What Is the Real Damage Caused by Chinese Education?

                                               

Photo from Baidu images

    Nowadays, primary school students' backs are starting to look less like backpacks and more like suitcases. This is because there are so many textbooks and workbooks that the weight of the bag is more than their bodies can even bear to carry.  What makes them study so hard? Who is to blame? In short, Chinese parents are putting too much pressure on their kids because they all believe that their kids are capable of being “the best” students,and that the academic achievement of these children are often seen as a reflection on the parents’ success as parents. This is largely a result of the Chinese social custom of “face” (a person’s pride or honor), by which a person is constantly judged and compared against their peers in society. For parents, this means making sure that their child is always better than the children of their friends and neighbors, so they are not the ones who “lose face” (lose one’s honor or face embarrassment and shame in the eyes of one’s peers). This leads to large pressure being put on children to do well in school. If a kid gets an A-minus, instead of applauding them, parents scold them for not getting an A-plus.(Amy Chua)   

Photo: sayingimages.com

  But it is not only just the parents to blame, the teachers are often just as bad, if not worse. In China,grades are not kept private. When the scores for every subject come out, the teachers usually says each student’s score out loud for everyone in class to hear, praising the students who do well and criticizing the students who did not. As a result, you always know exactly where you rank compared to all of your classmates. If you are the one with the best grades,you will be a “star” in the class,as the pride of your teacher and the envy of your classmates. For everyone else, especially the ones with the lowest grades, life is one of constant anxiety and struggle.

  In two separate studies done on the effects of China’s high pressure education environment, the results were shocking. In a study of 2,191 Chinese students between the ages 9-12, Therese Hesketh found that 81% of the students worried “a lot” about exams, 63% were afraid of being punished by their teachers, and 73% were physically punished by parents for poor scores. In the second study of 2,400 students of different ages from six Chinese provinces by the Children Research Center in Beijing, it was found that 76.2% of the students were unhappy due to pressure from parents and teachers, and 9.1% felt feelings of despair, with some students expressing thoughts of suicide because of so much pressure.

  The real question is: what kind of effects does this kind of pressure have on students over a long period of time? According to Xu, Selman, and Haste,Studies of high school students found that this kind of high pressure can create a tense environment where jealousy causes students to see each other as rivals, causing students not to trust one another and worry more about themselves than the good of others. These problems have become increasingly common in China in recent years, as incidents in which people often refuse to help others who are in trouble, preferring to avoid the burden of getting involved, are increasing. The most famous of these incidents was in Foshan in 2011, when a two year old girl was hit by a van in a crowded area, as the girl lied on the ground badly injured in need of help, a nearby camera caught more than 18 people walk by the girl without helping until finally the girl got hit by a second car and died. (Max Fisher, Washington Post)

  What’s worse, is that all of this emphasis on good scores may even be counterproductive.  In recent years, the large burden of homework and high pressure to get good scores on tests has lead to a large culture of cheating in Chinese schools.  This is especially true for Chinese students who are increasingly going abroad to foreign universities, where competition to get into the best universities is so intense that a study by Kirkpatrick and Zang has found that there have been increasing incidents of admissions essays being ghost-written, test answers being sold on the black market, and in some extreme cases, parents hire someone else to pretend to be their child for university entrance exams. Which makes me wonder: if all this effort is made for students to not learn anything at all, then why do they need to carry around so many heavy books?

Work Cited:

Chua,Amy."Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior". Patterns for College Writing:A Rhethorical Reader and Guide,14th ed.,edited by Laurie G.Kirszner and Stephen R.Mandell,Bedford/St.Martin's 2018,pp. 402-406.