Being both a high school teacher here in Huaihua, Hunan and a former Chinese high school student (This was at the Beijing Jingshan school, a public and renowned high school (see some photos from my time there here)) I like to ponder the education system of China.  Now, I know foreigners in China have a nasty habit of constantly thinking about how they would change this or that if they ran, for example, a Chinese school or even China itself – I’m certainly guilty of this sometimes, though I try to keep it to myself – but in regards to education I try to be more of a realist.  There are problems with the education system of China but as a student and now as a teacher I am constantly surprised and excited by the students and teachers.  School administrations, on the other hand, almost never seem to impress me.  My point is that I’m not one way of the other when it comes to China’s education system, there are good things and bad things about it and things that seemingly cannot be changed.  Today I wanted to write about creativity and critical thinking in the classroom and what I’ve learned about Chinese students and their teachers.

I’m a big fan of The Atlantic’s former China correspondent James Fallows.  While he may be leaving (already left?) China he still blogs about this country all the time, and always brings up interesting stories and topics.  Recently he’s been writing about the Chinese education system, specifically on the nationwide standardized college entrance examination the Gaokao (高考).  See his collected posts on Chinese education here.  This exam is the only way a Chinese high school student can get into a university, and then only a university chosen by the exam’s controllers (i.e.: the Chinese government).  This is a massive and seriously life altering exam that has a big trickle down effect on how students are taught in high school.  Lately Fallows has been posting the thoughts of both foreigners and Chinese on the exam and it’s effects on the education system.  Very interesting stuff.

By talking about the Gaokao and the ideas of college entrance reform in China Mr. Fallows also brings up the bigger issue of the way Chinese schools educate their students.  This is something I think about everyday while I teach high school students here in Huaihua.  I am a volunteer teacher at my school and this affords me almost no oversight on how I teach.  My classes use no textbook, have no final exam, and almost no one comes in to watch.  This is an odd set up for a foreigner teaching in China and it thankfully lets me teach the way I want to, with due discretion of course.  The thing is still I find myself teaching to students who have very in-the-box (as opposed to outside-the-box) thinking and this affects what I am able to do in the classroom.  There is a clear lack of willingness to be outspoken and creative in the Chinese classroom.

In my class I often have the students group up and work on a project to present to the class.  I always specify that I want creative answers and I try to set the project up so that they have to use critical thinking to complete it.  Yet their final projects usually end up looking the same.

For example this week I’ve been teaching my students about environmental problems the world faces.  While discussing the problems the students answered questions like “where does air pollution come from?” with stock answers they knew: factories (oddly cars never came up until I mentioned them).  Easy stuff.  Then the questions, “why is this bad for the environment?” and “what can we do to help solve this problem?” brought the same by-the-book answers.  They would look in their geography textbook for the right answer and didn’t think through the problems and how they are caused and could be fixed.  Air pollution, my students said every time, could be solved by planting trees and enacting stronger laws against polluting.  The idea that society’s need for cars should be questioned or that we should live with less stuff was rarely brought up.  Every class gave me the same answers, mostly bland simple ones.  Through the week I cheered on the idea of creativity and thinking for themselves but everyone preferred to write the easiest and most basic answers, even my best and brightest English students.  The students wanted to complete the worksheet, the quality of the answers wasn’t a priority.  There were some notably creative answers though, such as moving to Mars or the very Maoist idea of lowering the population through a world war.  While doing the least to achieve a decent grade is the norm for high school students the world over in China there often seems to be no other path taken.  In general my class projects always yield answers that stay well within the lines, and the students are proud and happy with this and don’t quite understand my disapproval with getting the same textbook answer over and over again.

Another example of this was written by a foreign teacher in China and reminds me similar experiences I’ve had with group skits in class.  They write about a class project where the students had to make a radio school skit (check it out here):

My eighth graders had a unit studying the radio, so I asked them to write their own radio shows. I put them in groups and told them to write 3-4 segments, including at least one conversation. Their English is more than good enough for an activity like this, and I did get several good shows, including a show where the news segment had some fake news and ended with the reader telling listeners that “some of this news may be fake, and we are not responsible for what people do after hearing this information”.

I also, however, got an enormous number of segments taken word-for-word from their books or newspapers; news items read directly from something they printed out or a magazine article; etc. Several students attempted to make conversations by having people alternate reading sentences from one of these printouts. The most extreme was when one group took a printout from a radio show and “wrote” it by changing the names. None of this was hidden – they know that I’ve seen the books and newspapers they were quoting from, and sometimes they would show me a magazine article and ask me how to pronounce one of the words. Often they’d understand the very general gist of the story but not the details, and it was very apparent in the way they said the words.

One foreigner teacher wrote on one of Jame’s Fallow’s posts: “I decided that one of the things that stifles creativity in China more than anything else was high school.”  Asking for creativity and critical thinking of my students clearly goes against the grain of the school’s teaching methods.  The textbook is God and us teachers are seemingly just there to whip our students as they plod through every page.  Even the exam essays they have to write for some classes (the best are pasted on the classroom wall) seem to be lifeless arguments they have heard or read elsewhere.  They are given good grades for such work.

I used to teach four classes a week at local elementary schools and one day I saw a teacher admonish a 10 year old student for not making a paper cup music maker exactly as instructed in the textbook.  Unbelievable!  Where I come from teachers usually never even used those stupid textbook projects and certainly never got mad at us over the way we made a class art project.  The same rules apply to English homework.  Never mind that the homework is almost entirely fill-in-the blank multiple choice questions on insignificant minor grammatical points (I can never seem to help my students on these, they want the right answer and I always see the grammar problem as having none), but when they do actually have to write sentences for each chapter’s final “creative” project the instructions have a hold-your-hand attitude that stifles almost any free thinking.

I’m getting a little harsh in my argument.  Chinese students are not uncreative, not at all.  They’re just rarely asked to be so by their teachers and parents.  The goal is always a perfect test score and spending time arguing about a grammatical point or trying out a new self-thought argument in an essay seems wrong when a teacher could just teach the right answer and the student memorize it.  Chinese education has been for a long time and still is a system where students parrot what their teacher teaches them.  At least for the most part.

I should point that due to the Gaokao college entrance examination a students high school grades don’t matter in the end.  If you are a mathematics genius you could fail your math class and still go to a good university.  I know students who have done that, though my students’ parents watch their child’s school grades pretty closely.  The parents even try to bribe us teachers sometimes.  This means that even if a teacher does ask his or her students to think creatively the student doesn’t really need to if they don’t want to.

A few weeks ago one of my classes showed me a video of their class dance routine for a school competition (one of the few times they get out of the classroom).  It was like a bad Backstreet Boys music video, except more lifeless and with everyone wearing matching shirts.  It made a cheerleading routine look like freestyle interpretative dance.  They were extremely proud of their work and had won the competition but I really didn’t see much of any creativity in it.  To them there was a right and a wrong way to do a dance and the line between the two was etched in stone.  Practice and memorization of a strict set of rules seems, to them, the best way to do almost anything.

My students board at the school and fr0m 7:30 AM until 9:30 PM are in a classroom (with short breaks for lunch and dinner).  Their life is incredibly insular and what they learn from us teachers can only be applied to exams in the classroom.  Forget about connecting English to real life (let’s learn about UFOs!) or seeing biology in action outside of reading about it in a textbook.  The fact that their knowledge is only used in getting a test grade severely limits how creative they are in using it.

James Fallows brought up a story in the People’s Daily from this month about the Chinese high school science team that competed at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.  The Chinese team won some minor honors but failed in to win any big awards.  Mr. Fallows writes:

What’s the problem?  The article discussed some obvious barriers — language, resources — but quoted a number of Chinese authorities saying that the real problem lay in the way Chinese schools taught people to think for themselves — or, didn’t. Too much emphasis on rote, detail, and following procedures; too little encouragement to reflect about the process of discovery.

Yep.

So after months of teaching in this environment of rote memorization and days spent locked in a classroom I was happy to read on Mr. Fallow’s blog that what Chinese students actually want is:

- more of a connection to the real world. They want to have the chance to do community service near their schools, such as tutoring and helping to take care of their elderly, and they also want to take their classes outside of their schools. One of the most impressive examples a student gave me was for an environmental science class being built around an effort to clean up a river, stream, or forest near the school.

- the chance for social development. They want clubs and sports, but they also want things like more free time to spend with their friends, school dances, and for dating to be allowed on campuses. I even had a student say, in full seriousness, that he thought there should be a class teaching students how to interact with the opposite sex.

As an aside, when I was a student at the Jingshan school my American classmates and I tried to start a Friday school dance during lunch.  It lasted all of two weeks before we found ourselves locked out of the gym by the administration, who had never told us that they were against the idea (communication in Chinese schools could be a whole other post).  Dancing and socializing go against the aims of a Chinese school.

I have a lot of hope for the future.  As I see it Chinese education can only get better.  The students I teach don’t make me sad for their future and there are not simply test taking robots, even if that’s the way they are taught.  My days as a student at the Jingshan school in Beijing showed me Chinese teachers (sometimes) making their students think critically and creatively.  While Jingshan is kind of a flagship school for public education in China (and therefore better than most in this respect) I can’t help but think that the pace of development and increasing international competition for Chinese students will bring about change in the way students are taught here.  Here’s hoping!