Education, Chinese Style

If Amy Chua, aka the Tiger Mom, can do it, why can’t Lenore Chu?

The Tiger Mom rejected the American way of bringing up children and adopted a more traditional Chinese approach. Chu took her one better. She enrolled her children in a state run school in Shanghai. When her husband started working in Shanghai she placed her three year old in the local school. Presumably, she could have sent him to a more international school.

The child was three when he began school. At home, he had refused to eat fried eggs. His schoolteacher solved the problem … by forcing him to eat the eggs. She put the eggs in his mouth and he spit them out. Instead of showing empathy the teacher kept putting more egg in his mouth until he swallowed it.

Chu was horrified at this abusive treatment. Since she spoke Mandarin fluently she went to the school to confront the teacher.

This is what ensued:

The next day, I marched off to school to confront Teacher Chen about the egg episode, brash in my conviction about individual choice.

“We don’t use such methods of force in America,” I blurted in Mandarin, my son clutching my hand. (I was born and raised in America but grew up speaking Chinese at home.)

“Oh? How do you do it?” Teacher Chen challenged.

“We explain that egg eating is good for them, that the nutrients help build strong bones and teeth and helps with eyesight,” I said, trying to sound authoritative. “We motivate them to choose…we trust them with the decision.”

“Does it work?” Teacher Chen challenged.

In truth, no. I’d never been able to get my son to eat eggs. He’s a picky eater. Later, Teacher Chen pulled me aside for a lecture. “In front of the children, you should say, ‘Teacher is right, and Mom will do things the same way,’ OK?”

China is a filial piety culture. The young are taught to respect their elders. The younger they are the more unquestioning the acceptance should be. In such a culture, teachers command respect. They are not therapists. They do not expect three year olds to make independent decisions. They do not try to understand a child’s viewpoint. They assert their authority and make sure that children respect them.

On academic performance tests, Chinese students far outperform their American peers. Chu explains:

Researchers have found that 6-year-old Chinese children trounce their American peers in early math skills, including geometry and logic. In the past decade, Shanghai teens twice took No. 1 in the world on a test called PISA, which assesses problem-solving skills, while American students landed in the middle of the pack.

When young Chinese head abroad, the results are impressive. They are earning more spots at the world’s top universities. The Ivy League enrolls eight times more Chinese undergraduates than a decade ago, according to the Institute of International Education, and the Chinese are helping to launch Silicon Valley startups in disproportionate numbers.

In America, Chu continues, teacher Chen would have been attacked for being abusive:

Force-feeding would get a teacher dragged into court in the U.S., the land of infant choice, free-form play and individualized everything. In China, children are also subjected to high-stakes testing at every turn, which keeps them bent over books from toddlerhood on.

What advantages does Chu find in the Chinese approach?

Discipline, love of school and a superior ability to learn geometry and programming:

As I worked through my anxieties about submitting to this kind of system, I began to observe that when parents fall in line with teachers, so do their children. This deference gives the teacher near-absolute command of her classroom. My son became so afraid of being late for class, missing school or otherwise disappointing his teacher, that he once raised a stink when I broached the possibility of missing a few school days for a family trip. He was 5.

Many subjects are best learned when children respect the fact that the teacher possess knowledge:

Having the teacher as an unquestioned authority in the classroom gives students a leg up in subjects such as geometry and computer programming, which are more effectively taught through direct instruction (versus student-led discovery), according to a 2004 study of 112 third- and fourth-graders published in the journal Psychological Science. A 2014 study of more than 13,000 students in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis found that math-challenged first-graders learned more effectively when teachers demonstrated problem-solving procedures and followed up with repeated practice.

Evidently, this is not Socratic learning. And it is not Common Core math. The approach does not expect children to figure it out for themselves. It shows them how it’s done and forces them to practice it by rote until they have mastered it.

American teachers often do not have the luxury of teaching math at all. According to Chu they spend too much of their time trying to discipline their unruly, undisciplined, disrespectful charges.

In China, each child is treated as a member of a group, not as a unique individual. In America, every child is treated as an individual seeking self-actualization, with a strong parental advocate constantly challenging the authority of teachers:

But Americans have arguably gone too far in the other direction, elevating the needs of individual students to the detriment of the group. Some parents think nothing of sending an unvaccinated child to school—ignoring community health—or petitioning to move school start times to accommodate sports schedules. Meanwhile, teacher friends tell me that they are spending more time dealing with “problem” students, often through intervention programs that whittle away teachers’ time with the rest of the class. 

Children in Chinese schools learn the work ethic. They are taught to work as hard as they can. These schools assume that children can do the work and that if they do not do it they need merely to work harder:

Another bracing Chinese belief is that hard work trumps innate talent when it comes to academics. Equipped with flashcards and ready to practice, my son’s Chinese language teacher knows that he is capable of learning the 3,500 characters required for literacy. His primary school math teacher gives no child a free pass on triple-digit arithmetic and, in fact, stays after school to help laggards. China’s school system breeds a Chinese-style grit, which delivers the daily message that perseverance—not intelligence or ability—is key to success.

In an approach that recalls the Tiger Mom, Chu explains: 

Chinese kids are used to struggling through difficult content, and they believe that success is within reach of anyone willing to work for it. This attitude gives policy makers in China great latitude when it comes to setting out and enforcing higher standards.

In the U.S., parents have often revolted as policy makers try to push through similar measures. In part, we are afraid that Johnny will feel bad about himself if he can’t make the grade. What if, instead, Johnny’s parents—and his teacher, too—believed that the boy could learn challenging math with enough dedicated effort?

American parents, infused with psychobabble, believe that the Chinese approach must produce children who are robotic automatons. They are shocked to see that, with Chu’s children, such is not the case:

When I tell the story of my son’s Chinese educational experience to American friends, they gasp. When they spend time with him, they are surprised that he doesn’t cower in the corner or obey commands like a Labrador retriever. My son is imaginative when he draws, and has a great sense of humor and a mean forehand in tennis. None of these qualities has slipped away, and I now share the Chinese belief that even very young kids are capable of developing a range of demanding talents.

We do well to consider this approach an opening gambit. Surely, talent, ability and intelligence matter. The Chinese do not prejudge any child’s talent before the fact. They assume the best and expect that performance that will prove it. If the performance is lacking the children follow different educational pathways.

At the same time, China’s education landscape is littered with dropouts in a system that perpetuates an underclass: Children who fail to test into regular high schools would populate a city the size of London each year. Because of the high stakes, families sometimes take extreme measures, including cheating and bribery.