I met Greg in my Dispute Resolution class. He’s a high school teacher. His dad is a retired school principal and mum is a retired nurse.
He was telling me about a life-changing experience. Jill, another person in our class, had led a three week trip to China. On this trip, he and about thirty other teachers saw the huge need for teachers and resources in the Chinese education system.
When Greg got home, he persuaded his newly retired parents to spend six months teaching in China. When they agreed, he organised for them to go over.
Greg tells me that the Chinese and Australian education systems are very different. I suspected this already. He explained that the systems have developed to meet the different needs of the countries. In China, there are so many people and the competition is so fierce that schools are highly disciplined. Students do not question the teacher. The emphasis is on rote learning.
Greg’s parents found this to be an alien environment but they did their best to adapt. Greg’s father is an English teacher. One Friday, in an effort to encourage creative thinking in his Grade 5 students, he set them an assignment: “You have won one million yuan. How will you spend your weekend?”
One million yuan is about AU$160 000. One million yuan is about 125 times what the average urban dweller in China would earn in a year. It’s a lot of money.
On Monday, the students submitted their essays. Something interesting had happened. Greg tells me that 95% of students had described their normal weekends. They did their homework, saw friends, went to the movies. Oh, some of them bought some extra DVDs and computer games but that was it.
What does this mean?
Apparently, the most creative response was from a small boy who wrote that he would spend his one million yuan on grenades and guns. He wanted to go to Iraq to fight the Americans.
Man that is so sad! 🙁 With one million yuan you can purchase a small tactical nuclear warhead from one of the collapsed soviet states and blow up your enemies from a distance! What are they teaching in schools these days?!
PS I think this system is reflective of many asian educational systems and also has to do with the generic asian cultural values (respect for elders etc). This is an incredible strength (eg. Korean children are infinitely better artists technically when compared to western children of the same age) but also an enormous weakness (the same Korean children can ONLY draw the one thing, the one way – and all of them do it exactly the same, comapred to the western child who does numerous illustrations of technically lesser quality, but with greater imagination. What do we value? Confirmity or Creativity?
An interesting story! What’s going on here? Conformity!
Even children know one must say the right things to people in power at all times to survive. In China this influence is stronger for the obvious reasons and for mainland chinese no doubt has genetic component as long periods of authoritarian cultural conformity marginalise genes for nonconformity.
These children are in a very awkward position. They must conform to Chinese adult expections. They must conform to their Chinese peers expectations and they must also conform to the expectations of a western teacher. They must conform in all these ways concurrently. This places suffocating constraints on the search space of possible acceptable answers. The youngest child, lacking social sophistication, came up with his creative answer because he didn’t head the newer constraint (westernism).
Long periods of traditional, stable civilisation makes people culturally and genetically boring, conformist, pecunary, nonviolent, controlled and po-faced (strangers are not a rare treasure, but a waste of energy, don’t even bother to smile!).
http://iq.org/
Someone I told this story to suggested that perhaps the Chinese students were content with their lives and did not believe their lives could be enriched further with more money.
(Although, if someone suggested they could take a trip to Disneyland, they might realise they want that sort of ‘enrichment’!)
“Eviscerate the Prolitariat!”
– Stewie, Family Guy
Seemed like an appropriate comment to make.
I get it now!