“Little Soldiers—Inside the Chinese Education System”, 2019-09-03 (; similar):
[Review of Lenora 2017 memoir Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, a memoir by a Chinese-American journalist married to a Jewish NPR journalist of subjecting their child to elite Chinese education in Shanghai. Chu naively credits the brutal rigor and training of the Chinese education system for the stellar results on international comparisons like PISA (the truth is likely otherwise).]
That’s why this was pure nightmare fuel for me. It’s a non-fiction account of an ethnically-Chinese, American-born woman following her multi-racial child through the Chinese school system in Shanghai. While we complain about our soft, liberal, decadent school experiences in America or Europe, tens of millions of Chinese kids are subjected to a school structure that seems purposefully designed to make everyone as miserable as humanly possible. Or at least that was my take-away. Lenora Chu has a kinder perspective on the system. Mostly.
…Why do students and parents put up with all this? Are they just brainwashed by an authoritarian culture and government? Probably yes, at least to some degree. But there’s also a rational calculus at play…The modern manifestation of the Imperial Exam is the gaokao. This single test given during the last year of secondary school is the sole determinant of the vast majority of Chinese students’ abilities to get into a domestic university. Its subject matter is certainly more practical than the old exams—math, Chinese literature, and English—though probably still fairly esoteric by Bryan Caplan’s standards.
Lenora stresses that though the gaokao is the flagship mega-test that everyone focuses on, basically all of Chinese education is a series of gaokaos. Students and parents believe that every homework assignment, quiz, and class test serves as a signal of a student’s ability in a giant country-wide competition to reach the top echelon of Chinese society. Every failure, no matter how small, sets a student back and jeopardizes his entire life. This is why one of Lenora’s friends enrolled his three-year-old son in a pre-MBA program. It’s also why virtually all of Rainey’s classmates’ parents thought Lenora was a horrible mother for giving Rainey “idle time” on the weekends instead of enrolling him in Chinese writing classes, English classes, piano classes, algebra classes, etc. All the parents believed that by getting their kids into these programs at this stage (barely post-toddler), they were getting a head-start, and that head-start would carry into primary school, then secondary school, then university, then work, then life. It was all about getting ahead.
Lenora did her best to avoid the rat race, but found that it was too all-encompassing. At Soong Qing Ling, Lenora dreaded seeing the “Big Board”—a bulletin board hung up outside Rainey’s classroom where his teacher posted constant updates of students’ stats. Some of these stats were relatively innocuous—like the height and weight of every student—while other stats ranged from shoe size and blood type, to individual teacher’s comments on instrument playing (apparently Rainey had no sense of rhythm). Naturally, Lenora didn’t care about any of this stuff, but the other parents did. She watched mothers gloat over the physical prowess of their three-year-old children, take shots at each other over public admonishments, and generally make mountains out of utterly benign molehills. Lenora’s enduring shame was that Rainey was bad at playing the recorder. Despite getting stern warnings from the teacher and other parents, Rainey never improved, and eventually he was the only student left out of the class’s recorder concert in front of all the parents.
Lenora realized that, again, there was a method to the madness. Soong Qing Ling was training students and parents to compete. A three-year-old who learns to compete over public displays of height, recorders, and blood types, will learn to compete over grades in the future. Parents who are ready to fight the same battles will drive their children into the fray for years to come. Everyone learned that they were at war, or rather, in a battle royale. Only the very best survive, and pre-school at Soong Qing Ling was just the beginning.
…I guess I couldn’t help but come away from the book with a sense of depressing apathy. There’s so much effort put into education by well-meaning people, but a lot of it just seems to make children and parents hate everything. China apparently spent 2,700 years perfecting its education system, and this is the result… students being force-fed, parents shamed into kowtowing, and teachers corruptly abusing their power. Yes, there are good people in the system to, and apparently the children learn something and it does give some sort of order to society, but I really, really wish they didn’t have to this way.
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