Education in China

I chose to move to China shortly after I started a job at a middle school in North Philadelphia. Working as a teacher in the US is nearly intolerable. There are a great many reasons for this, but I’ll use student chatter as my example. I fear that if I say “students refuse to stop talking,” it might not properly convey the frustration involved. Therefore, I’ll make a somewhat strange analogy and compare it to horseback riding. When a horse feels particularly energetic, he’ll generally try to transition into a higher gait, and you have to control him by pulling back on his reins just enough to slow him down but not enough to stop him. Horses have very short memories, so you typically have to do this every few seconds over a prolonged period of time. In the same way, when I gave lessons in the US, I had to stop teaching every few seconds because the students would start talking, and I needed to tell them to stop. In fact, the only real difference in these two phenomena is that the students have full agency over their actions, and actively chose to disobey out of sheer contempt. And although it might seem like a small thing, it breeds an antagonistic relationship between the teacher and the student, even though the teacher is ostensibly trying to help. As frustrating as it is to face constant interruptions, the real issue here is the way this bitterness explodes into serious problems like low student performance and violence.

You can see why I was excited to teach abroad. Like many Americans, I conceived schools in China as orderly and students as respectful. I thought I would no longer have to tolerate the same behavioral disasters that I did in America. Further, I expected students to perform better. It is frankly hard to do much worse. Unfortunately, both of these expectations proved incorrect. The purpose of this month’s entry is to describe the educational situation in China, as seen from my perspective as a foreign teacher at a private school.

Every private school I've seen looks identical to mine.

That last point, that I work at a private school, might give you the wrong idea. We in the West venerate private schools. It’s only common sense that if you pay for a service you could get for free, you will get a better product; otherwise, why would you pay? China inverts this. You might have heard of the gaokao — 高考 — the famously difficult Chinese college entrance exam. You probably haven’t heard of its younger brother the zhongkao — 中考 — an entrance exam for high schools. Students in China don’t just go to whichever school serves their district. They can only attend the public schools that they test into. If they score badly, they could be caught in the dregs… or, if their family is wealthy, they could just buy an education by attending a private school instead. Generally speaking, public schools in China are better than private schools, so students don’t often attend private schools unless they can’t make it elsewhere. In an inversion of expectations, public schools have the highest performing students, whereas private schools attract the weakest and least serious.

My expectations for high-performing and well behaved students were unfounded. This could be a consequence of the private school environment. I suspect it is not a problem with my particular school, because my peers have told me that private schools all over the country have this same problem. My girlfriend, who teaches art at a private school in nearby Zhaoqing, has shared stories of student behavior identical to my own experience, and has shown me videos of students littering and destroying property at her school, which could plausibly happen here too.

What specifically do my students do? The easiest way to approach this is to compare it to behavior in America. There are some bright spots here. For one, violence is practically a nonfactor. I ended up leaving my job at the Philadelphia middle school because of a news story that a middle schooler had brought a knife to his school and stabbed a faculty member, and I couldn’t convince myself that it “wouldn’t happen here.” There were fights nearly every day, often quite extreme, and it was sometimes my responsibility to break them up — I once had to throw out a pair of pants because it was stained with too much blood. By contrast, I’ve only seen two or three physical altercations in a full year of teaching in China, and none were more serious than a slapfight. Further, although students may incidentally vandalize through carelessness, they aren’t actively destructive the way my students were in Philadelphia.

What the students really do is so baffling that it’s hard to express in language. The easiest way I can say it is that the students act oblivious to the fact that there is a lesson happening around them at all. They are of course talking, wandering around, roughhousing, playing games, and so on when I enter the room, but my being there doesn’t change their behavior. When the bell rings and I start class, they ignore me. Although students in Philadelphia misbehaved, they at least perceived that a class was happening around them, and adjusted their behavior accordingly. In China, it makes no difference whether I’m there or not. The only methods I’ve found that provide a response are to stand directly over a student and stare at him — generally counterproductive, as the rest of the class grows louder and laughs at the student when I do this — or to increase my volume. Thus, all of my classes start the same way: screaming at the top of my lungs, for several minutes, to make the students register my existence. From this point on, I attempt to teach a lesson while engaging in the horse reining routine I mentioned earlier, maintaining a discussion with students and stopping every few seconds to tell them to be quiet. Sometimes students will simply continue to act as though I’m not present, requiring me to scream and fight further for their attention. Other times, students will treat this as a sort of game. They try to talk only when they think I’m not paying attention to them, apparently unaware that I can hear them even when not looking directly at them. Frustratingly, they recognize that the time I’m least likely to call them out is during direct instruction, so they are quiet when I am quietly waiting for them to quiet down, but start talking immediately once I proceed with the lesson, creating the impression that they purposely talk over me. They also express no remorse for their behavior. When I address them specifically and ask why any one individual student chooses to talk over me, they usually say nothing, deny that they were talking outright, or laugh. It’s as though they don’t understand why I don’t want them to talk, merely that I don’t want them to, so there’s no reason for them to feel bad. Suffice to say that all lessons are combat between myself and my students. I might be underselling the degree of chaos here; I assure you that it is quite extreme.

So why is it like this? Why are the kids so out of control? I don’t think it’s just that “kids will be kids.” My students are twelve to fourteen years old. They might be young, but not so young that they lack agency entirely. At their age, they should know how to behave properly in a classroom, they simply choose not to. I think instead that this is a matter of how different cultures punish misbehavior. The following argument comes from Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and The Sword:

There is sometimes conflict between what an individual person wants to do and what is best for the broader society in which he lives. Thus, for the sake of everyone’s best interests, we must sometimes exert control over others’ behaviors. However, every person has the agency to do everything within his own power, and we cannot directly control the choices that other people make. All we can control is how we respond to their behavior. One obvious way to do this is to threaten to murder, imprison, or otherwise punish those who do wrong, and this is called a fear culture. While this is the simplest method, it has a few issues; what if we do not have the requisite power to punish the wrongdoer? Further, what if we never identify him? In a fear culture, people are still free to do wrong if they can get away with it. To overcome this problem, some societies instill children from a young age with the concepts of right and wrong. In these societies, people might be motivated to do the right thing because they will feel bad if they don’t, and you can’t escape those feelings the same way you can escape law enforcement. They are also likely to evaluate the morality of an action before taking it, rather than only considering their personal benefit. This is called a guilt culture, and while guilt cultures have problems of their own, they at least don’t offer “get-out-of-jail” free cards the way fear cultures do.

There are several maps of this species on the internet, but they seem to all be amateur work. They represent how laymen might categorize different countries, but they aren't definitive classifications. I personally object to Africa's placement in the "shame" category alongside Asia.

Africa is a fear culture, and the West is a guilt culture. Almost everywhere else in the world, though, including India, the Islamic World, Japan, Korea, and yes, China, is a sort of intermediary shame culture. In these places, the motivating force is not how you personally feel, but rather how others will feel about you should you do something socially unpopular. People in these parts of the world do the right thing because they want to cohere socially with their community, which often means their sense of righteous behavior draws from what others will and will not accept. Confucius himself said:

Lead the people with law and organize them with punishments, and they will avoid the punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with virtue and organize them with ritual, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will bring order to themselves.

I maintain that China’s being a shame culture greatly influences my student’s behavior. For one, the fact that they consider it socially acceptable amongst themselves to ignore the class happening around them protects them from social ostracization. In a shame culture, if everyone does it, that makes it okay. More importantly, though, I think that fear, shame, and guilt societies aren’t defined by the behavior of everyone in them, but rather the endpoints of their development. Nobody is born with a sense of guilt; the defining factor of a guilt society is that most of their citizens will develop one as they grow up. At birth, children in a guilt society will only know fear, and at some point in their maturation they will develop shame, and as adults they will feel guilt. In a shame society, the only development is from fear to shame, and you might reasonably assume that this development takes longer. I contend that, because my students are children in a shame society, they have not yet developed the shame mindset and still respond only to fear. You see this in the US too, and I expect the reason even my worst students behaved differently there is that they were in the shame phase of their development. School culture further reinforces this. Most punishment at my school is corporal. If a student does something wrong, the teacher will hit him or pull his ear. Notably, students generally do behave when another teacher is present. I had hoped that my refusal to engage in this punishment might endear me to students as likable and trustworthy, but it seems that it only makes me appear weak and easy to disobey. Ironically, they incentivize me to hurt them, because they won’t respond to anything else. Such is the shame culture.

Bellyaching about student behavior offered insight into Chinese culture, but that’s tangential to my greater point. Let’s return to it now. To fully understand Chinese education, I have to address the elephant in the room: I am not a “real” teacher in the same sense as my peers. I teach about the same number of lessons that they do, but my students are not tested or graded on my lessons. I also didn’t receive a curriculum at the start of the year. Although I must prepare a new lesson for each grade each week, it doesn’t seem to matter what it’s about, given that nobody told me to teach anything in particular, and nobody ever evaluates my lessons. I took it for granted that my classes are meant to be English immersion, because many people hired by the same company as me speak no Chinese and therefore couldn’t do otherwise. So basically, my job is to go talk to students in English for an hour and spend the time between lessons in the office. You might think that the school doesn’t really care much about what goes on in my classes. I am inclined to agree. The ugly truth is that I was hired because I am a white American, and the school can advertise with my likeness to lure in parents looking for an attractive private school for children who didn’t qualify for an adequate public school. My job is very comfortable, but there is something soul-crushing knowing that it is basically pointless.

It’s harder for me to discuss their school performance for this reason. I don’t see how they do in exams. My friend told me that, on their latest standardized tests, the highest performing student earned a 40 out of 150. This seems too ludicrous for me to believe, but with no other data, I can’t really deny it. What I can talk about is their performance in my class, but keep in mind that their poor behavior may lead them to appear less capable than they truly are. Anyway, what do Chinese students do well, and what do they do poorly? I was stunned when I first started teaching to see how many words they had memorized. Sometimes, I might ask them to translate an obscure word, and then I’d be dumbfounded that they actually could. Their ability to recognize and recall foreign words was far greater than my own at their age, or that of anyone I knew. Of course, English is a much more serious subject in China than any foreign language is in America, but their capacity for memorization surprised me even in light of this. Strangely, though, while my students know many words, they never use them to communicate with me. They have a lot of trouble speaking and understanding English, even when they know all of the words in the only relevant vocabulary. They struggle with full sentences; when I ask them questions, they will typically provide a one-word answer. It’s as though they’ve memorized all of the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, but can’t figure out how to fit them together.

I think it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here. The students are accustomed to drilling and repetition, which enables them to memorize words that might be useful for standardized tests, but doesn’t help them communicate in English. This is actually a pretty consistent feature in Chinese culture. Generally, the Chinese approach to a problem is brute force. For example, most Chinese business owners will maximize profit by maximizing the time their employees spend at work. This is why schools operate from 7:30 and to 10:00, and why students attend classes every day except Saturday. The conventional wisdom is that students will learn the most if they spend the most time at school. For those wondering, research suggests this strategy is counterproductive, because it stresses the brain until it can no longer meaningfully intake information.

Perhaps because of this, my students do lack some of the metacognitive skills that you’d expect from a child their age. I will often ask my students to read a text together as a large group, and I do this by pointing at the text I want to read and saying “Read together.” I do this twenty or thirty times per class, so my students have heard the phrase hundreds or even thousands of times by now. And yet they still don’t respond to it. It could be that they just don’t want to participate in class, but that doesn’t explain why they do participate when I say “一起读,” a direct translation of read together. Further, although they sound out the words when we read a text together, they seem not to extract meaning from them. Today, they read the sentence “hippos don’t eat meat,” but could not answer the question “do hippos eat meat?” asked immediately afterwards. Even when I directly tell students the answer to a question, write it on the board, and translate it into Chinese, they still do not answer. I can ask them the same question in Chinese, and they can answer it perfectly well, and then I can tell them that I’m going to ask the same question in English, do so, and get met with silence. They also struggle a lot with creative, open-ended questions. In America, a question like "what is your favorite school subject?" is a softball. In China, these kinds of questions are the most difficult. It's as though they've been conditioned only to answer questions with certain answers. I really don’t know the reason they have all these struggles. My best guess is that they are so disinterested in English that they shut down in its presence. This is merely a hypothesis, though. The fact is there is something about Chinese education that renders students unable to answer questions even when they’ve just been told the answer, or even when they don't have a wrong answer at all.

There are two things I want to discuss that haven’t come up organically yet. One is the question of propaganda, and the other is faculty. You probably won’t be surprised that there is a propagandistic element to Chinese education. The most obvious expression of this is that students attend a class called “Morality and Law,” (道德与法治) which teaches them how to best act. I’ve asked a few people about the contents of this class and never exactly gotten a straight answer. The textbooks for this course feature a chibi Karl Marx, and I sometimes see posters for it around the school which say they will “teach what Marx said,” but I haven’t actually met anyone in China who can explain socialism or historical materialism. My girlfriend told me that the class taught her voting rights, but that she had never participated in an election, so she mostly forgot about it. It seems likely that the class teaches students to adopt values useful to the CCP, but I can’t ultimately say for sure.

The other big area of propaganda is the sinocentric attitude that schools take across all of their classes. Most students use maps that place China at the center, thus heavily distorting Europe, Africa, and the Americas, which get smooshed onto either side of the map. These maps are of course careful to place a little dotted line in the South China Sea, thus asserting that Taiwan and the rest of the islands there are a part of China. However, “sinocentric” might not be the right word, because most Chinese students graduate knowing very little about their own culture. Most Chinese students are aware that there was a man named Confucius, but haven’t read the Analects and don’t know what Confucianists believe. The same is true for Taoism and Buddhism. They also don’t know much about Chinese art, literature, or history. They know those things which are relevant to the CCP, but hardly anything else. I once showed them a painting of the Taiping Rebellion and asked them what it was, and they answered it was from the Boxer Rebellion. They hadn’t actually heard of the Taiping Rebellion. As for the world outside China, they know about contemporary pop culture, but that’s about it. It seems there is a concentrated effort by the CCP to control what information children can access. History began in China at the end of the Qing Dynasty, and that’s all you need to know.

A representative Chinese map of the world. Notice how the distortion at the edges makes the map less useful.

Finally, on being an educator in China. For me, it’s a cushy job, but not for the native teachers. Just like the students, they work long hours, and they don’t get paid very well. They will lose salary if they take sick leave or if their students do badly on a standardized test, and they often get paid late. You can see why students and teachers might see each other as enemies. The teachers need students to do well, and when they see students mess around instead of studying, it’s as though the students are personally depriving them of money they need to survive. I can afford to be patient with students, but they can’t. Is it such a surprise that they beat students who misbehave? Many Chinese people with college degrees pursue teaching in spite of its many pressures, though, because it’s seen as a “high-class” job in China, where it’s common to discriminate against those who do menial labor. It also offers ample vacation time. So far as I can tell, there’s no serious workers’ rights movement in China, so it’s hard to see the situation improving. However, China’s low birthrate means that there will be greater and greater demand for workers as the population ages, so workers may gain more power in the future. It’s also possible that there are reforms after Xi dies. It’s a difficult situation now, but it’s not entirely hopeless.

I understand that this entry in my series on life in China is considerably less optimistic than my others. I apologize for the long delay between articles — perhaps I’ve grown more jaded over that time. Part of me hoped to come to China and leave inspired by its superior education to help reform public education in America. I think all educators fantasize about being Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society. Unfortunately, schools here are no better. I enjoy the comfort of living and working here as a foreigner, but it dispelled the myth of China as an organized and efficient state, at least so far as education is concerned. I’m glad to have learned something in my time here, but I’m afraid it’s what not to do. So it goes.