This is an excellent and balanced article that explains why Asian nations swept the top places on PISA and at what cost to the students.
In the U.S., we have long had a belief in a “well-rounded” education, and many teachers believe they educate “the whole child,” thus putting concerns about social, emotional, and physical development in context with academic learning. Historically, there have been heated battles between those who want more or less emphasis on academics.
But in the test-centric Asian nations, academics come first, and some education officials in these nations are concerned about the lack of other dimensions of youth development.
It says:
“As a ninth-grader, Shanghai’s Li Sixin spent more than three hours on homework a night and took tutorials in math, physics and chemistry on the weekends. When she was tapped to take an exam last year given to half a million students around the world, Li breezed through it.
“I felt the test was just easy,” said Li, who was a student at Shanghai Wenlai Middle School at the time and now attends high school. “The science part was harder… but I can handle that.”
“Those long hours focused on schoolwork — and a heavy emphasis on test-taking skills — help explain why young students like Li in China’s financial hub once again dominated an international test to 15-year-olds called the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, coordinated by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.
“Students from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan — all from Asia — were right behind.
“Students in the wealthy city of Shanghai, where affluent families can afford to pay for tutors, are not representative of China overall, although they are ranked as a group alongside national averages for countries such as the United States and Japan. Still, they are indicative of education trends in China and elsewhere in Asia — societies where test results determine entrance into prestigious universities and often one’s eventual career path.”
But listen to the educators, who worry about what is sacrificed to get high test scores:
“Still, Chinese educational experts are taking a more somber view in the face of the stellar achievements by their students, saying the results are at most partial and covering up shortcomings in creating well-rounded, critical thinking individuals.
“This should not be considered a pride for us, because overall it still measures one’s test-taking ability. You can have the best answer for a theoretical model, but can you build a factory on a test paper?” asked Xiong Bingqi, a Shanghai-based scholar on education.
“The biggest criticism is that China’s education has sacrificed everything else for test scores, such as life skills, character building, mental health, and physical health,” Xiong said.
“Even the party-run People’s Daily noted the burden on Shanghai students. “While many countries have been urged to increase more study time and more homework for their students, Shanghai clearly needs some alleviation,” the editorial reads.
“Japan’s education minister, Hakubun Shimomura, pointed to the test results as evidence of success in reforms aimed at reducing class sizes — despite continued criticism of the pressure-filled university entrance examination system. Many Japanese students also attend cram schools to get an extra edge.
“Asian countries do better than European and American schools because we are ‘examination hell’ countries,” said Koji Kato, a professor emeritus of education at Tokyo’s Sophia University. “There is more pressure to teach to the test. In my experience in working with teachers the situation is becoming worse and worse.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
““There is more pressure to teach to the test. In my experience in working with teachers the situation is becoming worse and worse.””
Yep, because the most important thing in the world is to be #1, Número uno!
What concerns me is that there is no mention of social studies or history in all this discussion of high stakes testing. When did social studies become obsolete?!? Teaching to the test gives our students the skills to take a test. How can this prepare our students for a career or college? And what about the students with special needs? They are given impossible standards to meet and feeling more and more ostracized; basically high stakes testing is pushing students with special needs to the fringes and saying too bad; I think we need to stop worrying about the test results in other countries and really start focusing on our own country and the state of our public education. It deeply saddens me to see so many up and coming teachers being indoctrinated into common core and race to the top policies without questioning the supposed “powers that be”
Peri, CCSS will do nothing to deflate your concerns about social studies instruction. CCSS Social Studies is all literacy standards. The idea is to make social studies a tool for increased literacy rather than promote civic knowledge and responsibility.
I could improve my students’ abilities according to CCSS without ever introducing a single item of history in my class. Content doesn’t matter. Just skills, skills, skills.
As a social studies teacher, I, too, am appalled. The denigration of social studies began with NCLB and all of the pushing for “STEM” subjects. Public education was originally conceived in order to prepare citizens, so social studies should be INCREDIBLY important, but alas, it’s not.
I, too, wonder what the plans are for special education students. The testing culture is obviously not designed to help them learn and is slowly knocking off good teachers whose student data will never indicate proficiency. What purpose can there be in telling struggling students over and over again that they are failures?
I would like to hear more from Li Sixin and her peers on what they feel about their education both currently and as they progress into adulthood and apply that education. The merits of the different educational systems are an empirical question. Claims to be educating the whole child sound good, but what is actually happening and what are the results. In the movie Chariots of Fire, there is a contrast between the systematic and rigorous approach to athletics on the part of Americans and the more amateur and natural talent approach of the British. The movie shows that there are merits to both.
P.S. Eric Liddell, the flying Scot in the movie, is one of my personal heroes. He died in a Japanese POW camp having essentially sacrificed himself for his fellow prisoners. A man of almost unworldly integrity. His biography is worth a read.
If they are alive a generation from now to verify your requirements. The situation in China is nothing short of a national disaster, with students from Shanghai forced to stay home from school because of lethal pollution levels. How will IQ and pattern recognition help them here?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/06/schoolchildren-air-pollution-shanghai-eastern-china
East Asian countries do the best on these tests because their populations have the highest average IQ’s of any large populations in the world. Differences in average IQ levels between different races/ethnic groups are substantial and very stable over time.
Jim:
What role do you think having to learn an idiographic language plays on mastering pattern recognition tasks?
I think we know far too little to be so definitive about the source and meaning of these differences in IQ scores.
Having attended the University of Buffalo which has a large number of Asians on campus, I can attest to their feelings of superiority to Americans. In an upper level math course that my husband, Paul, was attending, one Chinese student turned to him and asked him why he thought he could pass this class. Paul was literally the only non-Asian in the course, taught by a visiting professor from China.
Because Paul is a genius in Math, he was used to breaking the curve. This class was a little tougher, but he still achieved an A. You don’t have to be Asian to be smart.
PS – this was not an isolated incident – it happened several times to both of us.
Here you go with the Social Darwinism stuff again. Appalling.
That’s an interesting question about the use of ideographic scripts and I certainly don’t know the answer however I don’t think the psychometric profile and academic performance of East Asians raised in the West is that greatly different from East Asians raised in East Asia. I would guess that the use of ideographic scripts is more the effect than the cause of cognitive differences. East Asians are particularly strong on visual/spatial aspects of intelligence and maybe that makes an ideographic script easier for them.
The Japanese have had syllabaries going back more than a thousand years. The nature of the Japanese language is such that a syllabary is quite practical. To a westerner such as myself the use of a syllabary of about 50 or so symbols seems a lot easier than kanji but the Japanese seem to have no particular problem learning 20,000 or more kanji characters.
Jim:
I guess my point is that there are likely a number of genetic, cultural, environmental, practice and personal factors influencing the performance on any given IQ assessment. Can you point me to definitive empirical research that sorts these various factors out? Discussions of such research is frustratingly contaminated by various forms of political correctness and jingoism.
Some years ago when it was an absolute necessity, our economy demanded it, to emulate the great Japanese schools, if memory is correct the Japanese found to their horror that by the time their students had finished high school the children had learned two things: 1. to hate school and learning 2. How to take tests. They had not even learned the material nor the concepts, they had just learned how to pass the tests. Dr. Ravitch has talked about this that a child can parrot the answer but have not concept of what that “answer” meant or even anything about the substance of what that answer was about.
Now that the Japanese economy has stagnated for a decade or so one never hears about how we must emulate the great Japanese schools to save our economy.
The same of course was true about the USSR. When they put up Sputnik we just absolutely must emulate the great Russian schools. After we put a man on the moon, no talk about that anymore AND did our public schools then get any credit for putting our man on the moon?
Too, today the blob about the Chinese suicide rate should – it won’t – caution us about the high stakes testing program. We know how much politicians care about people when 23% of our children live in poverty, when food stamps which allow recipients a grand total of $1.50 per meal, now even that will be cut way back when the carbon companies get huge subsidies and pay no income tax – ad nauseum.
I have written about this before but way back in the dark ages when I attended college our prof told us that in a conversation he had with a French professor, the French prof asked a question. It was perhaps a toss up as to who what the most surprised, the American or the French prof. The question: how many suicides do you have after you give the finals exams. When the American said none, it was the French prof who was amazed.
I sometimes wonder what this will all lead to and am almost afraid to think about it. Thank God that some people are still fighting against the stupidity of it all.
Ellen Klock – Yes the Chinese feel superior to other ethnic groups and always have ( and probably always will). That trait might have a genetic basis as well.
Of course there is a lot of individual variation in intelligence in different ethnic groups. It’s possible to be a dumb Ashkenazi Jew for example. But if all you know about someone is that they are Ashkenazi Jewish you’ve probably got at least a 75% chance that that individual is at least bright.