I just read an article in the New York Times on the recent PISA Test results where students from Shanghai were pretty much off the charts in every category, from reading to math to sciences. The PISA Test is a worldwide evaluation of 15 year old students issued by the OECD and has 65 counties and regions participating as of 2009. I personally never took one of these tests when I was younger, after all only about 5000 students from each country do take this test every year. However, I do remember hearing about them every year with all sort of doom and gloom stories about how the Austrian school system is falling behind, especially Asian countries.
I tend to take these kind of results with more than just a grain of salt, though. Living in China and attending university here with almost exclusively Chinese students, I can not count the number of times I heard something along the lines of “We didn’t really learn anything in high school, all we do is learn to pass exams.” And given the high TOEFL scores needed to attend the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, one would think they all spoke amazing English. And yet I still have to find one Chinese undergraduate student who can actually write a coherent and grammatically correct paragraph, let alone an entire essay. So when I read the US secretary of education Arne Duncan’s cataclysmic remarks of China out-educating the west, I can’t help but think that China has yet again fooled everyone.
So rather than panicking about how the west is supposedly falling behind, we should try to see these results in context. Rather than try and emulate a system that is built around passing standardized tests, our education system should focus more on interpersonal skills, creativity and all-round knowledge, because that’s exactly where the Chinese system, the way it is set up right now, will never be able to compete. No matter what the test results say.
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Couldn’t agree more, read the same article and thought to myself that all the people who in all seriousness want to learn from the sucess of the Shanghai students obviously haven’t been to China yet.
It is all just part of this overblown narrative of China taking over the world. They can produce numbers like this all day long, but at the end of the day, look at what happens to the majority of China’s 7 million university graduates every year. Churning out a million engineers a year is nothing but a label with no meaning behind it if at the end of their degree all they get is a piece of paper. I’ve met people who got bachelors degrees in ‘basketball management’, ‘sports english’ or ‘classical guitar’. Good luck in life with that.
Or “elite” university graduates sell pork:
http://www.chinasmack.com/2008/stories/1300-graduate-students-compete-to-sell-pork.html
:-)