Chinese Medicine for American Schools - New York Times
The New York Times

June 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Chinese Medicine for American Schools
By
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

SHANGHAI

Visitors to China are always astonished by the new highways and skyscrapers,
and by the endless construction projects that make China's national bird the
crane.

But the investments in China's modernization that are most impressive of all
are in human capital. The blunt fact is that many young Chinese in cities
like
Shanghai or Beijing get a better elementary and high school education than
Americans do. That's a reality that should embarrass us and stir us to seek
lessons from China.

On this trip I brought with me a specialist on American third-grade
education - my third-grade daughter. Together we sat in on third-grade
classes in urban
Shanghai and in a rural village near the Great Wall. In math, science and
foreign languages, the Chinese students were far ahead.

My daughter was mortified when I showed a group of Shanghai teachers some of
the homework she had brought along. Their verdict: first-grade level at a
Shanghai
school.

Granted, China's education system has lots of problems. Universities are
mostly awful, and in rural areas it's normally impossible to hold even a
primitive
conversation in English with an English teacher. But kids in the good
schools in Chinese cities are leaving our children in the dust.

Last month, the Asia Society published an excellent report, "Math and
Science Education in a Global Age: What the U.S. Can Learn from China." It
notes that
China educates 20 percent of the world's students with 2 percent of the
world's education resources. And the report finds many potential lessons in
China's
rigorous math and science programs.

Yet, there isn't any magic to it. One reason Chinese students learn more
math and science than Americans is that they work harder at it. They spend
twice
as many hours studying, in school and out, as Americans.

Chinese students, for example, must do several hours of homework each day
during their summer vacation, which lasts just two months. In contrast,
American
students have to spend each September relearning what they forgot over the
summer.

China's government has developed a solid national curriculum, so that nearly
all high school students study advanced biology and calculus. In contrast,
only 13 percent of American high school pupils study calculus, and fewer
than 18 percent take advanced biology.

Yet if the Chinese government takes math and science seriously, children and
parents do so even more. At Cao Guangbiao elementary school in Shanghai, I
asked a third-grade girl, Li Shuyan, her daily schedule. She gets up at 6:30
a.m. and spends the rest of the day studying or practicing her two musical
instruments.

So if she gets her work done and has time in the evening, does she watch TV
or hang out with friends? "No," she said, "then I review my work and do
extra
exercises."

A classmate, Jiang Xiuyuan, said that during summer vacation, his father
allows him to watch television each evening - for 10 minutes.

The Chinese students get even more driven in high school, as they prepare
for the national college entrance exams. Yang Luyi, a tenth grader at the
first-rate
Shanghai High School, said that even on weekends he avoided going to movies.
"Going to the cinema is time-consuming," he noted, "so when all the other
students are working so diligently, how can you do something so irrelevant?"

And romance?

Li Yafeng, a tenth-grade girl at the same school, giggled at my question. "I
never planned to have a boyfriend in high school," she said, "because it's
a waste of time."

Now, I don't want such a pressured childhood for my children. But if Chinese
go overboard in one direction, we Americans go overboard in the other. U.S.
children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a
television.

I don't think we could replicate the Chinese students' drive even if we
wanted to. But there are lessons we can learn - like the need to shorten
summer
vacations and to put far more emphasis on math and science. A central
challenge for this century will be how to regulate genetic tinkering with
the human
species; educated Chinese are probably better equipped to make those kinds
of decisions than educated Americans.

During the Qing Dynasty that ended in 1912, China was slow to learn lessons
from abroad and adjust its curriculum, and it paid the price in its
inability
to compete with Western powers. These days, the tables are turned, and now
we need to learn from China.

Possted by Miriam V.