China article: Education or Child Abuse?

Note: I wrote this about a year ago, while I was teaching at a middle school in Sichuan, China.

“Good morning everyone!” I say cheerfully as I pass through the door of class five. It is 8.10 a.m., time for the first class of the day, and the students have already been in class since 7.40. As their only foreign teacher, the students are often very happy to see me. I am something different. It is not simply that I am the best part of 30cm (one foot) taller than their Chinese teachers. It is the way that I teach. We play games, laugh and joke a lot. I talk a lot about myself, and my experiences in my own country, Australia, as well as my teaching experiences in New Zealand and the United States. Yet to me the students are a sea of faces. After six months, I still do not know a single student by name.
But just as often the greeting that I receive from my classes here at this middle school of 15-18 year olds is underpinned by one overriding emotion – exhaustion. Today the students are subdued. The entire front row is sleeping, as well as a dozen or so other students around the room. I know from experience that several of them will be sick, as every class has a few students bowed low with illness. I have never asked, but it seems that either they are not allowed to sleep in their dorms, or they choose to come to class because they don’t want to miss out on any anything vital for the exams. Yet exhaustion and illness are sometimes difficult to distinguish. These students are in this classroom till 9.00pm, six days a week. At 11.00pm the lights are switched out in their dorms, and they must sleep. At 6.45 in the morning, the loud speakers blare out the morning music – time to begin again.
Exams. This word just about sums up the goal of Chinese education. The students and teachers are obsessed by them. Everything centres around the test. When I was teaching at the Beijing No 2 Foreign Language Institute, the Dean of the Training Department came to check on my progress. Yet he asked nothing about what I was teaching (nor did he ever do so in the year that I was there). He only wanted to know what tests I had given the students. I pointed out that the aim of the course was to teach the students English, not to do tests. But in the end I had to relent, and began testing the students every two weeks. The absurdity of the testing obsession in China is no more apparent that in the enormous amount of money that students wishing to study abroad spend on IELTS preparation tests. Students who can barely speak or write a word of English think that if they just study test technique they will get a high score in the test and be able to study in a foreign university. In China, learning is not about knowledge, skill, or wisdom, but about The Test.
I walk past the desk of one boy. There is a stack of dozens of text and writing books on his desk, that must be about 45cm high (one and a half feet). I ask him if they belong to the students of the class. “No!” He states, with a grin. “They are all mine.” The worst part is that he will have to remember almost everything in those books. There will no analysis, however; just rote memorisation of the facts, to be mindlessly re-written on exam papers at the end of the term. The social sciences are not taught as problematical discourses. The History text says that Tibet was “peacefully liberated” in 1950. Period. The almost total absence of any capacity to think critically, or to question authority, is one of the most marked characteristics of Chinese students.
This scene in class 5 is repeated daily in every middle school across this country of 1.3 billion people. Recently, I traveled four hours by bus, with the English teachers of my school, to Mianyang Middle School, considered one of the best schools in Sichuan Province. There we sat in on an English class. I was not surprised at what I saw. There were precisely 69 students (I counted them) crammed side by side in a bleak classroom, repeating grammar drills from exactly the same text books as used in my own school. I saw students sitting silently as they filled in the blanks in their texts. At exactly 9.50a.m. the bell rang, and the loud speakers blared out precisely the same marching music as is played at my own school. 10 000 students filed out into the courtyard for stretching exercises, just as they do every morning.
As part of my doctoral studies in education, I have encountered the argument that Western education is based on the industrial model – that schools are basically giant factories spiting out gradates to become cogs in the societal machine. Perhaps those critics would not be so harsh if they came to China and saw the education system in this country. A colleague of mine teaching in a middle school in another province describes schools here as “concentration camps.”
This is my fifth year of teaching in China, and I never ceased to be amazed at what I see. Yet perhaps the most incredible thing out of all this is the attitudes of the students themselves. By and large they are polite and very respectful, and they are very keen to do well at their studies and very willing to talk to foreigners about life in other countries. There is little of the angst that one sees in the faces of so many Western students; little of the anger, alienation, or the self-fixation of an individualism which has almost degenerated into pervasive narcissism. Despite what many westerners would call an abusive education system, with only some exceptions, Chinese students grow up without the rebellion, hatred or despair that I have seen in so many adolescent eyes in Western countries. The key seems to be not at school, but at home. The Chinese love their children. Inevitably the students’ comments about their parents are effusively loving. Perhaps there is something for us westerners to learn from that.