Ever wonder how Chinese students blow the roof off international tests? If you read Yong Zhao’s wonderful book Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and the Worst) Education System in the World, you know why. Test-prep, test-prep, test-prep. Officials at OECD, which sponsors the PISA international tests, insist that test-prep has nothing to do with it, but Yong Zhao proves they are wrong. One of the riveting stories in his book is about a small town–Maotanchang–whose main industry is a test-prep factory. Yong Zhao warns that the Chinese testing regime produces high test scores, but it is authoritarian and crushes creativity, individuality, originality, and risk-taking.
The New York Times Magazine contains a gripping story by Brook Larmer about what happens at the test-prep factory in Maotanchang. There are more students in the school than there are residents in the town. The students start school every day at 6:20 a.m., and their last class ends at 10:50 p.m. Preparing for the big exam that determines whether they will gain admission to a college, whether it will be a first-tier college or something less is all-consuming, because their exam score determines their life path. The story focuses on a student named Yang, who is hoping to pass the college entrance exam (the “gaokao”).
China’s treadmill of standardized tests has produced, along with high levels of literacy and government control, some of the world’s most scarily proficient test-takers. Shanghai high-school students have dominated the last two cycles of the Program for International Student Assessment exam, leading more than one U.S. official to connect this to a broader “Sputnik moment” of coming Chinese superiority. Yet even as American educators try to divine the secret of China’s test-taking prowess, the gaokao is coming under fire in China as an anachronism that stifles innovative thought and puts excessive pressure on students. Teenage suicide rates tend to rise as the gaokao nears. Two years ago, a student posted a shocking photograph online: a public high-school classroom full of students hunched over books, all hooked up to intravenous drips to give them the strength to keep studying….
For a town that turns test preparation into a mechanical act of memorization and regurgitation, Maotanchang remains a place of desperate faith and superstition. Most students have a talisman of some sort, whether it’s red underwear (red clothing is believed to be lucky), shoes from a company called Anta (their check-mark logo is reminiscent of a correct answer) or a pouch of “brain rejuvenating” tea bought from vendors outside the school gates. The town’s best-selling nutritional supplements are called Clear Mind and Six Walnuts (the nuts are considered mind-boosters in large part because they resemble brains). Yang’s parents did not seem especially superstitious, but they paid high rent to live close to the mystical tree and its three-foot-high pile of incense ash. “If you don’t pray to the tree, you can’t pass,” Yang says, repeating a local saying.
Just up the alley from Yang’s room, I met a fortune teller sitting on a stool next to a canvas chart. For $3.40, the man in the ill-fitting pinstripe suit could predict the future: marriage, children, death — and gaokao scores. “Business is good these days,” he said with a broken smile. An older man in an argyle sweater and a Chairman Mao haircut watched our exchange. This was Yang Qiming, a retired chemistry teacher, who told me he had seen Maotanchang grow from an impoverished school of 800 students, when he joined the faculty in 1980, to the juggernaut it is today — a remarkable transformation during a period when most rural schools have withered. Even so, he grumbled about the deadening effects of rote learning. “With all this studying, the kids’ brains become rigid,” he said. “They know how to take a test, but they can’t think for themselves.”
This is not what we should want. This is not learning. This is coerced slavery and submission, soul crushing molding of children to societal norms. No pursuit of life, liberty and happiness here.
The Test prep factories sound like a cautionary rather than aspirational tale. They are an example of 21st century Darwinism.
They know how to take a test, but they can’t think for themselves.
This is why so many Chinese parents (those who can afford it) are beginning to send their children to the US to small private schools . They are through with the robotic education system in China and want their children to learn to think critically. They are paying full private school tuition and letting their children live with US families. Others who immigrate here put their children in our public schools. One mother told me that she brought her children to the US because they would get a better education. My fear is that they may be in for a shock as our schools teach under the common core. Children will/ are not learning to become those critical thinkers. They are only being “prepared” to take tests.
A fascinating article worth reading. The quote by a retired chemistry teacher really resonated with me. “With all this studying, the kids’ brains become rigid,” he said. “They know how to take a test, but they can’t think for themselves.” I think there is some truth to that statement. That seems to be where we are headed.
We have to strike a balance, don’t we?
“As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can’t really function you’re so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
There’s room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be”
by John Lennon
Very soon we could be saying the same thing about our students “They know how to take a test, but they can’t think for themselves.” And isn’t this exactly what the Chinese government — and sadly, the United States education reformers, want to be the case with our children as they become adults.
Lucy, it’s already becoming true. I teach high school and community college classes in history. My community college homework is always subjective essays that require students to develop ideas and opinions. The first month is a struggle because they think there is a “correct” answer. The younger students are, the more they struggle.
It’s a by-product of the NCLB era. I asked students to rank the relative importance of the characteristics of a civilization and justify their top choice. They were uncertain about their answers because they told me they were unsure which one is the right top choice. So, yeah, we’re almost there.
Steve K, Any thoughts on the “Untold History of the United States”
(Oliver Stone) ?
Is it a “lie”?
Give us your tired, your poor, and your huddled masses and we’ll test them into submission.
I read a report that a high number of voters think China owns most of the U.S. debt and will soon take over the United States. The actual amount held by China is about 10%. Japan and Carribean banks are top holders, too, but we never hear about them. Oil producers hold our debt, which you would think lead to a frenzied push for alternative energy. And never mind the Chinese economy is deeply intertwined with ours. But voters need to wake up and realize that we are not being taken over by China, we are becoming China. Frogs in a pan. America needs to stop the paranoia and fear and again trust and respect educators. The anti government hysteria of the tea party amplified by astroturf organizations has dangerously morphed into a rejection of not just social good, but democracy itself.
I feel for those kids. I was shocked to read the test prep schools go from 6 am to 10 pm! Never say never, but I really don’t see this happening in the US. It’s not in our culture. Nobody would send their kid to school for those hours. They would just keep them home. CC is already in trouble due to testing. And there are mass opt outs. The stakes aren’t nearly as high as the Gaokao either. And many in China are disaffecting, in a much more rigid and authoritarian country then the US. I have no love for our own brand of authoritarianism, but it isn’t as bad as in China.
It was fascinating here in Indiana. Our illustrious state top “educator”, at a meeting in Gary promoted as his talking point a book by a Chinese immigrant talking about how our education system was so poor in relation to the Chinese system. I asked him about your book with which he was obviously unfamiliar.
Who knew more about our education, a Chinese immigrant or the acknowledged expert of our American education history? He was unmoved – until caught with his hand in the cookie jar and then he was “removed”.
MAYBE the public will, hopefully soon before it is way too late, wake up to what the real issues in education are and demand intelligent change.
There is a big difference between Chinese test prep and Common Core test prep: in China they memorize; in the US they memorize little –they just work out their brains on sample test items. This allegedly builds brain muscles, but there’s no evidence to support this. Both test prep regimes are bad, but at least in China students gain a residue of knowledge. In the US they gain next to nothing. So in this sense our system is worse than China’s.
I think this aspect really needs to be discussed because ed reformers are misleading people. The fact is poor and middle class families are paying for these scores. That money is coming out of their family budget.
Comparing poor and middle class US families who are NOT paying for tutors to poor and middle class families in China (and South Korea, BTW) who ARE paying for tutors is just a bogus comparison.
Maybe Americans want to devote some of the family budget to test prep and maybe they don’t, but NOT TELLING them about the out of pocket cost is flat-out deceptive.
When Arne Duncan lectures US parents on test scores he needs to include what it costs families in these countries to get those scores. That’s information we need.
“More audaciously, they opened a private for-profit wing that catered to “repeat” students — high-school graduates who were so desperate to improve their scores that they would pay for the privilege of going through the gaokao mill again. The move paid off. The “repeater” wing, which sits on the same campus as the public high school and uses many of the same resources, is now the school’s biggest profit center, with more than 6,000 students paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars to nearly $8,000 a year in tuition alone. (Students with low scores pay the highest fees — a tuition structure designed to ensure a high rate of success and revenues for the school.) “
“For $3.40, the man in the ill-fitting pinstripe suit could predict the future: marriage, children, death — and gaokao scores. ”
In the US, prestigious statisticians in perfectly fitted pinstripe suits will predict the future of our students too, but their fees are much, much higher, because there is a “value-added aura” to the predictions that are aided and abetted by institutions such as Harvard or Stanford or the University of Chicago.
The following version of predicting the future of students in the USA includes conclusions about their likelihood of being employed, staying out of prison, avoiding teen pregnancy, etc.,etc., etc,. These preductions come from a Nobel Laureate in Economics who knows a thing or two about marketing his ideas by branding and sloganeering them as “Schools, Skills, and Synapsis.”
Click to access Schools_Skills_Synapsis.pdf
What if the most authentic voices on the impact of education came not from economists, but from educators in the classroom?
We are in this quandary because the most uncreative yet money and power-driven people have control over our country right now – AKA BILL GATES. Until campaign finance reform takes place and mega billionaires are no longer allowed to buy policy, we will be stuck by the most absurd notions of a twisted, ego-centric and myopic mind.
“Two years ago, a student posted a shocking photograph online: a public high-school classroom full of students hunched over books, all hooked up to intravenous drips to give them the strength to keep studying”
“Testing in the IV League”
The IV League prepares the youth
An intravenous testing booth
The “drip drip drip” of testing prep
Is like a water torture rep
I refer interested viewers to a posting on this blog of 10-16-2014 entitled “The International Statistics That Matter Most.” I reproduce the first paragraph below.
[start quote]
As a nation, we worry far too much about PISA scores, which rank and rate students according to standardized tests. Many nations have higher average scores than we do, yet we are the most powerful nation on earth–economically, technologically, and militarily. What do the PISA scores mean? In his new book, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and the Worst) Education in the World,” Yong Zhao says that the East Asian nations have the top scores because they do heavy-duty test prep. One thing is clear: the PISA scores do not predict the future of our economy. They never have. Our students have never had high scores on international tests, not since the first international test of math was administered in 1964, and our seniors scored last among 12 nations. We went on over the half-century since then to outcompete the other 11 nations with higher test scores.
[end quote]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/10/16/the-international-statistics-that-matter-most/
Yong Zhao goes over the ‘test prep town’ on pp. 134-138 of his book. I also refer to two of my comments on the accompanying thread, one of which includes an excerpt from his book that ends “The only way China will win the global competition of the future is for the West to begin educating the way China does.”
And as an inducement to buy Yong Zhao’s book, a small teaser from the last section of the last chapter of his book entitled “WHY NOT EMULATE SHANGHAI?”:
[start excerpt]
Today the world’s measure of excellence in education follows the old paradigm. Excellence is defined as effectiveness and efficiency in homogenizing children and transmitting the prescribed content, indicated by standardized test scores in a few subjects. Schools and nations that produce higher test scores are considered to have better educational systems. Hence, China has been made the model of excellence.
But it is an excellence of the past.
To cultivate the talents we need for the twenty-first century we must redefine excellence in education. Instead of effectiveness in homogenizing students, an excellent education should support the development of diverse talents. Instead of suppressing creativity and individual differences, an excellent education should deliberately encourage and shape them. … Excellence in education should thus be measured by its effectiveness in providing personalized education that promotes diversity and creativity, engaging children in global interactions, and inspiring entrepreneurship and innovation.
[end excerpt]
(pp. 185-186)
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
We need thinkers, creatives and problem solvers.
SCARY what is going on in China. What a life – ugh! The Chinese example may be more extreme compared to what we have in the US, but when I am forced to test and prepare for testing my 5-6 year old kindergartners until they cry, all of us in the classroom feel incredible frustration and despair. The insanity of US testing madness reminds me of the Emperor’s New Clothes. We all know over-testing is damaging (teachers, administration, parents, politicians, businesses) and not providing any value, in fact, is an obstacle to a good education. So when will the voice cry out (and be heard) “He is not wearing any clothes!” I think adminstrators are in a better position than teachers to stand their ground and make their voices heard on this matter.
Quit doing the testing, plain and simple!!
Google: A Declaration of Professional Conscience for Teachers by Kenneth Goodman. It’s important and defies current deforms.
You can see what’s been going on in Asian education in videos.
Educational enthusiasm in Japan, South Korea, and China
http://jukuyobiko.blogspot.jp/2014/05/educational-enthusiasm-in-japan-south.html