Ever noticed the way all Chinese students wear glasses?
Posted: December 1, 2009 Filed under: BLOG | Tags: 80s generation, academic pressure, china, education, 韩寒, han han 2 Comments »Yesterday a Chinese family was kind enough to take me out for Peking duck. Their son is studying at an Australian university and translated parts of the conversation for me which had turned to Sydney selective schools. The family likened them to the top schools in Beijing: not the best because they were filled with the brightest students in the city – just the students who worked the hardest. “And many of those Sydney selective schools are populated by Asian students,” I pointed out.
I expected the family to be proud of that indefatigable Chinese work ethic, but in fact, they too recognised that the insane amount of hours Chinese students study was getting out of hand. I was a little surprised – I’d always thought that even though we foreigners thought it crazy that these university, high, even primary school kids filled every waking hour with study*, for them isn’t it normal?
And it is normal – in that it’s what everyone is doing – but many here are starting to realise it’s normal bad kind of normal.
I brought up this topic with my Chinese student today (I’m tutoring him in English). He nodded vigorously in agreement. I asked him if it was a case of “race to the bottom” – that is, if you know that the only way to get a good job is to be the top of your class, all you can hope to do is work that extra bit harder than everyone else. Only problem is every single other student has the same idea, so they all start trying to work that extra bit harder. Which means now you have to give even more “extra work”, which everyone else is doing now too, and so you have to give a bit more and so on and so on until everyone is doing, no joke, 14 hour days.
“And the teachers tell us this,” he said disapprovingly, “that we have to be the best if we want to get anywhere. So all we become obsessed with defeating one another! That’s all we want to do, beat each other.”
And the pressure was getting to them, with concern about the mental health of these kids. Yesterday at lunch the family discussed the sad and pressing issue of suicide among overseas Chinese students (or even worse), who not only have to contend with pressures related to academia, but all the other stresses related to being in a vastly different country to your own.
The Chinese family used an illustrative anecdote: ever noticed that Western children carry their own bags? Whereas here in China, parents carry the bags for their children. Their son studying in Australia – a really cool 21-year-old dude, engaging, friendly – put it to me like this: “Chinese kids spend their whole childhood studying, and in the closed world of their family. They don’t know anything about the world. And then suddenly they’re in Australia where they’re meant to be independent. Not just because they’re away from their family, but also because Australia is a very different culture where young people are much more independent anyway.”
And from what I’ve so far gathered, young, Chinese students, particularly those under 20, are more inexperienced and less assertive than their Western counterparts. (Although by the mid-to-late 20s it all seems to even out.)
I cautiously asked him if he thought being more independent was a good thing. He replied, “yes! Definitely. I wanted to be more like that, which is why I went on exchange to Germany in high school. And man, was that a learning experience. I could barely even speak English then, let alone German! And there wasn’t anyone there who could speak Chinese, so every second I was having to work out words with my German host family,” he said with a laugh, stabbing an imaginary dictionary with his finger.
Perhaps it’s no accident that the story of my last post, should come out of China.
Of course the imperative question, are things changing? Firstly, are things worse now? Or is this simply one of those idiosyncratic cultural characteristics?
“It’s getting worse,” my student confirmed. “My parents are of the generation of the Cultural Revolution, so they didn’t even study! But now, all we do is study and the number of hours is escalating (actually I taught him the word “escalating”, lulz.) Before you worked hard in high school to get into a good university. But now to get into a good university you have to get into a good high school. And now they’re even beginning to take notice of what primary school you go to!”
And most hilariously he added, “and haven’t you noticed that all Chinese students wear glasses?” Funnily enough I had noticed just that at the last Chinese class I gatecrashed. “It’s because all we do is study! It’s a national tragedy,” he added, shaking his head.
And is this really of any benefit to the nation? Aren’t you simply creating a generation of exhausted, frazzled robots with brains full of data, but not a single thought? Doesn’t a truly great nation need workers who don’t just work hard, or know a lot of stuff but are also creative, innovative, worldly, confident and most importantly mentally sound? They’re the attributes you sacrifice when your kids are buried in books, working themselves to the bone.
But yes, as always, I have faith! The 80s generation are feeling burnt out. Writers like Han Han, icons of the new Chinese gen, are out there, criticising the education system. Yes, when you live in a country with a one-party system political activism may seem impossible, but in fact, I think it just takes forms different to our own. And these kids have one very vital trump card that previous generations in this country never did. It’s called the INTERNET, heard of it?
But that’s a post for another day!
*And a friend tells me that in one province of China, the children go to school every day of the month, with only two days off.
I wonder what would happen if China directed all of its hard-working study energy into hard-working creative/scientific/analytical/lateral thinking energy.
Boom! China would own the world!
I watched a TED.com talk today about origamists, and how recent origami has exploded into creating insane things like giant sized statues of humans and animals out of one sheet of square paper due to the creative application of mathematics to origami. This has not only led to developments in the ancient art of origami, but also to developments in space (several telescopes have systems based on origami design) and medicine (a cardiac stent is based on the balloon box you used to make in primary school – who knew!) and other areas. I really, really advocate for more emphasis on lateral and creative thinking in all systems of education and work environments.
Great post, as always. Your point about everyone working harder and harder and harder in order to ‘beat’ each other reminded me of the one thing I don’t like about New York, and one reason I would be a little scared to live there. It makes me grateful for Australia’s comparatively laid back culture.
It reminds me also a recent piece on modern upper-middle-class parenting by Sandra Tsing Loh in the Atlantic:
“Because what my class of mothers consumes most is education. We know how precarious our world is, and how easily our children can fall out of it. We see the invisible line down the middle of the street that separates the good school district from the bad. We see the line that separates our Prius, hovering silently at the crosswalk, from the corner, where 50 lower-middle-class children wait for the bus. We see, at our Creative meetings, the line that separates state-college folk from Ivy alums. Clearly, the solutions for overwhelmed working mothers include either moving in with some kid-loving older relatives (but they’re Republicans! from Ohio!) or kicking it 1950s style by just letting their kids play with the other kids on the block. In my part of Los Angeles, this means going over to the Mexican-gardener neighbor’s house and jumping on an illegal trampoline with 11 children, five chihuahuas, and three chickens, as we did often enough when my kids were toddlers. But the gardener’s children were English learners, who would gradually (I was told) leach the vocabulary from my English-speaking children—and then my daughters would never test gifted, never have academically motivated peers, never get into the good college-prep classes … ”
For goodness sake, I thought to myself! Although now, upon re-reading it, I think this part of the article is about class anxiety, which is an extremely middle-class trait. Perhaps the increased Unclese obsession with education and work (although I understand from Gladwell that it has its roots in rice farming), also has something to do with the emerging middle-class.