I have been following with quite some interested the discussion on the Gao Kao(高考) on James Fallow’s Blog and also discussed the issue with some of my friends who have recently gone through the ordeal.
From teaching in China and knowing quite a few High School (高中) students, I witnessed the immense pressure that they were under. My personal opinion from my observations has been that the skills needed to pass the gaokao are not the skills needed to succeed in academia or real life and hence it is an arbitrary meritocracy in which the ones that succeed the most, wind up also giving up the most in terms of creativity and independent thought.
Now, I still think that is the case, but my views on what has to change have changed. I now believe that the gaokao is probably the fairest system possibly in a country that still very much relies on bribery, nepotism and the ever elusive guanxi （关系）. So, however much imperfect the system may be, I believe it is already moving in the right direction and I believe that progress could be accelerated by greater reliance on a varied system of trial and error (something China is already trying with its experimental schools 实验学校) and extrapolating the systems that work on a national scale.
To finish, some opinions of Chinese students who just did and didn’t do the gaokao.
This is from a top student at the school where I was teaching, who is now studying in France:
I learned something from the gaokao, but once is enough, I don’t want to live through it for a second time. Yes we work 12 years for this exam, but I think it’s the exam [that’s] the most fair in China, thanks for gaokao, the kids from the poor families have a chance to change their lives. The students say that they work too much, they suffer too much, but when you enter into society, you know that life is harder than in high-school. The situation in China is much different from that in the USA and in Europe. China, as you k now, can not do exactly what the schools do in the other countries. We need to change the educating system, But step by step.
And this is from a more artistic student, whose intuitive feel for English far surpassed any “high achiever” in the gaokao system:
I was an anti (高考) blogger 2005 through 2007. But later I got tired of everything that related to it. We can’t describe the whole thing clearly to the world and the world can’t fully understand the whole thing [ourselves] .It’s a pain in my (and not only my) ass. The CEE system in China is a tool to control our thoughts, which [seems to be] much like the stereotyped writing system in Qing and Ming dynasty. [The way] things turn out,half of the students in China become nerds and puppets while the other half became “traitors” like me. It’s a little bit of an overstatement to have used the word “traitor”, but indeed the nerds will use it.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
the truth is cruel.it still can be cheated.not on a massive scale but i have some live instances.it seems to be the best way to avoid Guanxism but from things i experienced i wud say its crap.well,maybe i happened to be the one whos unlucky on this.actually,i hope the system being kept before Guanxism dies out.but it has to be devoloped into something else otherwise it wont make any difference.
hey,
i liked your articles, i hope you’ll put more in the future, i’ll keep an eye on them. (yeah, i think maybe we should start by speaking in english, as i haven’t spoken german in a long time and so we can get to know each other better now, as potential future roommates =) )
i think the scariest thing about this system is that chinese universities are very hard to get in, but very easy to get out of once you’ve passed gaokao…
so gaokao is not just a test that doesn’t make much sense that then allows you to go on to getting a challenging education that will require you to develop academic and creative skills…
most people who get into university (i’m not talking about the top ones, but i can tell you about minzudaxue) can graduate. gaokao is pretty much the only hard test you’ll experience.
that’s probably why college students have a hard time finding jobs… the diploma doesn’t have much value in itself.
and why many students spend so much time taking exams outside school (like toefl, economics tests and so on depending on the subject)…
sure, some students spend a lot of time studying things they’re interested in on their own, but still, most people do not like (or even hate) their major, and are only taking all those classes to fill in their schedule and get the credits.
I’ve been taking history classes here for a semester, well, some just come with their english exercices, or listen to music with their ipod, sleep, chat, read the papers, prepare homework for other classes, and so on and so on.
i know it’s hard to improve the quality of the education in such a huge country in a short time, but it’s not by selecting people who tested well in english rather than the passionate biology student for biology master programmes that it’s gonna get better…
the last point is a little different, though, it comes from the will of the gvt to encourage english learning (some people say that india’s advantage now is that they speak english and so they need to catch up with it, which is creating an amazing imbalance with other languages, maybe not so productive after all, kind of reminds me of “everybody makes steel, cause that’s what makes an economy advanced”), but maybe it all comes down to the same problems…….
they don’t want creativity.
hard to produce Einsteins in such conditions.
Thanks for the great comment!
I agree that it would seem like the government’s priority right now is not to push creativity. But having gone to the University of Melbourne, you wonder how creative they are as well. Most people in my major were completely disinterested in most of the subjects and just did it for the sake of getting a degree.
The times where only people who want to go to university out of genuine interest are long gone. Now, if you don’t at least have a bachelor, you have little chances in the professional world, and this has created a degraded learning environment everywhere. Let’s face it, most courses would be better off if a majority of the students would not take the course.
I think in Switzerland it is still more like the “good ol days” where only the 15% who are genuinely interested to go to university get the Matura (high school diplooma)