12/11/2010

China's Confucian culture clash

Students top global rankings - at a cost

 School students in Shanghai have proven themselves the top of the class in science, maths and reading, but that has not stopped parents from pouring scorn and ridicule on the Chinese education system.

"What you learned in childhood has nothing to do with your work in the future," says Gao Chunying, a primary school teacher with a 16-year-old son at high school. "Our kids can't create, and they are turning into idiots." 

The deficiencies of China's education system are possibly the No. 1 gripe among the country's middle-class parents.

That is why they are signing their children up for international schools and sending them abroad in their tens of thousands.

Employers are complaining that China's high-scoring children do not necessarily make for well-adjusted employees.

"Proportionately, is there a lot of wasted and misdirected talent here? I'm afraid there is," says David Kelly, who runs the China Policy consultancy and is also associate professor of politics at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Regardless of China's enormous education challenges, this week the respected Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) said students in Shanghai were streets ahead of those from any other country.

Shanghai students scored 600 in maths while those in the next four places - Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taipei - were in a cluster between 543 and 562, according to the PISA report, produced every three years by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Australia scored 514, which ranked it behind New Zealand (519) but comfortably above Britain (492) and the United States (487).

Read more at The Sydney Morning Herald

Shanghai, never previously included in the OECD sample, was also far ahead of anywhere else in reading and in science. It was a stunning result for a developing country.

Dec 11, 2010 10:50:59 AM | Culture, Current Affairs

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