A fundamental difference between Chinese and US education
Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 12:04AM 
Lovely bit:
Zheng Yue, a young woman from China who is teaching her native language to students in this town on the Oklahoma grasslands, was explaining a vocabulary quiz on a recent morning. Then a student interrupted.
“Sorry, I was zoning out,” said the girl, a junior wearing black eye makeup. “What are we supposed to be doing?”
Ms. Zheng seemed taken aback but patiently repeated the instructions.
“In China,” she said after class, “if you teach the students and they don’t get it, that’s their problem. Here if they don’t get it, you teach it again.”
China, we are told, wants to teach the world Mandarin, so it's sending several hundred teachers here to teach in US schools, subsidized by the Chinese government. US school administrators visit Chinese schools in reply.
I think this is inevitable and good, strengthening bold sides and increasing understanding. It is hard to imagine a global culture a generation hence that isn't as infiltrated by Chinese and today's is by Japanese--the exporters of cool. Nothing quite makes a culture feel secure in its own accomplishments than to have their ways incorporated by other cultures.
Reader Comments (2)
Hi Tom,
We once had similar expectations regarding student responsibility less than 30 years ago.
Largely, in an effort to stem the former deliberate neglect toward students with severe physical and mental disabilities practiced by school districts and states prior to circa 1970, legal onus for providing an appropriate ( not optimal) education in the "least restricted" environment was put on to school districts. It remains a core principle behind IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act). This is Civil Rights legislation and it has been very effective. Formerly, children with significant handicaps were not being educated or, if they were, they were being physically segregated. Putting an end to that was all to the good.
Unfortunately, this concept became a slippery slope over time that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, neither students nor their parents retain any legal responsibility for the student's educational performance or even making sure the child attends school ( school truancy laws have been gutted by homeschooler lobbies in most states). The latest major Federal legislation on education, NCLB and subsidiary requirements for RtI (Response to Intervention protocol) assume that parents are absent/uninvolved, all students are passive and that the system's resources should be predominantly used to get the bottom 25 % to 5 % to perform at minimally acceptable standards - the 5 % category being made up of students with cross-categorical problems, including invariably, severe emotional and behavioral disturbances.
(Actually, the background reason for RtI is Federal cost-control because it greatly reduces the number of students eligible for special education services - which the Federal government is supposed to subsidize by law- by delaying such identication until a student has failed to respond to any tier of intervention with supporting documentation and data - a process that might take years)
Treating the general population of students as if they were legally disabled removes any accountability for student academic performance and tends to create the same "grade inflation" effect that has plagued higher education, sort of a "Lake Wobegone" syndrome where unless you are mightily screwed up, even very mediocre performance merits a "B" average because all children are above average. And parents are not shy about demanding good grades even if their child's work is subpar or missing.
Can't see this system fine-tuning American students for a globally competitive world. Or countries like China or India adopting it.
So, they are not just going to roll over and learn English? How inconvenient. The Indians,at least, had the good sense to be colonized by the British and gladly gave up their native dialects.
I have been married to a French teacher for 42 years and managed to learn only to ask for "Two white wines please." Got me through two trips to France. I'll Just skip China.