I picked up this story before getting to work this morning. Given the slowly awakening giant that is China, every now and again we get a story comparing Chinese ability in one field or another to European ability in some field or another. Although I’m glad that we’ve improved to the point where we’re not making racial arguments, there are some cultural arguments here that are a problem. And some inconsistent logic as well. The blog entry talks about Asians, but there are differences not just between Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, and China…but there are significant differences between immigrant populations and native populations. Note for example, how the author switches between talking about Chinese practices, and the practices of Chinese immigrants to the US. Or how the author talks about how hard the curriculum is without actually providing details. You wouldn’t know from reading his post for example that Chinese are only required to go to school for nine years, or that there are stark differences between the ability to even provide this level of education for large swaths of rural and urban China.
So when I read this entry, I did some quick reading on the context of the Chinese education system.
China’s population stands at approximately 1.3 billion. A little under 5 times the size of the US population. About 22 times the size of the British population. They barely have the resources to provide for the equivalent of a middle school education for most of their students, and they really need to modernize.
So one of the things they’ve had to do is ratchet up their education system. You can’t modernize without a population proficient in modern management techniques, in modern technology, in modern political practices, etc. But they can’t make the US equivalent of a high school education universal–because they don’t have the resources. The best they can do is create a pyramid whereas there is some broad base of education everyone gets (nine years worth), and some top tier of education that only a small number of people can get. The quickest and most efficient way to figure out who that top tier is?
A national examination. Or the Gaokao.
Now I can’t see the current numbers in this wiki entry above, but from this entry it appears as if the Gaokao weeds out fifty percent of applicants. Some 7 million take the test, some 3.5 million get in.
Oh. About that 7 million. 7 million take the test out of the approximately 125 million eligible to take the test.
And where they get in depends on where they apply and their scores.
(What’s the difference between the Gaokao and the SAT??)
Good question. The difference between the two tests and systems is simple. You do poorly on the SAT you go to a junior college. Or to a school where high scores aren’t particularly important.
You do poorly on the Gaokao? You go to work. No college for you until you pass.
Talk about weeding out!
Take that math question in the original link. You see how the question says that it is for “pre-entry” students vs. first year university students in Britain? What this means is that this question was likely asked on the Gaokao–a test only taken by the smartest and most well-off Chinese in the first place.
It’s fairly clear to everyone that the US education system is absolutely horrible, and that they do a poor job of educating most populations (not just black and Latino ones). But before we look to China for solutions, we should probably look at the Chinese educational system first.
Professor Spence,
Thanks so much for writing about my blog entry and for your thoughtful, critical, and insightful comments. I may post an update to my blog in the near future that lists some of the points you discussed.
In the meantime, let me try to provide some clarifications that may or may not change your general opinion about my post:
1) As I tried to make clear in what I wrote, the purpose of my post wasn’t to construct an airtight sociological argument. Rather, I was just trying to offer a readable and hopefully entertaining perspective of one Asian-American immigrant growing up in a major suburb in New England, and to discuss how that perspective has informed how I read about the news in recent day of Asian math scores.
2) To the extent that #1 (above) is true, I hope this explains what you perceive as inconsistencies in my logic. I don’t draw clear distinctions between the different Asian races (Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean) because, although these differences are indeed salient to my everyday life, I didn’t feel like it was that important for my purposes. I wasn’t trying to create a highly nuanced picture of Asian school systems vs. the American school system. I was trying to speak from personal experience about how cultural differences may help to explain this gap in math scores. Hopefully what I’ve said explains what you perceive to be inconsistencies in the way I describe my parents and conflate them with Asian/Chinese/Taiwanes culture; to me, they embody the culture in which they grew up.
3) Your point about the Gaokao is well taken. One of my parents took such a test and failed, effectively eliminating himself from the pool of best educational candidates. He immigrated to the United States, started a business here, and was very successful in doing so. My parents are the reason I have the life and education I have today. And if they’d never moved here, my life would be drastically different today (probably for the worse, in my opinion).
What I hope to communicate by telling you this is the same point I tried to make in my post: I’m not advocating that we all switch to China or Taiwan or Korea or Japan’s way of educating our students. I’m advocating that we create a dialgoue about the subject, so that we can acknowledge our differences in these matters, and perhaps, with time, embrace them.
Thanks again for your time, and great blog 🙂
-David
David, I think there is a great deal of positive things we can learn from immigrants, and from other nations as far as their approach to education is concerned. Thanks for (re)starting the dialogue here.
(The Gaokao sounds like it’s NO JOKE.)
I read with interest both your article and Mr.Chen’s.
My feeling is that immigrants and in particular their children have high levels of expectation and pressures to succeed in the new society and at home.
I know first hand of some immigrant sisters in an Acrobatic troupe that described to me what is essentially child abuse, from their parents in learning and excelling in their artform! (The Sisters are Americans now, the parents in China).
When you look at the numbers, a country with a population of 1.3 billion, yet 7 million take the test out of a pool of 125 million, and 3.5 million get in; think who immigrates to the US (best educated, monied) we are outnumbered by the best of the best.
This fact became strikingly clear to me when I entered a London airport some 25 years ago, and observed an housecleaning person from India cleaning the bathroom. I frankly (and naively) was shocked! In the US, most people from India I observed were…professors, or doctors. NEVER, a cleaning person or lower income…until the 7 Elevens.
I was in China four years before the Tiannanman Square incident. I observed first hand conditions of poverty in various cities. That, (being poverty) in itself remains a prime incentive for most immigrants or immigrant groups having the good fortune to come to the land of opportunity to do well!
The other thing is the mindset. The United States is seen as the land of opportunity by those outside the system. The incentives to do well, to perform, to achieve the American dream(whatever that may be)fuel the academic success of not only the Chinese, but other groups as well that are not so heavily populated.
Thanks for a great discussion on your blog!
Adrienne Zurub
http://www.adriennezurub.livejournal.com
One interesting question is how much benefit the bottom 50% get from the nine years of education. At the end of that, are they about as functional on intellectual tasks (math and reading skills as used in normal life) as American high school graduates? Or American eighth grade graduates? Or something else? If you’re not heading to college, it does seem like there would be diminishing returns to education at some point, but I have no idea if that’s 8th grade or 12th grade or some spot in-between.
FWIW, my grandmother had only an eighth grade education, having grown up pool in Illinois farm country, and she seemed to have no trouble reading complicated books, doing the kind of math needed for daily survival, etc. I don’t know how typical she was though–both her kids ended up with masters degrees and successful careers as teachers.
I guess I’m not immediately convinced that it’s unreasonable to stop proving schooling to people at some point based on their test scores. The idea of a single test changing your whole life is creepy, but don’t tell the people taking the SAT or GRE this year that I said so.
Interesting.
I’ve only done a moderate amount of thinking about this subject but I have noticed that the reasons given seem to have changed over time.
Back in the early 80s when I was an undergrad, the reason we (as minority students & as Americans) for Asian success in the sciences was that they sublimated their ego for the purposes of collaborative success. Secondarily if not equally important was that they had no social option but to succeed in the hard sciences. The practical consequence of that was that the center of the Asian social model at college was the Study Group.
Several groups of Asian students, had indeed taken over a number of study rooms in the library and booked them all the way out. It was their regular meeting place. They made significant efforts to book all of their classes together and to apply for work in the same companies. In other words, Asians were portrayed to us as people who didn’t have a choice but to succeed in very specific ways, and thus leveraged all of their free time in order to guarantee that success.
Behind this was the fact that unsuccessful Asians did not show up on the American radar. There might be Asian families living 5 to a room, but we never see it. There might be Asian families who demand that their teens spend all their time working in the family business however unglamorous that business might be, but we never see that.
I have come to accept that there is much truth in theory about limited social mobility for Asians outside of the hard sciences and medical professions.
Cobb:
Thanks makes sense to me. Without looking at this empirically, and relying solely on my memories from roughly the same era, in New York and Michigan and California, that would be a solid summation.
Why Asians are better at math(?!?) http://t.co/Yn5oTf5P