What’s Wrong with China’s Secondary Education System
This post has been a long time coming. You might wonder why.
It’s hard to put this in a politically correct way for a long time. But it’s better to be straightforward and honest than trying to make a made-for-everyone presentation.
What makes me qualified to talk about the Chinese education system, specifically high schools? Not much, really, just a year of teaching English experience and a whole lot of friends in the same boat. But that’s enough to begin to see cracks in the system.
What’s Wrong with the average Chinese High School
- Too many students in one class
- Teachers with too many meetings and too few classes
- The military-like environment of many Chinese schools
- Class division according to overall, as opposed to subject-specific, test scores
- Overworked students - No time for anything but studying
- Overly high emphasis on memorization
- The joke called English education
- Resistance to change
Warning: This is a very long post, proceed at your own peril.
Too many students in one class
(Update: More about inefficient class structure in China here.)
This is the most apparent flaw in most Chinese secondary schools, and the one that most Chinese people will most readily provide as the Achilles heel of their education system. Class size is usually at least 50 and often over 60 students per class (at my school every class was about 64 students per class). Could you learn in such an environment?
The expectation is that all of the students will sit quietly and at attendance - that Chinese culture and norms will cause the students to be able to study even in such a large class. But in the real world, at least in the 21st century, this is not the case.
Many teachers are unable to control such a large amount of students. Thanks to strict disciplinary measures, such a large amount of students is easier to control than in the States, but still is not conducive to learning. You can imagine why.
However, while most Chinese people claim this is an unsolvable problem (there are too many people in China), it may not be. Let’s see why.
Teachers with too many meetings and too few classes
(Update: More about ‘under-worked’ teachers in China here.)
When I was teaching English in Shenzhen full time my first year in China, I was struck by the pressure Chinese teachers felt. They seemed overworked and very stressed out, much more so than even the management I work with in multi-national factories / companies today. So you would guess that they had too many classes, right?
Strangely enough, Chinese teachers usually have an extremely light class-load. Both the teachers at my school and those at most of the high schools around Shenzhen taught, on average, about 8-12 classes per week. And these were only 45 minute long classes. Does that sound like being overworked?
Ignoring everything else (see below), all Chinese teachers would have to do to cut their class sizes down to US standards would be to drop a wall in the middle of the classroom, and double their teaching load - which would bring them to about US levels. Simple, right?
Yet when you mention this to Chinese friends they usually shrug it off without acknowledging the simple math. Perhaps it is not possible, because people still believe there are just “too many students”.
But there is no denying that Chinese teachers feel a ton of pressure. They must be at school from about 7:30 am until 5:30 pm with a rather longish lunch break, and often have to supervise night study sessions (say 7:00 pm to 9:30 pm). All non-teaching hours are spent largely in their offices, and there seem to be a good bit more meetings than in American high schools. And of course they must grade the same amount of tests and papers as their American counterparts (based on half the number of classes with twice the number of students). So the math kind of adds up on their side as well. It just leaves the question, why not cut down on the bureaucracy and up the hours to ones that would be standard in the States?
This dilemma may remain unresolved. However, there is more to why Chinese teachers feel harried than the typical grading load and excessive amounts of meetings. Read on to find out more.
The military-like environment of many Chinese schools
Many Chinese high schools, and even some primary schools, seem more like perpetual boot camps than institutions of learning to many expat observers. Is being a Chinese student really like being in the military, though?
Morning roll call and exercises would seem to point to the affirmative. At the school I taught at, every morning students would gather on the athletic fields and perform their morning exercises. On Monday’s, the principal of the school would scream - literally - through a loudspeaker for almost an hour. He would pick out all of the bad things that were taking place - mainly test scores that were always too low - and continually drive home the point that no one was trying hard enough.
Most mornings I could sleep in a little bit, but Monday morning at 7:00 am always woke me up in a hurry. And my experience was the norm. Most principals / school directors were quite harsh to many students and teachers, only reserving praise for the most outstanding test takers and teachers of classes with high average scores.
Is an educational environment in which you are constantly yelled an encouraging learning environment? I don’t have the answer to this question, as perhaps it is the US education system which has it wrong and is too soft on today’s students. What do you think?
Class division according to overall, as opposed to subject-specific, test scores
In most Chinese high schools, classes are divided according to overall test scores, as opposed to subject specific test scores. Students sit through all of their subjects in one group of 50-60 students. And these classes are ranked, by number. In the school I taught at, there was class one through class eight for most of the grades I taught. This fostered low self esteem among the lowest ranked classes and some arrogance among the highest.
While this arrangement undoubtedly drives cooperation and fosters a spirit of unity among Chinese students, it also means that the abilities of students are only roughly matched to the classes they take. A student good in English but bad in every other class may end up in the lowest ranked class, meaning his or her English learning will suffer in comparison to someone with similar English levels in the top class.
Division according to subject specific ability is of course the ideal, one that takes a little bit more coordination and planning, but one that is necessary to really develop the specific strengths and weaknesses of individual students. (In the school I taught at, students did get to choose a ‘major’ that they spent about 20% of their class time on during their last two years of school. However, the rest of their classes were still divided according to overall ability.)
Overworked students - No time for anything but studying
The biggest complaint most Chinese high school students have is that they don’t have time for anything but studying. Is this true?
Most Chinese high schools are divided into junior and senior high, similar to the States (in Chinese it’s beginning middle and advanced middle school, but close enough). Each one is three years long, meaning elementary school is a year longer than in the States.
The first three years are not so bad, with the exception of the examination to get into ‘advanced’ middle school or senior high. And the first year of senior high is not too bad either. It’s the last two years that are killer.
During the last two years of high school, it is virtually assured that for 11 months of the year you will be at school from morning to night six days of the week - with Saturday night often free. The hours are long and activities few outside of classes. All of the years of studying culminates in a several day long comprehensive exam that determines whether one gets into college or not.
This college entrance exam tests the body of knowledge that is supposed to be acquired during the three years of high school, it is not an aptitude test. And since the test score is pretty much the only thing that colleges look at besides the amount of money one’s parents have, every year the futures of millions upon millions of Chinese students hinge on one test.
No wonder students have little time to do anything else besides study.
Overly high emphasis on memorization
As the section above let you in on, Chinese students study all day. But how exactly do they study? While things are getting better, there is still a massive amount of rote memorization going on. What drives this, of course, is the examination system that tests all of this accumulated knowledge.
It should not surprise you that long hours of rote memorization does not help foster creativity or problem solving skills. But the long hours do prepare you for a lifetime of hard work.
The joke called English education
Let me start right out by saying that not all English departments in Chinese high schools are a joke. There are certainly exceptions. However, what I and those who came to teach English on the same program ran into were a number of reasons why many English programs at Chinese high schools are quite poor.
Some of them you probably guessed just by reading the points above. Here they are, to be fleshed out in a later post:
- Excessively large class sizes for language learning
- Division of ability according non-English subjects
- Lack of well trained teachers
- Lack of good textbooks
- Teaching to the test instead of for true language learning
- Inability to change the status quo
The last point above is the same as the last point below, read on and I’ll tell you why I think there is such resistance to change in the Chinese secondary education system.
Resistance to change
Chinese schools are not much different from public schools around the world in quite a few respects. One of these respects is the strong resistance to change within the system.
The desire to avoid change is deeply entrenched within the Chinese education system. Since it would take a complete overhaul and perhaps removal of the current college entrance examination to produce meaningful change, teachers individually and even collectively as a school have little leeway to implement changes. Students must be prepared for their tests.
But even at the individual school level, plausible changes are resisted. I made a number of suggestions for how my classes could be arranged in terms of student composition, but most of them were completely ignored. In the case of material that must be memorized by everyone, this is understandable. But my course had little direct impact on student’s test scores: I wasn’t teaching them to the test.
Yet things are of course getting better as the years pass by. There is still a tremendous amount of efficiency that can be added to the current system, and many ways in which the Chinese education system can be improved. This is both a personal critique and an invitation to discussion. I hope you leave your thoughts and help me flesh out this complicated system in more detail.
My response. It’d take a bit of late night editing to paste it here, so I’ll just leave you with the link.
Trey,
I enjoyed reading your response and you make some great points. Thanks for the expanded and improved input.
We were just talking about this the other day in my grad school class; historically, there’s been a great deal of anxiety amongst mostly academia in the US about our inability to keep up with China (and now India). I think you bring up some very interesting points.
Hey Preya,
I think you are responding to the first post in this series instead of this one (which talks about what is good, relatively speaking, about China’s education system) - but thank you for the input.
We already are well ahead of China - the question is neither this nor for how long, but instead ‘what can we do to insure the US continues to move forward?’
By some measures (ie using CPI data based on the old calculation methods like those at shadowstats.com to figure out things like GDP growth rate and inflation) the US is not only not moving forward - it is falling behind. What is for sure is that competitive forces from around the world have caused US median (average wages might be going up still) real wages to fall over the past 6-7 years - and will likely force wages down in real terms (after inflation) for years to come.
Oh, sorry! I thought I was on the right page because the text right above my comment is from “what’s wrong with China’s secondary Education System.”
Hey Preya - no you are completely right. It was me that was wrong. =)
“What’s Wrong with China’s Secondary Education System”
The friggin’ goal of brainwashing 1.3 billion people! THAT’S the 800 pound gorilla in this room…
Well…I can say that you’re completely right about what’s wrong…
I have a friend in China. She says her school does not let her have a proper weekend; she has one day off in a fortnight.
Overworked? Of course.
But with more than a billion people in China, secondary schools have to overwork the students. Otherwise once the children grow up, they cannot attend adaqute universities and end up unemployed. I believe the reason for such a tough secondary school program in China is for the eventual good of the students.
And it also builds up (though it also sometimes breaks down) the student’s constitution. The overall grading system forces the student to work on all areas of progress as, after all, all areas of the world are linked together. It expands the knowledge of students in many areas of study and will eventually be helpful in the future for the students.
I taught in primary school for a while when I was a student in Nanjing. The classes were smaller than the ones you describe, but the degree to which even English was rote-learned was somewhat shocking. I remember walking into my first class to find that the students had already learned how to read all of the dialogues in the book - but had no idea how to use the language contained in them. The atmosphere was marginally less militaristic than the one you describe, but the portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Lei Feng etc. which hung from the walls did make things seem somewhat oppressive.