by Yong Zhao
Romanticized Misery
Schleicher has on many occasions promoted the idea that Chinese students take responsibilities for their own learning, while in “many countries, students were quick to blame everyone but themselves.” France is his prime example: “More than three-quarters of the students in France…said the course material was simply too hard, two-thirds said the teacher did not get students interested in the material, and half said their teacher did not explain the concepts well or they were just unlucky.” Students in Shanghai felt just the opposite, believing that “they will succeed if they try hard and they trust their teachers to help them succeed.” Schleicher maintains that this difference in attitude contributed to the gap between Shanghai, ranked first, and France, ranked twenty-fifth. “And guess which of these two countries keeps improving and which is not? The fact that students in some countries consistently believe that achievement is mainly a product of hard work, rather than inherited intelligence, suggests that education and its social context can make a difference in instilling the values that foster success in education”21
Schleicher got the numbers right, but his interpretation is questionable. Plenty of countries that have higher PISA rankings than France report similar attitudes. For example, more students in number eight, Liechtenstein, and number nine, Switzerland (over 54 percent, in contrast to 51 percent in France), said their teachers did not explain the concept well. The percentage of students attributing their math failure to “bad luck” was almost identical across the three countries: 48.6 percent in Liechtenstein, 48.5 percent in Switzerland, and 48.1 percent in France. The difference in percentage of students claiming the course material was too hard wasn't that significant: 62.2 percent in Liechtenstein, 69.9 percent in Switzerland, and 77.1 percent in France. Neither was the difference in the percentage of students saying that “the teachers did not get students interested in the material”: 61.8 percent in Liechtenstein, 61.1 percent in Switzerland, and 65.2 percent in France.22
Moreover, the PISA report seems to contradict Schleicher's reasoning because it finds that students with lower scores tend to take more responsibility: “Overall, the groups of students who tend to perform more poorly in mathematics—girls and socio-economically disadvantaged students—feel more responsible for failing mathematics tests than students who generally perform at higher levels.”23
A closer examination of the data reveals that the degree to which students take responsibility for failing in math or blaming outside factors does not have much to do with their PISA performance. Consider the percentage of students who attribute their failing in math to teachers: countries with low percentages of students saying, “My teacher did explain the concepts well this week,” or, “My teacher did not get students interested in the material,” do not necessarily have the best ranking. Conversely, countries where students are more likely to blame teachers are not necessarily poor performers.
Using Shanghai as the cutoff, the countries with the lowest percentage (below 35 percent) of students blaming their teachers for failing to explain the concepts well are Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Russian Federation, Chinese Taipei, Albania, Vietnam, and Shanghai-China. An almost identical list of countries has the lowest percentage (below 41 percent) of students blaming their teachers for not interesting students in the material: Kazakhstan, Japan, Albania, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Russian Federation, Montenegro, and Shanghai-China. When the lists are combined, the ten countries with the lowest percentage of students blaming their teachers are Kazakhstan, Japan, Albania, Singapore, Korea, Malaysia, Russian Federation, Chinese Taipei, Shanghai-China, and Vietnam. The countries whose students are most likely to blame their teachers are Norway, Italy, Germany, Slovenia, France, Austria, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland.
Among the countries whose students are least likely to blame teachers are some of the best (Shanghai, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taipei, and Vietnam), worst (Kazakhstan, Albania, Malaysia), and average (Russian Federation) PISA performers. Students who are most likely to blame teachers come from countries that earn the top PISA scores (Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and Germany) and middle-level PISA scores (Norway, Sweden, Italy, Slovenia, France, Austria, and the Czech Republic).
What's intriguing is that the countries whose students are least likely to blame their teachers all have a more authoritarian cultural tradition than the countries whose students are most likely to blame their teachers. On the first list, Singapore, Korea, Chinese Taipei, Shanghai-China, Japan, and Vietnam share the Confucian cultural tradition. And although Japan and Korea are now considered full democracies, the rest of the countries on the list are not.24 In contrast, the list of countries with the highest percentage of students blaming their teachers for their failures ranked much higher on the Democracy Index. Norway ranked first, Sweden ranked second, and Switzerland was number seven. With the single exception of Italy, all ten countries where students were most likely to blame their teachers ranked above 30 on the Democracy Index (and Italy ranked thirty-second).
One conclusion is easy to draw from this analysis: students in more authoritarian educational systems are more likely to blame themselves and less likely to question the authority—the teacher—than students in more democratic educational systems. An authoritarian educational system demands obedience and does not tolerate questioning of authority. Just like authoritarian parents, authoritarian education systems have externally defined high expectations that are not necessarily accepted by students intrinsically but require mandatory conformity through rigid rules and severe punishment for noncompliance.25 More important, they work hard to convince children to blame themselves for failing to meet the expectations. As a result, they produce students with low confidence and low self-esteem. On the PISA survey of students' self-concept in math, students in Japan, Chinese Taipei, Korea, Vietnam, Macao-China, Hong Kong-China, and Shanghai-China had the lowest self-concepts in the world, despite their high PISA math scores.26 A high proportion of students in these educational systems worried that they “will get poor grades in mathematics.” More than 70 percent of students in Korea, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Vietnam, Shanghai-China, and Hong Kong-China, in contrast to less than 50 percent in Austria, United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they worry about getting poor grades in math.27
In other words, what Schleicher has been praising as Shanghai's secret to educational excellence is simply the outcome of an authoritarian education. As discussed previously, Chinese education has been notoriously authoritarian for thousands of years. In an authoritarian system, the ruler and the ruling class (previously the emperors; today the government) have much to gain when people believe it is their own effort, and nothing more, that makes them successful. No difference in innate abilities or social circumstances matters as long as they work hard. If they cannot succeed, they have only themselves to blame. This is an excellent and convenient way for the authorities to deny any responsibility for social equity and justice and to avoid accommodating differently talented people. It is a great ploy that helped the emperors convince people to accept the inequalities they were born into and obey the rules. It was also designed to give people a sense of hope, no matter how slim, that they can change their own fate by being indoctrinated through the exams.
The ruling class in China has worked diligently to convince people that suffering is good for them and will bring them great success. Mencius, a loyal follower of Confucius who was second only to Confucius in status, wrote over two thousand years ago: “Thus, when Heaven is about to confer a great office on any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering, and his sinews and bones with toil. It exposes his body to hunger, and subjects him to extreme poverty. It confounds his undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetencies.”28
Historical tales of hard work that brings success have been passed down for centuries in Chi
na; parents and teachers still tell them every day. For example, Sun Jing in the Han dynasty studied day and night. He tied his hair to a beam so that when he fell asleep and dropped his head, the pain would wake him up. He became a successful and famous politician. There was also Su Qin, a well-known minister in the Warring States period (476–221 BC) whose success came from studying hard. To stay awake, he would jab his side with an awl.
Poverty should not matter, Chinese tradition insists. Kuang Heng became the prime minister in the Han dynasty by studying hard, even though he was born in extreme poverty. He could not afford lamp oil, so he made a hole on the wall and studied in the light of his neighbor's lamp. Che Yin, another poor child who could not afford oil, became a powerful government official in the Jin dynasty (265–420); he caught fireflies and put them in a transparent bag to use as a reading light. His contemporary Sun Kang read his books using reflections from the snow.
Accompanying these stories are abundant Chinese sayings about the necessity and possible outcomes of hard work: “Diligence makes up for stupidity”; “Stupid birds get an early start”; “Diligence is the path through mountains of books; suffering is the boat that sails over the ocean of knowledge”; “Only those who could tolerate the bitterest of the bitter can come out as a man above men.”
This ploy has been successfully forced on the Chinese people and their children for centuries, and now it is being romanticized by observers such as Andreas Schleicher. “Chinese and Japanese societies allow no excuse for lack of progress in school; regardless of one's current level of performance, opportunities for advancement are always believed to be available through more effort,” wrote Harold Stevenson and James Stigler more than twenty years ago in their book Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education.29 In contrast, Americans have been said to hold the assumption that achievement comes from innate ability rather than effort.30 As a result, it is believed that struggle and tolerance for hardship are valued in China but avoided in the United States.31
Sold on the idea that effort can trump any inequalities, Chinese parents and schools subject their children to extreme hardships, some amounting to child abuse. The controversial book Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother by Yale law professor Amy Chua offers a mild version of what a Chinese parent might do to her children.32 Following Chua's book came the Chinese Wolf Dad, whose motto is “beat the child every three days and they will be admitted to Peking University.”33 Xiao Baiyou, a Chinese businessman, wrote a book sharing the wolf-dad parenting approach that smoothed his three children's way into one of China's top universities. He believes wholeheartedly in the Chinese tradition of education. His children were not allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities. When one showed an interest in studying plants, he said, “You can have your personal interest, but only after you pass the exam to college.” He also firmly believes that his children did not need to make any friends before successfully getting into college.
Xiao devised a system with seven principles of beating his children:
Beat them less after middle school, but be very strict in early childhood and primary schools.
Beat them only with a feather duster, to inflict maximum pain without hurting the bones.
Only hit their hands and calves.
Lecture before the beating to explain why.
Make the other children watch their siblings being beaten.
Tell the children in advance how many slashes they will be given and make them count. Each wrong count adds ten more slashes.
Children must voluntarily put out their hands to receive the beating and cannot withdraw or cry.
Glorified Authoritarianism
Xiao's parenting approach is extreme, but like Amy Chua, he received wide attention in China, with hundreds of media interviews, lectures, and book signings. In many ways, his approach is a realization of the “poisonous pedagogy” described by the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller in her book For Your Own Good. The basic principles of the “poisonous pedagogy” are as follows:
Adults are the masters (not the servants!) of the dependent child.
They determine in godlike fashion what is right and what is wrong.
The child is held responsible for the adult's anger.
The parents must always be shielded.
The child's life-affirming feelings pose a threat to the autocratic adult.
The child's will must be “broken” as soon as possible.
All this must happen at a very early age, so the child “won't notice” and will therefor not be able to expose the adults.34
According to Miller, this “poisonous pedagogy” was practiced in nineteenth-century Germany and was responsible for producing such authoritarian figures as Adolf Hitler. Its spirit continues today. David Gribble, a British veteran educator and author, translates the principles for educators in his satirical novel A Really Good School:
Teachers are the masters of learners.
The school determines what is right and wrong.
The school provides everything that a reasonable parent could desire.
Children's enthusiasm and curiosity are threats to authority.
Human behavior is driven by competition.
The body is disgusting.
Emotional problems are irrelevant when you are in the classroom.
If anything goes wrong, it must be the boy's fault.
To implement these principles, Gribble suggests the following methods:
Unwelcome behavior must be prevented by punishment.
Teachers must be respected simply because they are teachers, whatever their failings.
Learners must be humiliated so they become eager to please.
No teacher must ever show affection for a child.
Any boy who asks for more must be ignored.
Boys must be ranked in everything.
A master must not consider what a boy feels; he only needs to correct what the boy does.35
These principles and methods are supposed to be seen in a “school so awful that it could not possibly exist,” but such schools do exist, and in great abundance, in China.36 In fact, the entire Chinese educational system endorses the poisonous pedagogy. At the system level, Chinese education holds that:
The government (state) is the master of its citizens and by association its children.
The government (state) determines what is right and wrong.
The government (state) provides everything that a reasonable parent could desire.
Children's enthusiasm and curiosity are a threat to authority.
Human behavior is driven by competition.
Emotional problems are irrelevant when you are in school.
If anything goes wrong, it must be the people's fault.
When implemented, these principles translate into:
A uniform national curriculum
A high-stakes examination (the college entrance exam)
A hierarchically organized educational system to implement the curriculum and prepare for the exam
A tightly controlled, well-trained teaching force to make sure all children comply with what is expected on the exams
Unsuspecting children and parents forced or drawn to eagerly embrace the precious opportunities doled out, through a miserable and grueling process, by an authoritarian government
These are the features endorsed and celebrated today by Western observers such as Marc Tucker in the book Surpassing Shanghai, Thomas Friedman in numerous columns in the New York Times, and Andreas Schleicher in his many interviews and writings about the Shanghai miracle. Instead of seeing these features for what they are, powerful ways to control people, these pundits want Western countries to emulate China's traditions simply because they are the secret to Shanghai's PISA performance.
Why Not Emulate Shanghai?
It is almost absurd that this book needs to be written and this question asked, because for over a century, China has been trying to re
ject its own educational system and replace it with the education that produced the more developed economies in the West. But the question does need to be raised because of the widespread misinformation about Chinese education, the seductive misinterpretation of China's economic and educational achievements, and the misguided popular recommendations for Western democracies to copy China.
No one would disagree that the world needs excellence in education. But what defines excellence? There are two paradigms: employee oriented and entrepreneur oriented.37 While both aim to prepare children to live successfully, the former focuses on transmitting a body of knowledge and skills predetermined to be valuable, and the latter emphasizes developing the potential of each individual child. The former presumes that the necessary knowledge and skills can be determined by predicting the needs of the society and the economy, while the latter assumes that a child whose potential is developed will become valuable in her own way. Employee-oriented education values what children should learn, while entrepreneur-oriented education values what children would learn. Employee-oriented education prepares children to fit existing jobs, while entrepreneur-oriented education prepares children to take the responsibility of creating jobs.