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Would Chinese-style education work on British kids?

bbc.com

1–10 of 41 posts

Re: Would Chinese-style education work on British kids?

#2
This article is too short to really approach the question asked in its headline. Instead, we get a glimpse at Chinese teachers in British classrooms. The article's voice is a little unclear, but I guess it's written by one of the students.

Edit: I had trouble telling that each section was written by a different author.

Re: Would Chinese-style education work on British kids?

#3
>It is, however, abundantly clear to me that Chinese parents, culture and values are the real reasons that Shanghai Province tops the oft-cited Pisa tables rather than superior teaching practice.

Yes, there's a reason that the High Expectations Asian Father is a meme[1]. Even at home outside of school, the strict attitude of always being mindful of schooling was also made famous by the Tiger Mom author.[2]

When kids have 2 parents apply pressure like that, an inept high school football coach with a degree in General Studies could teach physics to Asian students and it wouldn't matter.

[1]http://highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com/

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Hymn-Tiger-Mother-Chua/dp/01431...

Re: Would Chinese-style education work on British kids?

#5

This article is too short to really approach the question asked in its headline. Instead, we get a glimpse at Chinese teachers in British classrooms. The article's voice is a little unclear, but I guess it's written by one of the students. Edit: I had trouble telling that each section was written by a different author.

3 separate voices, actually. One by the headmaster, one by a student, and one by a teacher. Each had very very different viewpoints.

Re: Would Chinese-style education work on British kids?

#6
Funny. Some brits look up to the Chinese system to educate their kids, but come time for university and every single Chinese parent would rather their kid go the oxbridge route than any chinese school.

Perhaps this article should be more explicit in that it involves comparison between CHinese practices and those of a subset of British schools. I went to a british-style boys school, a rugby school. It was nothing like the one in this article. We did plenty of memorization. We paid attention and worked hard for many hours beyond what is expected of the kids in this article. By grade 12 I had actually read all the major Shakespeares, read them well enough to have opinions and write papers. (First year university was a total walk in comparison.) The brits need not go to china for inspiration.

Re: Would Chinese-style education work on British kids?

#7
While China has a great and deep culture, I don't see a strong reason why the UK should look to China for inspiration for its education system. The West continues to do great things in every field including technology. I think that the increasing representation of Chinese in technology is mainly due to the fact that hard technical skills are much more transferable across language and cultural barriers, than to any inherent advantage in China's education system. And while it's great that the Chinese government wants to invest more in cutting edge research, right now the most advances are still being made in the West.

Re: Would Chinese-style education work on British kids?

#8
Chinese education kills the real genius, but does make the ordinary kids a skillful engineer(relatively), so the best kids still want to go overseas while the rest can do math better than any other west countries after repeatedly practice.

The USA education system does allow their top kids fly freely(which is really a small percentage), however the demanding on the average kids are too little, many kids gave up or drop out and could not find a decent job thereafter. No-child-left-behind can only do so much. There is nearly no grit/hard-working attitude in middle/high schools here at USA comparing to China.

Note 1: Not all Chinese students going overseas are top kids these days anymore, in fact most of them are having a rich dad meanwhile they can not stand up the fierce competition in Chinese schools. Note 2: The Chinese education system(in that sense, the India's) produced lot of "good-enough" engineers eager to fill up the H1B quota annually, those USA kids with the same IQ ended up not being a STEM engineer most likely, which is considered too nerdy or more, too hard for them. -- No pain, no gain.

Re: Would Chinese-style education work on British kids?

#10
It made me kind of sad when the British students preferred copying things from a chalkboard. I tried to implement a flipped classroom -- 15 minutes of "lecture" at the beginning, 25 minutes of group practice, 15 minutes of individual practice, then a 5 minute formative assessment/quiz -- when I taught chemistry in a low-income public high school in Mississippi. My students were really disoriented at first and preferred the less mentally-active work of copying notes or listening to a teacher... I actually had to tell them not to copy everything off my 15 minute presentations because they could just print it later or view it on their phones, and I'd rather they actively engage with the material. Many complained that they'd rather get a packet of notes to transcribe during class time.

The good news: by my second year of teaching, kids from the first year were telling their friends how a flipped classroom takes work away from studying notes and puts them into your classroom time. My students were more confident when they practiced concepts in class then assessed their own knowledge with a low-pressure quiz at the end of class. My second year I had students (and their parents) fighting to be in my chemistry classroom instead of a 30-year veteran's traditional classroom with 55 minutes of lecture.

Based on what we know about learning and cognition -- and with the way that the internet and mobile technology is de-emphasizing the need for memorized fact and emphasizing asking questions and performing creative problem solving -- I don't know why we're looking towards rote learning models to educate a 21st century workforce.

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