I wouldn’t have to touch them ever again. At last, the strategy worked, but in retrospect, I feel robbed of a real education.
Lastly, it demands us to be unnecessarily competitive. This is not entirely a criticism to our education because the Chinese society by itself is hyper-competitive due to the large population and the limited resource. Nowadays, children are forced to prepare for school entrance exams as early as before finishing kindergarten (and if you think our kindergartens are all fun and play, you might as well believe our schools are nothing but a breeze). As a consequence, unlike American children who are reassured to be better than the others, we are told that we need to be better than the others before we were even psychologically ready to internalize what that means. After having officially started school, competition is reinforced in every aspect. In my experience, starting from middle school, we would have regular monthly exams where all core subjects were tested. Afterwards, the numeric grades, ranging from 0 to 100 with a precision of 0.5, were used to rank all the students and the result was often shared publicly. The message is clear: swim or drown. The direct negative impact of this hyper-competitiveness is evidently the underdeveloped cooperative skills. After all, why should we cooperate when we were being evaluated individually even in the rare occasion of working in a team? Whenever I encounter stories about young Chinese startups doing everything they can to beat their competitors, lacking a startup mindset myself, I question out loud the necessity and the benefits. Why do we have to burn all that money, reinvent all those wheels just to reproduce the same product 30 times? In what sense is such a competition necessary? How is this not wasteful? And if I may, why can’t we just cooperate? Our entire history and education taught us to be vigilant and there exists a sense of urgency and excitability in many of us, but is it time now to take a step back and think if we are, quite possibly, overdoing it?
After having complained extensively, it is now logical for me to opine what a good education system should look like. Most people would agree that an ideal school should be customized and tailored to each individual student’s needs while all remaining accessible to everyone. However, you and I both know that it’s practically impossible (unless if you are fortunate enough to be born in Finland). In China, it is very common to have a class of more than 50 students and a grade of more than 10 classes. Due to the shortage of teachers, one teacher is often responsible to teach at least two classes. Under this circumstance, how does one expect to have a “customized” education? Of course, if your parents can afford it, you can always go to one of those elite private schools where the class size is much smaller and the teachers are more attentive. Or you can stay in a crowded public school but afford private tutoring elsewhere. Personally, I’m against such elitism because I believe education should fundamentally be accessible to all, and, in the age of Internet, it shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve after all. Instead of using AI to develop dystopian surveillance cameras to scan students’ facial expressions in class, why can’t we use it to make sure the lessons are worth paying attention to in the first place? To be fair, there exist indeed many Chinese startups aiming to disrupt the education industry, but, being for-profit companies, they usually come with a price tag and certain compromises. Yet, even in mass education like ours, it doesn’t take much to provide a superior experience. All it takes are good teachers who not only excel at teaching but can also positively influence their students beyond the knowledge at hand. As a result of the test-driven learning style, I remember today very little of what I learned in the past but I do vividly recall all the teachers who have kindly acknowledged me and encouraged me to pursue the kind of career that I wasn’t aware that I would be capable of.
That being said, I was also fortunate to be one of the “good” students thanks to my decent grades. For those who were less fortunate, they were usually purposely ignored and ostracized by the teachers and, under their open encouragement, by their peers too. In particular, it is a rather common practice for teachers to assign seats to students based on their test scores and intentionally group those who score the lowest together and place them at the far end of the room while advising the rest of the class to not hang out with them. I did not recognize the cruelty in this treatment until years later. In a way, it is equivalent to pushing the lower class citizens out of a city and rejecting them from the mainstream society. As long as they are not seen, everything is going smoothly, no one is being disturbed, and the system works. It is shocking how our education foreshadows and prematurely defines our future and effectively prepares us for a consensus-driven society that determinedly eradicates misfits and naysayers.
This, in my opinion, is the crux of the problem with our education. Instead of educating students for the sake of educating them, we use it to select the best and the brightest, by conventional standard, and filter out those who fall short. Under this mindset, learning ceases to be fun. In fact, it’s not even about acquiring knowledge anymore. Instead, it becomes a long, painstaking process to prepare ourselves for this single, common evaluation. Hence, it is no surprise that we used to compare classrooms to battlefield and ourselves to soldiers. Yet, we refrain from extending the metaphor any further to calling each other enemy even though doing so would have only been logical. We didn’t because we felt a strong kinship and comradeship among ourselves, because we understood each other, and because we needed support and encouragement from each other since we weren’t receiving enough from our teachers. This is perhaps the biggest paradox and miracle produced unintentionally by our education: when thrown in a “hunger game” situation, instead of turning our backs and sabotaging each other, we built friendships and learned compassion instead.