English struggles expose stifled school system

• Source: Global Times
• [09:06 August 23 2010]
• Comments

By Harvey Dzodin

Recently I spent a week judging a national English language competition for Chinese youngsters from pre-school through high school. This exhilarating experience confirmed for me much that I had heard about the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese educational system.

Actually, I did get paid to be a judge for the "'Lovely China' Youth English Talent Show" but please do me a big favor and do not tell the organizers that I had such a good time.

Despite a few annoying power failures and more than a few mosquitoes up in Yanqing county, I would have probably paid for the opportunity to interact with these sweet students from all over China, together with their parents and teachers.

For all but the youngest contestants, the drill was for the students to give self-introductions one pair at a time. This was followed by a short dialogue where the students role-played a factual situation given them in advance. This was followed by several questions from one of the judges to each student.

I was struck by the fact that everyone had memorized their introductions with care and precision. Unfortunately, I was equally struck by the fact that with a few exceptions, most of the students interacted poorly with each other, even though they knew the topic in advance. It was clear that they just didn't understand.

This was made clear in the question-and-answer session where memorizing was impossible. Most students could not answer the most basic questions and few had the ability to even fudge the answer. Most could be observed repeating the question to themselves under their breath. Their frustration was obvious. It was frankly painful to watch and I shared their pain.

I had heard from many of my Chinese friends that Chinese education was heavy on memorizing and regurgitating undigested information back, but light on thinking and synthesizing. My experiences at the competition certainly drove this point home.

Now it's easier for me to understand why there are no Nobel Prize winners yet who were residents in China when they won, but many winners of Chinese extraction. It also goes some of the distance to answering the riddle of why so many things are made in China, but few are invented here.

I think that part of the reason must rest on the fact that this is still a very Confucian society. Few here dare contradict their teacher or professor, whereas in the West, reasoned challenges are encouraged. Another reason is that the concept of face is so important here. Venturing outside of the safe harbor of mere facts to putting the facts together to reach a conclusion might result in making a mistake and a public loss of face. By contrast, our system encourages the massag-ing of information.

Can it be that at least in one sense that we are a more Marxist society? Western educational system encourages the process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in a way that China' may not.