Craig
11-22-2002, 09:05 PM
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/commentar...,156573,00.html (http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/commentary/story/0,4386,156573,00.html)?
Seeds of China's success sown in kindergarten
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NEW YORK TIMES
SHANGHAI - Quick, what's six plus eight minus seven plus six plus five?
If you knew instantaneously that the answer was 18, then congratulations! You're as bright as a Shanghai kindergarten student - calculating in his third language.
I've met the future, and it is these children. Americans who come to China tend to be most dazzled by glittering new skyscrapers like the 420 m Jin Mao Tower, but the most awesome aspect of China's modernisation is the education that children are getting in the big cities.
And the long-run competitive challenge China poses will have less to do with its skylines, army or industry than with its bright children, like Tony Xu.
Tony's real name is Xu Jun, but all the children at the New Century Kindergarten he attends get English names as well. Six-year-old Tony's first languages are Mandarin and Shanghainese, but even in English, he rattled off answers to equations faster than I could. It was embarrassing when I posed my own question to him, 10 plus five minus one minus four plus five, and he answered 15 before I could tell if he was right. I want a refund on my college tuition.
Parents pay about US$2,000 (S$3,550), a huge sum here, to send a child to private kindergarten for a year. But as urban families now have only one child each, no expense is too great for one's 'little emperor'.
Throughout China, first-rate private schools are popping up, as the Chinese saying goes, like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.
Of course, Chinese education is still hobbled by rural mud-brick schools that are in a shambles, peasants who pull their daughters out of school, and third-rate universities. But China's great strength is that in the cities, it is increasingly not a communist country or a socialist country, but simply an education country.
When I lived in China, I represented Harvard in interviewing high school students applying for admission, and it was a humbling experience. The Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) isn't offered in China, so students take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) - meant for graduate school applicants - and still get top scores.
And while many of my Chinese friends worry that the system works children too hard and costs them their childhood, the brightest children are not automatons; many are serious enthusiasts of art, music, poetry or, these days, the basketball plays of Yao Ming.
I visited one of Shanghai's best high schools, the No 2 Secondary School Attached to East China Normal University. American students who have earned perfect scores on the SAT should meet the 17-year-old here who last year got a perfect GRE score.
Principal He Xiaowen showed off 14 gold medals that students have earned in the international maths and science Olympics. When I asked if she had any problems with students smoking or drinking, she looked so scandalised that I might have been sent to the principal's office, if I hadn't already been there.
One reason for Chinese educational success emerges from cross-cultural surveys. Americans say students do well because they're smarter. The Chinese say it is because they work harder.
A growing body of evidence suggests Chinese students do well partly because their parents set very high benchmarks, which the children then absorb. Chinese parents demand a great deal, American parents somewhat less, and in each case, the students meet expectations.
The result is apparent at No 2 Secondary School. The students live in dormitories, going home only at weekends, and they're mostly studying from 6.30 am until lights-out at 11 pm. On Saturdays, they attend tutoring classes from 9.40 am to 5.10 pm, and on Sundays, they do what one girl described as six hours of 'self-assigned homework'.
She explained: 'This is extra work to improve ourselves. I read outside books to improve my ability in any subject I feel weak in.'
Chinese students may not have a lot of fun, and may lag behind in subjects in which some American students excel, like sex, drugs and rock n' roll. But they know their calculus and are driven by a work ethic and thirst for education that make them indomitable.
With them in the pipeline and little kindergarten pupils like Tony Xu behind them, China may lead the world again.
Seeds of China's success sown in kindergarten
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NEW YORK TIMES
SHANGHAI - Quick, what's six plus eight minus seven plus six plus five?
If you knew instantaneously that the answer was 18, then congratulations! You're as bright as a Shanghai kindergarten student - calculating in his third language.
I've met the future, and it is these children. Americans who come to China tend to be most dazzled by glittering new skyscrapers like the 420 m Jin Mao Tower, but the most awesome aspect of China's modernisation is the education that children are getting in the big cities.
And the long-run competitive challenge China poses will have less to do with its skylines, army or industry than with its bright children, like Tony Xu.
Tony's real name is Xu Jun, but all the children at the New Century Kindergarten he attends get English names as well. Six-year-old Tony's first languages are Mandarin and Shanghainese, but even in English, he rattled off answers to equations faster than I could. It was embarrassing when I posed my own question to him, 10 plus five minus one minus four plus five, and he answered 15 before I could tell if he was right. I want a refund on my college tuition.
Parents pay about US$2,000 (S$3,550), a huge sum here, to send a child to private kindergarten for a year. But as urban families now have only one child each, no expense is too great for one's 'little emperor'.
Throughout China, first-rate private schools are popping up, as the Chinese saying goes, like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.
Of course, Chinese education is still hobbled by rural mud-brick schools that are in a shambles, peasants who pull their daughters out of school, and third-rate universities. But China's great strength is that in the cities, it is increasingly not a communist country or a socialist country, but simply an education country.
When I lived in China, I represented Harvard in interviewing high school students applying for admission, and it was a humbling experience. The Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) isn't offered in China, so students take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) - meant for graduate school applicants - and still get top scores.
And while many of my Chinese friends worry that the system works children too hard and costs them their childhood, the brightest children are not automatons; many are serious enthusiasts of art, music, poetry or, these days, the basketball plays of Yao Ming.
I visited one of Shanghai's best high schools, the No 2 Secondary School Attached to East China Normal University. American students who have earned perfect scores on the SAT should meet the 17-year-old here who last year got a perfect GRE score.
Principal He Xiaowen showed off 14 gold medals that students have earned in the international maths and science Olympics. When I asked if she had any problems with students smoking or drinking, she looked so scandalised that I might have been sent to the principal's office, if I hadn't already been there.
One reason for Chinese educational success emerges from cross-cultural surveys. Americans say students do well because they're smarter. The Chinese say it is because they work harder.
A growing body of evidence suggests Chinese students do well partly because their parents set very high benchmarks, which the children then absorb. Chinese parents demand a great deal, American parents somewhat less, and in each case, the students meet expectations.
The result is apparent at No 2 Secondary School. The students live in dormitories, going home only at weekends, and they're mostly studying from 6.30 am until lights-out at 11 pm. On Saturdays, they attend tutoring classes from 9.40 am to 5.10 pm, and on Sundays, they do what one girl described as six hours of 'self-assigned homework'.
She explained: 'This is extra work to improve ourselves. I read outside books to improve my ability in any subject I feel weak in.'
Chinese students may not have a lot of fun, and may lag behind in subjects in which some American students excel, like sex, drugs and rock n' roll. But they know their calculus and are driven by a work ethic and thirst for education that make them indomitable.
With them in the pipeline and little kindergarten pupils like Tony Xu behind them, China may lead the world again.