Science and Confucianism

[wanderingbhikkh]

I read this article as a link from the incomparable silveradept and something kept poking at my brain the whole time. High-stakes testing...teaching to the test as a mantra...schools as elimination rounds...something about all this sounded oddly familiar.

Then it hit me.

The American school system is morphing into the Chinese one. Due primarily to the same

Comments

[mnemonicer]

Ros, this is a very nice piece of writing. You should submit this as an op ed to a newspaper or magazine and see where it gets you.

Also, speaking of China, I'm slogging back through my second year language texts and trying to relearn what I forgot in the last year of OMGTHEBAR! And reading a book published in 2001 called "The Coming Collapse of China." The guy has a year and a half left of shelf-life on his prediction (that China would collapse in 10 years), which is why I picked it up. It amused me. Author is Gordan Chang. He's worked with a lot of major international law firms in Shanghai and elsewhere. It's interesting.

[wanderingbhikkh]

The way I put it is "the PRC will last as long as the money lasts, plus maybe five years. The money will either run out by 2020 or in 2080."

How much Mandarin has left you like an errant lover?

[mnemonicer]

Dangran tai duo le, wo pengyou.

I think the grammar there was atrocious. But I suspect it gets my point across. Ask me if I can still write all those characters and you'll get an even worse answer.

B

[kaura_nighthawk]

Uh... if anything, Ros, the shift in US education more closely resembles an effort to reflect European standards of education. Which also deals heavily with Rigid Standards and a Boatload of Tests. Mainly because, you know, it seems to bloody work for them, as they consistently beat us out on the math, sciences and even basic English.

The Chinese model isn't even touched, really. When was the last time a Chinese sports team successfully sued to keep its budget up?

Hell, that doesn't just apply to sports. You can take San Jose's Leland High School as an example of exactly what our priorities are, even when the school in question does have money. Even now, with NCLB, California's exit exam, and the SAT/ACT bearing down on it, the Science department's still given far less funding and attention than its nationally acclaimed speech and debate team, its music program, its million-dollar and consistently losing football team, its more successful track and field and badminton teams, the new solar panel array they installed over the

[wanderingbhikkh]

On the subject of faculty politics: So, you're telling me that the humanities guys can create moving orations and the science guys just stick to the facts?

Quel horreur.

I'm not arguing that we're intentionally modeling the Chinese, or that the American education culture is vastly different from it...I'm only pointing out that we're going in a direction that ends with schools completely at the economic mercy of their standardized tests, and this is what it looks like. I haven't taught in European schools (next year in Prague!) but even so, this all looks damn familiar.

[silveradept]

I suspect that is where we will be soon enough, but I don't know how much the tracking will take hold, and I don't know where the big cutoff point between destined for success and destined for failure will be. Depending on the success of ideas like vouchers, it could be that if you have to go to public schooling at all, you've already failed.