Responding to my letter to James Fallows blog, he writes:
Thanks for this. I think you underestimate the importance of the introduction of the gaokao in reintroducing the idea of fairness. It marked the end of political criteria into access to education - even children of landlords could sit it. In theory! The numbers being able to progress through the Imperial exams were tiny.
Good point on the end of politicization. I bring up the imperial exams because every time I read about them, they sound exactly like an earlier version of the gaokao. It was, of course, more difficult and far fewer people got through - but the overall idea of having a static body of knowledge to be studied that can be memorized and tested with precision because of it's absolutism and rigidity is the essence of both. I think both exhibit the same idea of "fairness" that it's supposed that most people are flunk out, even the ones who come from rich and powerful families. Those who do rise to the top come from all over the mid and top levels of society.
I think most foreigners wish we had the same attitude towards studying as the Chinese. If I put half the time into Chinese that my average student puts into English, I'd be nearly fluent by now I think! That said, it does say something bout Chinese education that students can "know" so much about English but perform so low. Even my students who have studied English for eight years (almost all of them) struggle to hold a conversation....also what is wrong with 'tenacity' - I despair sometimes with the level of work /commitment/intellectual curiosity in the 'West'. Does it produce 'creativity'? What is the benefit of not actually knowing anything???
Modern education theory draws heavily from Piaget, but Piaget seems a lot less interested in hard work for the sake of hard work, but rather students feeding their own curiosity that leads to self-discovery. In this sense, hard work feels a lot more like play... like spending an hour jumping through Wikipedia links after watching Star Trek and accidentally discovering what Einstein's theory of relativity was all about. Ramming uncontextualized, inert, and isolated "knowledge" down students throats and having them spend hours mindlessly repeating it until it sinks in is indeed hard work but it's also the "banking" that Freire warned us about. It's the "creation and recreation" of ideas and concepts, using facts, that constitutes learning.
This is bit over my head. Peter saw a part of Chinese education I've never seen: a public school taking English education seriously. We worked for the same school at the same time, but my colleagues and I worked in the primary school, he was in the high school. The only other teacher in my company with prior educational experience wanted to quit within two weeks of being starting work there. Hera told me she would cry through her First Grade classes where students never bothered to sit down when the bell rang and other teachers would walk right past without trying to help. This is the same school that left her out of a picture at the front gate of that was supposed to show the parents the "waijiao" teachers working there. Her Chinese colleagues never acknowledged her existence and never even gave her the English book they were using until I went in one day to demand it. if I remember correctly, several teachers told students to do their homework during our classes there.In some ways the access to English teaching is the worst aspect - the emphasis on reading and writing is damaging to modern pedagogy. At Nanshan [Foreign Language School] there was a trial of creating two ability sets from two classes. It was abandoned - it was a Y8 class- after a few weeks because the bottom set (?) was 'unteachable', There is a fear of disorder and chaos out there.
I think maybe that "fear of disorder and chaos" that drives a lot of the English teaching practices we see. It's unfortunate that what I think the single easiest and more important change to Chinese curriculum - placing students in a class that fits their skill level - goes so against the grain of Chinese culture and the idea of "face." Instead of using common-sense educational ideas, like step-by-step learning (which are translated into educational theories like the Zone of Proximal Development), where the top and bottom 20% are effectively learning nothing.
It's all the more unfortunate that that bottom 20% (the "unteachable"), and top 20% (who often have English at the same or higher level as their Chinese English teacher), could learn so much if they had classes designed around their needs instead of whatever it is schools are assuming about fairness, face, or effectiveness.
