by Lenora Chu
“Before there was only cold water?” I asked.
“Yes. We thought cold water could enhance the endurance and willpower of the students,” Dai said, with a chuckle that, for the first time, hid a bit of nervousness. “But we’re more humane now.”
And the demands kept coming, Dai said. One group wanted recycling bins. Another targeted teacher perks, including elevators that have been off-limits to students, who have toted books up multiple flights of stairs for decades. “Now students and teachers ride the elevator together,” Dai told me.
National Day students have even managed to lighten up jun xun, or military training, one of the most brutal physical tests that schoolchildren all over China endure. The students protested the drills as “inhumane and dogmatic,” Dai told me, and the school nixed the most grueling ones.
“What are the limits to change?” I asked Dai.
“There have been some negative consequences,” Dai said, slowly. “Students have begun openly breaking rules and disobeying teachers. China lacks a civil society, and when people are granted some freedoms, there isn’t a compass guiding their behavior.”
“Can the school handle these new freedoms?” I asked.
Dai Chong was silent for a few seconds before laughing, gently releasing the worry from his face.
“We will see,” he said. “We will see.”
* * *
Change is afoot at schools in major Chinese cities.
For decades, the education ministry has been patient, pumping out policies for reform like a talkative police sergeant that drones on and on while the crowd never listens. Yet change is happening at ground level, driven less by the sergeant and more by public schools that enjoy the funding, special designation, or political clout to experiment. Private schools also have certain freedoms (though Beijing is currently ramping up efforts to ensure they keep a government-sanctioned political curriculum). “China is in the process of reform, and we can see that there’s nothing that should remain unchanged, especially institutionally,” said Wang Feng, my education ministry source. “From our macro-policy perspective, everything needs to be modified.”
As the grass seedlings of experimentation sprout, Chinese families aren’t standing idly by. (Patience has never been much of a modern Chinese virtue.) Students are heading abroad for education in a steady pipeline that fattens each year, emptying out in the United States, the UK, Australia, and even Japan and France. Teachers and education officials are also going overseas for training, education, and work. These Chinese leave their imprint on their adopted communities and also return home with new ideas about education.
The pipeline runs into China, too. Nearly four million foreigners have come to study in China over the past two decades, hailing from more than two hundred countries. This shrinking-world dynamic is making for a global mix of educational ideas faster than anyone ever imagined, and this exchange is happening on every level: between individuals, communities, institutions, and governments.
This won’t be easy; my own little family faced a reckoning as we grappled with new ideas and an unfamiliar environment, and so will the Chinese. China’s is an education system steeped in thousands of years of tradition, yet confronting a period of unprecedented change. It’s a school system whose methods are constantly challenged but whose results—at least in Shanghai—others wish to emulate. As Chinese educators work to develop areas they believe are deficient—such as creative thinking, leadership abilities, socio-emotional competencies, and other soft skills—they must confront some new realities: To succeed means a student might sometimes step out of line. In the process, test scores might fall, lines of authority be subject to questioning, and long-held institutions challenged. Will Chinese parents, teachers, administrators, and the government be willing to accept change, and what that may mean for society?
One educator summed up the problem for me: “The Chinese want creativity and expect their children to attend universities overseas, but they have problems with boys and girls holding hands,” she said. Just as this American parent had hoped to pluck items off the menu of Chinese education—“yes” on math rigor, “no” for unblinking obedience—so do the Chinese when they ponder Western-style culture.
On the flip side, Americans and Europeans are feeling a little uncertain themselves, as politician after educator after politician lectures them about lifting student achievement.
“We need to take a strong look at ourselves in mathematics, particularly since we’re beginning to see a downward trend across assessments,” said Peggy Carr, the top official overseeing education statistics. “US students are running in place. We’re losing ground,” said John King in 2016, the US education secretary at the time. The chorus has become as loud as Blaring Bullhorn at the entrance gate, only fitting, as China holds a special place in this global dialogue. Shanghai students’ top-place finishes were so startling, in part, because the test doesn’t purport to measure the knowledge you’ve acquired but rather what kids can do with what they’ve learned. Few expected China’s stereotypical rote learners to top the rankings, and it was a wake-up call for education watchers around the world. The British also bought into the clamor for action; various education officials set goals of a top-five PISA finish by 2020, and one policymaker flew in Shanghai teachers to school their British counterparts on how best to teach math.
Yet in America, at least, we tussle constantly over who can set standards, what they should be, and how best to hold accountable those who deliver education. This back-and-forth is stalling progress; it’s clear where we need to head but the journey feels uncomfortable, as educators struggle with the perceived difficulty in raising academic levels—without sacrificing what the culture celebrates.
“How we differentiate from the rest of the world is this creative, out-of-the-box thinking, and if not stacking up on these tests means we need to ‘teach to the test,’ then I worry we will lose our competitive edge,” said Jennifer Price, at the time the principal of the high-performing Newton North High School. “The bureaucrat’s idea is they want to see scores, production of a child, the old assembly line. But how do you measure production of a child?” Minnesota social studies teacher Brian Steuter told me. Others worry that the individuality of the student will disappear, as progress ceases to have a human face, instead becoming a number measured by school and by state.
The schoolhouse grass, it appears, is always greener elsewhere.
I understand the concern, and I’ve experienced the same anxiety as a parent. As a journalist, I’ve searched high and low for evidence that creativity and critical thinking are quashed when we focus on our kids’ academic skills, and I haven’t found a direct link (though, clearly, they need time to experiment and explore). Yet I have stumbled upon plenty of research that suggests a strong academic foundation, couched in knowledge, enables higher-order thinking and even the creative process. “You can’t think about something you don’t know—try it for a moment—and the more you know about a subject, the more sophisticated your thoughts become,” said UK educator David Didau.
As we all wrestle with change, the world’s education systems are gravitating toward convergence in what a “twenty-first-century” student should look like. It’s a catchphrase that educators bandy about; we may not know exactly how to brew the magic potion, but we know what should result from drinking it. Technical abilities are important, but so are the soft skills such as leadership, creative thinking, and the ability to work with people you disagree with. “Certain competencies must be integrated into everything that’s done, but saying that is simplistic,” American education professor William Schmidt told me. “How to do it is really, really complicated, and there’s no data or real pattern of success.”
“Maybe the hybrid of American and Chinese systems is perfect,” concluded Liu Jian, the mathematician who studies curriculum for the Chinese education ministry. Xiaodong Lin, the Chinese professor at Columbia University, said that “the Chinese have gone too deep on t
he content, and the Americans are not doing enough. The systems have a lot to learn from each other.” “The pendulum has always swung from East to West, and back again,” as Chinese early education professor Zhou Nianli put it.
At the end of 2016, I attended an education conference in Beijing along with academics and government leaders from countries on six continents. I watched a Frenchman speak of teaching engineering to the Chinese, a Turkish reform director talk about obstacles to change in a Muslim country, and an Ontario education minister talk of infusing sustainability into her schools’ curriculum. It was a whirling hot pot of dialogue, and after a heated debate about “innovation in education”—a zeitgeist phrase no one seemed to be able to clearly define—an education expert from Mexico finally threw up his hands onstage.
“The speed of change in the way we educate is staggering,” the man said, before a ballroom full of attendees. “We will reach 2030 and none of the things we are talking about will be relevant at all.”
At least we’re having the conversation.
* * *
As Rainey approaches his final year in Chinese kindergarten, soon to enter primary school, I am clear on my priorities. I want academic rigor, but I don’t want him huddled over books every waking hour like his Chinese peers. I want him to learn to draw, play sports, and enjoy leisure, as well as cultivate a penchant for drama and literature and comedy. If he wants to hop, skip, or scramble on the way to retrieving a ball—diving over the couch and scrabbling under the kitchen table—he’s welcome to do it.
I want that exact middle, that convergence, or what we believe the ideal twenty-first-century education should look like. Policy makers are inching the world’s school systems toward an increasingly globalized future, but none have yet arrived in a satisfying way.
As we wait, I’m cobbling together my own solution. Few education experts the world over would dispute that in the elementary years, the content of Chinese education is robust and rigorous. The math curriculum is advanced and well developed, teachers specialize in subject areas from day one of first grade, and a schoolchild who stays in until fourth or fifth grade should acquire Chinese literacy and its nearly thirty-five hundred characters. I like the Chinese system’s parameters for academic rigor. “If you have to focus scarce energy and resources, focus on the early years,” as a Greek education expert told me.
We’ll keep Rainey in the Chinese primary school as long as we can, all the while understanding there’s a hard stop for his time in the Chinese system. I speak often with American, European, and Chinese friends in China lucky enough to have choices—whether by foreign passports, connections, or resources—and we generally agree the ideal upper limit in the Chinese system is sixth grade, possibly earlier, depending on the child. We’ll pull Rainey out, especially as the unseemlier aspects—backbreaking levels of homework, a slow brainwash of political education, crushing pressure from entrance exams—filters in.
When the negatives outweigh the positives, we will alter course. Meanwhile we’ll reap the benefits of a rigorous early education, while compensating for its imperfections as much as we can. My own childhood enmeshed the Chinese way at home with the American approach in US public schools; Rainey’s upbringing does, too, pegged with the reverse influences for home and school.
Somewhere within these constructs, we hoped to find balance.
In the beginning, I looked at the Chinese education system and saw only the bad—authoritarian teachers, rabid competition, high-stakes testing, and the anti-creativity argument—and was tempted to dismiss the entire system.
True, the Chinese have a fundamentally different way of looking at the world: When international education rankings are launched into the world, a group of critics always emerges with the accusation that such tests don’t account for differences in culture or government, issues like inequality and poverty, or the presence of special-needs children in any particular classroom. This is only natural. Over the years, I’ve met a handful of global educators who explained away their students’ poorer performance in some way. A Danish education expert told me that Denmark considered the Chinese math curriculum and decided to go another way. “Our education goals are different than theirs—we’re looking to educate rebels,” he told me, chuckling maniacally while socializing with stuffed suits at an education conference, looking every bit the rebel himself. A Russian education official told me PISA simply fails to measure what his country values in fifteen-year-old students. “We believe fundamental knowledge is more important than critical reasoning at that time, since eighty percent of our students eventually go on to college,” he said, dismissing the test with a wave of his hand. The Americans also have their self-soothing explanations, and the “no Chinese creativity” argument seems to ring loudest.
Certainly, an American teacher wouldn’t dream of shaming a student in front of his peers or locking a child in an empty classroom; indeed, she might be dragged into court. Meanwhile, the Chinese are bewildered by the American obsession with sports such as football, which keep preteen boys circuit-training on rubber tires during the hours their Chinese counterparts are drilling in algebra. Cultural differences are stark, as are disparities in what different countries value. (Not to mention that China’s is a developing economy while Americans and Europeans have generally enjoyed prosperity and power in the last century.)
But that doesn’t mean we have nothing to learn from each other. To their credit, despite their dismissals of the Chinese way, the chuckling Dane and the dismissive Russian had considered the Chinese curriculum, and travel to Asia regularly for education conferences.
And as we argue over whether such international rankings matter, China and other countries are working to equip their kids with the higher-order skills that are important for a rapidly changing world, and are also quietly demonstrating stellar math, reading, and science abilities, at least in major urban centers. American, Chinese, Indian, Australian, and French kids are now competing against one another for college admissions spots, and they’ll later face off for jobs in a global marketplace for talent. Meanwhile, jobs for less-skilled graduates are moving to developing countries, and the opportunities that are staying in the West are being slowly replaced by automation, the experts say.
The Chinese will be catching up on all the soft skills that Westerners pride themselves on. It might take two, three, or four generations, but it’s coming. Meanwhile, far more Chinese are learning English today—it’s part of China’s national curriculum—than the number of Westerners learning Mandarin, the most spoken language in the world.
I’m certainly not advocating increasing the competitive stakes in education by testing our kids the Chinese way. I’m just saying we should consider doing things a different way. Try something that scares you—you just might be surprised. For me, that something started with shaking up my assumption about what’s possible with my child and with his schooling. Chinese Lesson No. 1 was that kids are much more resilient than I ever imagined.
The day-to-day challenges of Chinese school weren’t what we’d expected, but, surprisingly, through all of this, we have endured—you may even say we’re thriving. I’d batted down desperate fears that his schooling environment would snap him in two—and I’m certain much more of this kind of anxiety is in my future—but quite the opposite has resulted. Rainey embraces hard work, adjusts well to adverse situations, and has become an open and curious child. He has leadership skills, and he makes me and his friends laugh.
This is a gift he’ll carry into the future.
As we approached the end of the second school year, Rob and I continued to celebrate certain behaviors and compensate for others. In this way, we always had our finger on the scale. “Ultimately, I believe that family culture overrides school culture,” says Corinne Hua, a Brit in Shanghai whose children studied in the local system through primary school. The former Beijing headmaster Kang Jian told me, “I’d estimate family’s influence over character, morality, and affection of a kid
at sixty to seventy percent. Family holds great leverage.”
Recently, I’d been using my leverage to ensure Rainey didn’t become a boy who asks for permission to do everything.
“Mom, can I decorate this?” Rainey asked on a lazy Saturday morning. We’d just built a clay model of a boat and set it afloat in the bathtub.
Rainey clearly needed some retraining. “It’s your boat. You don’t need to ask,” I insisted, while my son shrugged.
Another time, his teachers insisted on holding hostage his favorite toy, which they’d requested each child bring to school. Rainey asked permission to bring home his velociraptor, only to be denied.
“Did you insist?” I asked Rainey.
“No, I didn’t,” he said, glancing up forlornly. “Teacher Song said no, so I just left it at school.” I was infuriated at what seemed like purposeless authoritarianism. I marched into the classroom the next day at pickup, beelined for the toy box, teased out Rainey’s velociraptor, and marched out the classroom door with my son’s plastic animal under my T-shirt. (A pointless maneuver, since it’s almost impossible to conceal a hard, pointy-clawed plastic animal, but the attempt to hide it made me feel less confrontational.)
On the way home, Rainey became anxious.
“Mom, did you ask the teacher for permission?” he said, right hand gripping his dinosaur.
“No. You know that I didn’t,” I challenged him.
“Did the teachers see you?”
“I don’t think so. Do you think we’ll get in trouble?” I asked.
“No—but you’re supposed to ask,” he told me.
“Not always,” I responded, voice rising a register. “Not always. You’re not always supposed to ask.”
“Yes, you are, Mom.”
“No, you’re not. The teachers don’t always know best, Rainey, okay?” I said. “But, um, keep that to yourself, all right?”