'Britain's generous welfare system behind pupils' lack of ambition,' say Chinese teachers

Britain’s generous welfare system is behind pupils’ lack of ambition and ill-discipline, a group of Chinese teachers has said after spending four weeks in a comprehensive school in Hampshire. The five teachers, who are part of a TV series in which they take over the education of a class of 50 teenagers, have said British pupils unruly behaviour is directly linked to welfare handouts that has produced adolescents with rude behaviour. The teachers are starring in BBC Two's “Are Our Kids Tough Enough Chinese School” as part of a three-part documentary that begins Tuesday. Wei Zhao, who teaches Mandarin and spent 14 years working in communist Chinese, said cuts in the welfare system will mean students will be more motivated to learn. She said: “Even if they don’t work, they can get money, they don’t worry about it. "But in China they can’t get these things so they know, 'I need to study hard, I need to work hard to get money to support my family'. "If the British Government really cut benefits down to force people to go to work they might see things in a different way."


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11779784/Britains-generous-welfare-system-behind-pupils-lack-of-ambition-say-Chinese-teachers.html

If it's the report I have seen, it misses out the number of Chinese children who commit suicide because of the pressure they are put under.

The reason many more Asian children as a group have a higher IQ on average is due very much to an ethos to do well in school and life instilled by parents. There is much merit to what the teachers are saying here

Nine-hour tests and lots of pressure: welcome to the Chinese school system

As education minister Liz Truss heads for China to learn the lessons of its success, Jonathan Kaiman reports from the classrooms of Beijing


High-pressure Chinese education? A crowd in Anhui province waves off a coachload of students on their way to take the nine-hour 'gaokao' college entrance exam Photograph: China Daily/Corbis

The streets surrounding Shijia primary school in Beijing were mobbed by a crowd of parents so dense that cars were obliged to beat a retreat.

At 3.45pm on Friday, 11-year-old Zou Tingting, five minutes late, bounded through the school's west gate and into her waiting mother's arms. Tingting's classes were over, but her day was just beginning – she had an hour of homework, plus lessons in ping pong, swimming, art, calligraphy and piano.

Tingting's mother, Huang Chunhua, said that, like many Chinese mothers, she once considered Tingting's academic performance her top priority; now she realises the importance of a well-rounded education. "I've seen British curricular materials, and I'm actually kind of jealous," she said. "British teachers guide students to discover things on their own – they don't just feed them the answers, like in China."

In recent weeks British parents and educators have been in a panic about the discrepancy between the Chinese education system and the UK's. In December the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the 2012 results for its triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test – a reading, maths and science examination administered to half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries. Shanghai students topped the rankings; the UK ranked 26th.

Next week education minister Elizabeth Truss will lead a "fact-finding mission" to Shanghai to learn the secrets of China's success. She plans to adjust the UK's education policy accordingly.

Yet Chinese parents and educators see their own system as corrupt, dehumanising, pressurised and unfair. In fact, many are looking to the west for answers. Huang said that some parents bribe Shijia primary school to admit their children (though she declined to say whether she had done so herself).

Tingting attends an expensive cramming school at weekends, leaving her tired. She will probably have to abandon extracurricular activities in high school to devote more time to the college admission exam, called the gaokao. Many parents consider the gruelling nine-hour test a sorting mechanism that will determine the trajectory of their children's lives.

Chinese experts are also less impressed than Truss by the Pisa scores. "Even though Shanghai students scored well on the test, this doesn't mean that Shanghai's education system doesn't have any problems," said Lao Kaisheng, a professor in the education department of Beijing Normal University. "In fact, it's the opposite."

As long as China's education system remains vast but resource-constrained, Lao added, its schools will default to testing as a reliable indicator of competence. "The education system here puts a heavy emphasis on rote memorisation, which is great for students' test-taking ability but not for their problem-solving and leadership abilities or their interpersonal skills," he said. "Chinese schools just ignore these things."

According to an analysis of the rankings, the children of Shanghai's cleaners and caterers are three years more advanced than UK lawyers' and doctors' children in maths. Yet the figures are an unreliable measure of equality. Although Shanghai's 23 million people make up less than 2% of China's population, its per capita GDP is more than double the national average; its college enrolment rate is four times as high.

Furthermore, nearly half of Shanghai's school-age children belong to migrant families and were effectively barred from taking the test: because of China's residence registration system, these students are forced to attend high school in their home provinces, where schools are often debilitatingly understaffed. Although students from 12 provinces took the test in 2009, the government only shared Shanghai's scores.

"The OECD has not disclosed if other Chinese provinces secretly took part in the 2012 assessment. Nor have Pisa officials disclosed who selected the provinces that participated," wrote Tom Loveless, an education expert at Harvard University, on a Brookings Institute blog. "There is a lack of transparency surrounding Pisa's relationship with China."

Wang Peng, a teacher in Wuhu, a city in Anhui province, said that his school's average class size is significantly larger than most in Shanghai, and that it cannot compete in terms of financial strength. Wang said he makes about £300 a month; teachers in big cities make twice as much. "As far as education methods go, there's not a huge difference [between Wuhu and Shanghai]," he said. "But the general educational environment, and the opportunities that students receive – those are really different."

Occasionally, reminders of the system's ruthlessness cause soul-searching. In 2012, pictures of a classroom of Chinese high-school students hooked up to intravenous amino acid drips while studying for the gaokao went viral on social media. Last May two teenagers in Jiangsu killed themselves after "failing to complete homework", according to state media. In 2012, a student emerged from the exam to learn that his mother had died in a car crash 12 days prior; the school and his relatives conspired not to tell him so as to not distract him.

Authorities recognise the problem. Last June the government issued guidelines urging schools to focus on students' "moral development", "citizenship" and "ambition" rather than their test scores.

Yet solutions remain elusive. One recently retired teacher at a Beijing middle school said she earns extra money by teaching an after-school cramming course called maths olympiad. The programme was designed as an advanced exercise for outstanding maths students.

In the late 1990s Beijing authorities barred grade schools from setting entrance exams, and some simply adopted maths olympiad scores as a substitute. Parents began to see the course as required, even if their children were uninterested or under-qualified. Although the education ministry has repeatedly cracked down on maths olympiad instruction, schools maintain the programme under different names, state media reported in 2012. Enrolment figures remain high.

"When maths olympiad first started, it had the right idea – it was a programme for students who were really interested," said the teacher, who requested anonymity because of the course's controversial profile. "There are a lot of kids without the ability who go to study this stuff, and it consumes their weekends, and their winter and summer vacations.

"These students aren't developing in a healthy way. This shouldn't be allowed to happen."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/22/china-education-exams-parents-rebel

Oh, such a great idea to follow the Chinese path and treat our children like this.

Perhaps we should get them all to wave the flag.

So this has gone from a debate to Sassy spamming again

I heard this on talk radio today on my way to London.

I agreed with the first woman interviewed (name eludes me sorry) who said there should be a mix of the two.

Cuchulain wrote:The reason many more Asian children as a group have a higher IQ on average is due very much to an ethos to do well in school and life instilled by parents. There is much merit to what the teachers are saying here

agree with the first part but not the second
it is not the welfare system, which is relatively new, it is centuries of valuing scholars over warriors/athletes.

Up the Commies

Actually, the system we should be looking at is the Finnish model:

Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?
The country's achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework

"This is what we do every day," says Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School principal Kari Louhivuori, "prepare kids for life."

It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.

Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.

“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.

Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “You helped me,” he told his former teacher. Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”

This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools.

“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”

The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/?no-ist

It's long been acknowledged within the education system that Finland are ahead by leaps and bounds with their approach to education.

We could learn a lot from them