While China flails, stuck in its Bread and Butterfly dilemma, the rest of the world, oblivious to the struggle, watches in awe. To them, China is an idol. Envy, terror, and genuine admiration—or a mixture of all three—color most outsiders' response to the ancient, gigantic dragon. Its miraculous economic growth, its rapid ascendance on the global political stage, its explosive growth in patent applications and scientific paper output, and its stunning performance on international tests: all of these triumphs seem to suggest that China has found its way to economic growth without following the Western liberal democratic path. At a time when Western democracies are experiencing economic slowdowns and political chaos, the apparent efficiency of China's authoritarian government is an attractive model: an alternative to Western democracy, a threat to the West's complacent superiority, and a fresh source of political, economic, and intellectual inspiration.
But while China's achievements over the past thirty years are laudable, it's a bit premature to declare authoritarianism a victory over democracy. The Chinese economic miracle is not the result of intensified authoritarian control. Rather, it's an involuntary, pragmatic retreat from a rigid totalitarian regime. Suddenly a large population, previously deprived of any autonomy, had the freedom to conduct their daily economic life as they wished. Albeit still very limited, that freedom was enough to enable them to take advantage of an increasingly globalized economy. Alas, as the massive uneducated, cheap, and highly motivated labor force dries up and the world economy changes, China's miracle faces the inevitable challenge of upgrading.
The upgrade will require a different workforce, one that is diverse, creative, and entrepreneurial. But despite 150 years of effort, China has failed to develop an education capable of cultivating such a workforce. Since its humiliating encounters with Western powers in the mid-1800s, China has been on a hesitant journey to develop its people's capacity for scientific and technological innovation. But due to its reluctance to move away from authoritarianism, China's educational philosophy and practice remain as incapable of producing creative and innovative talent as they were two centuries ago. Yet the authoritarian nature of Chinese education has proven extremely effective—at producing great test takers. And so, in a world captivated by test scores, Chinese education rises as a shining, overestimated example.
Like its economic accomplishment, China's educational achievement is remarkable and respectable. But promoting Chinese education as the world's best is both scientifically inaccurate and philosophically misleading. Much of the world's admiration rests on a simplistic definition of education quality, a romanticized interpretation of the factors contributing to the system's success and an unquestioning glorification of its authoritarian approach. This misplaced admiration leads to China's elevation as a model for the rest of the world, particularly Western countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While the admiration may be innocent, putting China on a pedestal is dangerous. At best, it will lead to a waste of time and resources, as other countries struggle to copy a model that was proven obsolete over a century ago. At worst, it will destroy the creative Western educational systems that China has been so eager to copy for more than a century. “Chinese education would be a poison for America, not a remedy,” warns Saga Ringmar, a Swedish high school student who attended a Shanghai school for two years.1
The evidence to support China's excellence in education is embarrassingly thin, but it's been well marketed. Given the widespread acceptance of China's peerless status in the world of education, it is mind-boggling to realize that the primary evidence is simply two sets of test scores in three subjects from one source.
China was made the world's model of educational excellence by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the triennial test of fifteen-year-old students in math, reading, and science operated by the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD). PISA has become the star maker in the education universe because of its bold claim to assess “the extent to which students near the end of compulsory education have acquired key knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies.”2 Moreover, PISA claims to find educational stars by identifying which education systems better prepare their children for “full participation in modern societies” as measured by PISA scores. The goal is for educational systems to learn from “the highest-performing and most rapidly improving school systems.”3
China was found to have the “strongest-performing” school system in December 2011, when the 2009 PISA results were publicized. Students from Shanghai topped the rankings in all three subjects. A new star had been discovered! The OECD promoted its star with press releases, interviews, blog posts, publications such as Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for the United States, and an elaborate video series produced by the Pearson Foundation (in collaboration with PISA and OECD).4 Shanghai was now officially an education giant, declared the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), a nonprofit education policy think tank in the United States, in a paper, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform, later expanded to a book, Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems.5 In addition, a host of reports by international media and awestruck comments by government leaders such as US President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave further credence to China's newly acquired reputation.
It is worth pointing out that none of the publications, media reports, and commentaries provided more empirical evidence. Instead, they simply accepted the illusion of excellence and strengthened it by attempting to explain its causes. The only additional evidence was the same top ranking in the 2012 PISA. Shanghai's fifteen-year-olds again ranked first in all three categories. More promotion and publicity followed, including a report compiled by the NCEE entitled Chinese Lessons: Shanghai's Rise to the Top of the PISA League Tables.6
The unsuspecting public, along with many national policymakers, have been sold the notion that PISA measures the quality of educational systems; therefore China's is the best. Yet the sole piece of evidence that supports China's status has been critiqued relentlessly. In a June 2013 article in the Times Education Supplement magazine, William Stewart raised a barrage of questions:
But what if there are “serious problems” with the Pisa data? What if the statistical techniques used to compile it are “utterly wrong” and based on a “profound conceptual error”? Suppose the whole idea of being able to accurately rank such diverse education systems is “meaningless”, “madness”?
What if you learned that Pisa's comparisons are not based on a common test, but on different students answering different questions? And what if switching these questions around leads to huge variations in the all-important Pisa rankings, with the U.K. finishing anywhere between 14th and 30th and Denmark between fifth and 37th? What if these rankings—that so many reputations and billions of pounds depend on, that have so much impact on students and teachers around the world—are in fact “useless”?7
The article's findings are troublesome to PISA and should be extremely unsettling to its faithful, say scholars who have independently reached the same conclusions. “As far as they are concerned, the emperor has no clothes,” writes Stewart. Citing numerous publications and conversations with scholars in Denmark, Northern Ireland, and the United Kingdom, as well as with OECD, he points out major technical flaws with PISA's composition of the tests, administering of the tests, and use of statistical techniques to generate country rankings. Stewart uses research by Svend Kreiner, a professor of biomedical statistics at the University of Copenhagen, to point out that the PISA rankings are fundamentally flawed because not all students in each country responded to the same questions. “For example, in Pisa 2006, about half the participating students were not asked any questions on reading and half were not tested at all on maths, although full rankings were produced for both subjects,” he writes. Moreover, students in different countries were asked different sets of questions. “Eight of the 28 reading questions used in Pisa 2006 were deleted from the final analysis in some countries.”
Kreiner presents a more serious challenge to PISA. He questions the appropriateness of the model PISA uses to produce the country rankings. PISA uses the Rasch model, a widely used psychometric model named after the late Danish mathematician and statistician Georg Rasch. For this model to work properly, certain requirements must be met. But according to Kreiner, who studied under Rasch and has worked with his model for forty years, PISA's application does not meet those requirements. In an article published in the academic journal Psychometrika, Kreiner and coauthor Karl Bang Christensen show that the Rasch model does not fit the reading literacy data of PISA, and thus the country rankings are not robust. As a result, rankings of countries can vary a great deal over different subsets. For example, Denmark can rank anywhere between fifth and thirty-sixth out of fifty-six countries.8 “That means that [PISA] comparisons between countries are meaningless,” Kreiner told the Times Education Supplement.
Kreiner is not the first or only scholar to raise questions about PISA's technical flaws. In 2007, a collection of nearly twenty researchers from multiple European countries presented their critical analysis in the book PISA According to PISA: Does PISA Keep What It Promises?9 Independent scholars from all over the world took apart PISA's methodology, examining how it was designed; how it sampled, collected, and presented data; and what its outcomes were. Then the researchers compared the test's real-life validity to its claims. Almost all of them “raise[d] serious doubts concerning the theoretical and methodological standards applied within PISA, and particularly to its most prominent by-products, its national league tables or analyses of school systems.”10 Among their conclusions were these:
PISA did respond to some of the technical challenges. For example, Andreas Schleicher, PISA's face to the world, wrote a commentary responding to Kreiner's charges in TES.12 While the dispute over PISA's technical flaws continues, some argue that even if PISA did everything right technically, it still could not possibly claim to be measuring the quality of entire education systems, let alone their students' ability to live in the modern world.
“There are very few things you can summarise with a number and yet Pisa claims to be able to capture a country's entire education system in just three of them,” wrote Hugh Morrison of Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “It can't be possible. It is madness.”13 Morrison, a mathematician, does not think the Rasch model should be used at all. He argues that “at the heart of Rasch, and other similar statistical models, lies a fundamental, insoluble mathematical error that renders Pisa rankings ‘valueless’ and means that the programme ‘will never work.’ ”14 The problem of PISA, according to Morrison, violates a central principle of measurement drawn from physicist Niels Bohr's work: the entity measured cannot be divorced from the measuring instrument. Morrison illustrates his point with an example. Suppose Einstein and a student both produced a perfect score on a test. “Surely to claim that the pupil has the same mathematical ability as Einstein is to communicate ambiguously?” The unambiguous communication would be “Einstein and the pupil have the same mathematical ability relative to this particular [test]…Mathematical ability, indeed any ability, is not an intrinsic property of the individual; rather, it's a joint property of the individual and the measuring instrument.”15 In a nutshell, Morrison's point is that PISA scores students' ability to complete tasks included in the test, not their general ability to understand and succeed.
Even if PISA did measure cognitive abilities as accurately as it claims to, those abilities span only three domains: math, reading, and science. PISA makes the assumption that these skills are universally valuable. In other words, as Svein Sjøberg, a professor of science education at Norway's University of Oslo, points out, PISA “assumes that the challenges of tomorrow's world are more or less identical for young people across countries and cultures” and thus promotes “kind of universal, presumably culture-free, curriculum as decided by the OECD and its experts.” This assumption is mistaken. He continues, “Although life in many countries do [sic] have some similar traits, one can hardly assume that the 15-year olds in e.g. Japan, Greece, Mexico and Norway are preparing for the same challenges and need identical life skills and competencies.”16
Even if cognitive skills in math, science, and reading were the most important skills in the universe, they would not—could not—be the only skills an educational system should cultivate. Skills and knowledge in other domains, such as “the humanities, social sciences, foreign languages, history, geography, physical education etc.,” play a crucial role if citizens of any country are to live a fulfilling life.17 So do noncognitive skills: social-emotional skills, curiosity, creativity, resilience, engagement, passion, and a host of other personality traits. In fact, many would argue that talents, skills, knowledge, and creativity in domains outside math, science, and reading are at least as important, perhaps even more important, to live successfully in the new world. Henry Levin, a professor in economics of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, reviews empirical evidence that shows the essential value of noncognitive skills to work and life in his article “More Than Just Test Scores.”18
PISA provides no direct evidence of Chinese students' performance in areas beyond math, science, and reading. Thus, even if PISA were methodologically sound, conceptually correct, and properly administered, its only unambiguous conclusion would be that fifteen-year-old students in Shanghai received the highest scores in math, reading, and science in 2009 and 2012. Leaping from the highest PISA score in three subjects to the best education system in the world is too big a jump for any logical person—unless the purpose of education is defined as doing well on the PISA.
Since no one, not the Chinese and not even the PISA team (I hope), would define the purpose of education as achieving good PISA scores, making China the world's model of educational excellence just because some of its fifteen-year-olds received the highest PISA scores is not only inaccurate but misleading. The excellence is a simple illusion created by the PISA league tables.
PISA's operators refuse to have their shiny new star tarnished. In response to doubts about Shanghai's performance, Andreas Schleicher put out a forceful defense in a blog post in 2013.19 He dismissed critics as narrow-minded, jealous individuals with petty ideas: “Whenever an American or European wins an Olympic gold medal, we cheer them as heroes. When a Chinese does, the first reflex seems to be that they must have been doping; or if that's taking it too far, that it must have been the result of inhumane training.”
Schleicher countered charges that the Shanghai sample did not represent children of migrant workers; reiterated that students were not only good at memorization but could also apply their knowledge in math; and stressed that students in Shanghai have more productive beliefs than students in other countries. Schleicher's arguments about the sampling remain controversial. Tom Loveless of Brookings Institute challenged him with more data and evidence, to which PISA has yet to provide an adequate response.20 Schleicher's statement about Shanghai students' math performance does no more than simply affirm that Shanghai students are the best PISA performers in math. It does not add any more proof that Shanghai has the best education. And his point about Shanghai students' belief that “they will succeed if they try hard and they trust their teachers to help them succeed” does not add proof either. Instead, it confirms that their PISA performance is a result of “inhumane training” and exemplifies Schleicher's and his like-minded observers' attempts to romanticize the insufferable reality Chinese parents and students experience daily.
Schleicher has on many occasions promoted the idea that Chinese students take responsibilities for their own learning, while in “many countries, students were quick to blame everyone but themselves.” France is his prime example: “More than three-quarters of the students in France…said the course material was simply too hard, two-thirds said the teacher did not get students interested in the material, and half said their teacher did not explain the concepts well or they were just unlucky.” Students in Shanghai felt just the opposite, believing that “they will succeed if they try hard and they trust their teachers to help them succeed.” Schleicher maintains that this difference in attitude contributed to the gap between Shanghai, ranked first, and France, ranked twenty-fifth. “And guess which of these two countries keeps improving and which is not? The fact that students in some countries consistently believe that achievement is mainly a product of hard work, rather than inherited intelligence, suggests that education and its social context can make a difference in instilling the values that foster success in education”21
Schleicher got the numbers right, but his interpretation is questionable. Plenty of countries that have higher PISA rankings than France report similar attitudes. For example, more students in number eight, Liechtenstein, and number nine, Switzerland (over 54 percent, in contrast to 51 percent in France), said their teachers did not explain the concept well. The percentage of students attributing their math failure to “bad luck” was almost identical across the three countries: 48.6 percent in Liechtenstein, 48.5 percent in Switzerland, and 48.1 percent in France. The difference in percentage of students claiming the course material was too hard wasn't that significant: 62.2 percent in Liechtenstein, 69.9 percent in Switzerland, and 77.1 percent in France. Neither was the difference in the percentage of students saying that “the teachers did not get students interested in the material”: 61.8 percent in Liechtenstein, 61.1 percent in Switzerland, and 65.2 percent in France.22
Moreover, the PISA report seems to contradict Schleicher's reasoning because it finds that students with lower scores tend to take more responsibility: “Overall, the groups of students who tend to perform more poorly in mathematics—girls and socio-economically disadvantaged students—feel more responsible for failing mathematics tests than students who generally perform at higher levels.”23
A closer examination of the data reveals that the degree to which students take responsibility for failing in math or blaming outside factors does not have much to do with their PISA performance. Consider the percentage of students who attribute their failing in math to teachers: countries with low percentages of students saying, “My teacher did explain the concepts well this week,” or, “My teacher did not get students interested in the material,” do not necessarily have the best ranking. Conversely, countries where students are more likely to blame teachers are not necessarily poor performers.
Using Shanghai as the cutoff, the countries with the lowest percentage (below 35 percent) of students blaming their teachers for failing to explain the concepts well are Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Russian Federation, Chinese Taipei, Albania, Vietnam, and Shanghai-China. An almost identical list of countries has the lowest percentage (below 41 percent) of students blaming their teachers for not interesting students in the material: Kazakhstan, Japan, Albania, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Russian Federation, Montenegro, and Shanghai-China. When the lists are combined, the ten countries with the lowest percentage of students blaming their teachers are Kazakhstan, Japan, Albania, Singapore, Korea, Malaysia, Russian Federation, Chinese Taipei, Shanghai-China, and Vietnam. The countries whose students are most likely to blame their teachers are Norway, Italy, Germany, Slovenia, France, Austria, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland.
Among the countries whose students are least likely to blame teachers are some of the best (Shanghai, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taipei, and Vietnam), worst (Kazakhstan, Albania, Malaysia), and average (Russian Federation) PISA performers. Students who are most likely to blame teachers come from countries that earn the top PISA scores (Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and Germany) and middle-level PISA scores (Norway, Sweden, Italy, Slovenia, France, Austria, and the Czech Republic).
What's intriguing is that the countries whose students are least likely to blame their teachers all have a more authoritarian cultural tradition than the countries whose students are most likely to blame their teachers. On the first list, Singapore, Korea, Chinese Taipei, Shanghai-China, Japan, and Vietnam share the Confucian cultural tradition. And although Japan and Korea are now considered full democracies, the rest of the countries on the list are not.24 In contrast, the list of countries with the highest percentage of students blaming their teachers for their failures ranked much higher on the Democracy Index. Norway ranked first, Sweden ranked second, and Switzerland was number seven. With the single exception of Italy, all ten countries where students were most likely to blame their teachers ranked above 30 on the Democracy Index (and Italy ranked thirty-second).
One conclusion is easy to draw from this analysis: students in more authoritarian educational systems are more likely to blame themselves and less likely to question the authority—the teacher—than students in more democratic educational systems. An authoritarian educational system demands obedience and does not tolerate questioning of authority. Just like authoritarian parents, authoritarian education systems have externally defined high expectations that are not necessarily accepted by students intrinsically but require mandatory conformity through rigid rules and severe punishment for noncompliance.25 More important, they work hard to convince children to blame themselves for failing to meet the expectations. As a result, they produce students with low confidence and low self-esteem. On the PISA survey of students' self-concept in math, students in Japan, Chinese Taipei, Korea, Vietnam, Macao-China, Hong Kong-China, and Shanghai-China had the lowest self-concepts in the world, despite their high PISA math scores.26 A high proportion of students in these educational systems worried that they “will get poor grades in mathematics.” More than 70 percent of students in Korea, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Vietnam, Shanghai-China, and Hong Kong-China, in contrast to less than 50 percent in Austria, United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they worry about getting poor grades in math.27
In other words, what Schleicher has been praising as Shanghai's secret to educational excellence is simply the outcome of an authoritarian education. As discussed previously, Chinese education has been notoriously authoritarian for thousands of years. In an authoritarian system, the ruler and the ruling class (previously the emperors; today the government) have much to gain when people believe it is their own effort, and nothing more, that makes them successful. No difference in innate abilities or social circumstances matters as long as they work hard. If they cannot succeed, they have only themselves to blame. This is an excellent and convenient way for the authorities to deny any responsibility for social equity and justice and to avoid accommodating differently talented people. It is a great ploy that helped the emperors convince people to accept the inequalities they were born into and obey the rules. It was also designed to give people a sense of hope, no matter how slim, that they can change their own fate by being indoctrinated through the exams.
The ruling class in China has worked diligently to convince people that suffering is good for them and will bring them great success. Mencius, a loyal follower of Confucius who was second only to Confucius in status, wrote over two thousand years ago: “Thus, when Heaven is about to confer a great office on any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering, and his sinews and bones with toil. It exposes his body to hunger, and subjects him to extreme poverty. It confounds his undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetencies.”28
Historical tales of hard work that brings success have been passed down for centuries in China; parents and teachers still tell them every day. For example, Sun Jing in the Han dynasty studied day and night. He tied his hair to a beam so that when he fell asleep and dropped his head, the pain would wake him up. He became a successful and famous politician. There was also Su Qin, a well-known minister in the Warring States period (476–221 BC) whose success came from studying hard. To stay awake, he would jab his side with an awl.
Poverty should not matter, Chinese tradition insists. Kuang Heng became the prime minister in the Han dynasty by studying hard, even though he was born in extreme poverty. He could not afford lamp oil, so he made a hole on the wall and studied in the light of his neighbor's lamp. Che Yin, another poor child who could not afford oil, became a powerful government official in the Jin dynasty (265–420); he caught fireflies and put them in a transparent bag to use as a reading light. His contemporary Sun Kang read his books using reflections from the snow.
Accompanying these stories are abundant Chinese sayings about the necessity and possible outcomes of hard work: “Diligence makes up for stupidity”; “Stupid birds get an early start”; “Diligence is the path through mountains of books; suffering is the boat that sails over the ocean of knowledge”; “Only those who could tolerate the bitterest of the bitter can come out as a man above men.”
This ploy has been successfully forced on the Chinese people and their children for centuries, and now it is being romanticized by observers such as Andreas Schleicher. “Chinese and Japanese societies allow no excuse for lack of progress in school; regardless of one's current level of performance, opportunities for advancement are always believed to be available through more effort,” wrote Harold Stevenson and James Stigler more than twenty years ago in their book Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education.29 In contrast, Americans have been said to hold the assumption that achievement comes from innate ability rather than effort.30 As a result, it is believed that struggle and tolerance for hardship are valued in China but avoided in the United States.31
Sold on the idea that effort can trump any inequalities, Chinese parents and schools subject their children to extreme hardships, some amounting to child abuse. The controversial book Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother by Yale law professor Amy Chua offers a mild version of what a Chinese parent might do to her children.32 Following Chua's book came the Chinese Wolf Dad, whose motto is “beat the child every three days and they will be admitted to Peking University.”33 Xiao Baiyou, a Chinese businessman, wrote a book sharing the wolf-dad parenting approach that smoothed his three children's way into one of China's top universities. He believes wholeheartedly in the Chinese tradition of education. His children were not allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities. When one showed an interest in studying plants, he said, “You can have your personal interest, but only after you pass the exam to college.” He also firmly believes that his children did not need to make any friends before successfully getting into college.
Xiao devised a system with seven principles of beating his children:
Xiao's parenting approach is extreme, but like Amy Chua, he received wide attention in China, with hundreds of media interviews, lectures, and book signings. In many ways, his approach is a realization of the “poisonous pedagogy” described by the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller in her book For Your Own Good. The basic principles of the “poisonous pedagogy” are as follows:
According to Miller, this “poisonous pedagogy” was practiced in nineteenth-century Germany and was responsible for producing such authoritarian figures as Adolf Hitler. Its spirit continues today. David Gribble, a British veteran educator and author, translates the principles for educators in his satirical novel A Really Good School:
To implement these principles, Gribble suggests the following methods:
These principles and methods are supposed to be seen in a “school so awful that it could not possibly exist,” but such schools do exist, and in great abundance, in China.36 In fact, the entire Chinese educational system endorses the poisonous pedagogy. At the system level, Chinese education holds that:
When implemented, these principles translate into:
These are the features endorsed and celebrated today by Western observers such as Marc Tucker in the book Surpassing Shanghai, Thomas Friedman in numerous columns in the New York Times, and Andreas Schleicher in his many interviews and writings about the Shanghai miracle. Instead of seeing these features for what they are, powerful ways to control people, these pundits want Western countries to emulate China's traditions simply because they are the secret to Shanghai's PISA performance.
It is almost absurd that this book needs to be written and this question asked, because for over a century, China has been trying to reject its own educational system and replace it with the education that produced the more developed economies in the West. But the question does need to be raised because of the widespread misinformation about Chinese education, the seductive misinterpretation of China's economic and educational achievements, and the misguided popular recommendations for Western democracies to copy China.
No one would disagree that the world needs excellence in education. But what defines excellence? There are two paradigms: employee oriented and entrepreneur oriented.37 While both aim to prepare children to live successfully, the former focuses on transmitting a body of knowledge and skills predetermined to be valuable, and the latter emphasizes developing the potential of each individual child. The former presumes that the necessary knowledge and skills can be determined by predicting the needs of the society and the economy, while the latter assumes that a child whose potential is developed will become valuable in her own way. Employee-oriented education values what children should learn, while entrepreneur-oriented education values what children would learn. Employee-oriented education prepares children to fit existing jobs, while entrepreneur-oriented education prepares children to take the responsibility of creating jobs.
Excellence in one paradigm does not mean excellence in the other. Quite the contrary. When a school or system becomes extremely good at preparing employees, it is not necessarily good at preparing entrepreneurs, because different paradigms lead to different arrangements of educational institutions and systems. Given its primary goal to efficiently and effectively transmit predetermined knowledge, the employee-oriented education paradigm requires an apparatus with clearly defined learning outcomes for all students, well-trained teachers knowledgeable about the content to be transmitted and skilled at doing so, engaged students willing and able to learn the content, standardized measures to monitor the progress of each student and institution, and other resources aligned with the prescribed content. Uniformity, consistency, standardization, competition, data-driven practices, and an emphasis on outcomes are the features of employee-oriented education.
In distinct contrast, entrepreneur-oriented education maximizes individual differences. Schools following this paradigm have no standardized, common curriculum. Each child pursues his or her interests and passions, and teachers respond to and support those individual pursuits and assess students' progress accordingly. Variation, diversity, tolerance (or indulgence), autonomy, and student-driven education are features of entrepreneur-oriented education.
Today the world's measure of excellence in education follows the old paradigm. Excellence is defined as effectiveness and efficiency in homogenizing children and transmitting the prescribed content, indicated by standardized test scores in a few subjects. Schools and nations that produce higher test scores are considered to have better educational systems. Hence China has been made the model of excellence.
But it is an excellence of the past.
To cultivate the talents we need for the twenty-first century, we must redefine excellence in education. Instead of effectiveness in homogenizing students, an excellent education should support the development of diverse talents. Instead of suppressing creativity and individual differences, an excellent education should deliberately encourage and shape them. Instead of preparing compliant employees, an excellent education should intentionally encourage children to be entrepreneurial. Instead of overemphasizing global competitiveness, an excellent education should foster a global perspective. Excellence in education should thus be measured by its effectiveness in providing personalized education that promotes diversity and creativity, engaging children in global interactions, and inspiring entrepreneurship and innovation.38
Chinese education is the complete opposite of what we need for the new era.
First, the educational excellence in Shanghai is no more than an illusion. The primary evidence that has been used to support the claim that Shanghai has an excellent education is its students' PISA scores in three subjects. Given the exam's technical problems and compared to the true purpose of a modern education, these scores are hardly evidence of greatness. Tucker, Friedman, and other like-minded observers have been trying to offer lessons about “Shanghai's rise to the top of the PISA league tables.”39 In reality Shanghai has not risen to the top. It already stood at the top in 2009, the first time it participated in PISA. If Shanghai's students had taken the PISA in 2000, they would have made top scores then as well, because the magical ingredients have been present for thousands of years. So unless PISA scores are the ultimate goal of education, there is no reason to admire, envy, or copy education in China.
Second, behind the illusion of excellence is an insufferable reality that the Chinese have long been trying to escape. Historical and contemporary evidence, as presented in previous chapters, suggests that the Chinese education stifles creativity, smothers curiosity, suppresses individuality, ruins children's health, distresses students and parents, corrupts teachers and leaders, and perpetuates social injustice and inequity. In other words, what has given China its stunning PISA scores has cost China dearly. The authoritarian education system and tradition are at least partially responsible for the humiliating military defeats by Western powers in the 1900s; the slow development of scientific and technological innovations over the past century; and the shortage of innovative and creative talents China needs desperately if it is to transform its economy into one that is productive and innovation driven. The Chinese have long recognized the damages of their education system and have taken drastic actions to change it for over a century, but they have had little success. China continues to struggle with traditions that appear to be mechanisms for excellence, yet hold China back from any real, meaningful change.
Third, at the core of Chinese education are the three basics that Zhang Mingxuan, China's PISA director, uses to explain Shanghai's success: Chinese families' high expectations, hard work and diligence, and the examination system. As we've seen, the high value Chinese parents place on education is simply a survival strategy to cope with an authoritarian regime. Since all other possibilities for success have been removed by the authoritarian regime, education—or, rather, test preparation—is the only path to success.
Chinese students' diligence is the result of an ancient ploy designed to deny the existence of social injustice and individual differences and suppress individuals' desire to question authority and demand equality. Hard work, effort, and struggle are of course important for both learning and life, but denying the important influence of human nature and family conditions can do great damage. One consequence is the vast inequality of opportunities. The likelihood of attending a college is much higher for a child born in an urban area than for a child born in a rural village, even if the child in the village works harder than his urban peer.40 Another damaging consequence is the loss of great talents. Hard work can help with rote memorization and preparing for exams, but for true creative and innovative work, one needs passion, interest, and some innate strength. Moreover, the belief that everyone can succeed the same way as long as they work hard has led to the virtually complete negligence of children with disabilities and special needs.
Zhang calls the exam, or gaokao, a great equalizer. It may appear so, because it seems that test scores are the only incorruptible measure in China. However, the gaokao, like any other exam of that nature, is inherently discriminatory, favoring those who have the resources to prepare, the propensity to do well, and the interest in what is being tested, and working against those who are unwilling or unable to comply.
These elements are intuitively seductive and very difficult to undo. Unless the West wishes to be stuck with a system that cannot be easily broken, it is best not to use China as a model.
Education in the West must go through transformative changes. A paradigm shift will be necessary if teachers are to prepare children to live successfully in the new world.41 As traditional routine jobs are offshored and automated, we need more and more globally competent, creative, innovative, entrepreneurship-minded citizens who are job creators instead of employment-minded job seekers. To cultivate new talents, we need an education that enhances individual strengths, follows children's passions, and fosters their social-emotional development. We do not need an authoritarian education that aims to fix children's deficits according to externally prescribed standards.
China's education represents the best of the past. It worked extremely well for China's imperial rulers for over a thousand years, but it stopped working when the modern world emerged. It continued to produce students who excel in a narrow range of subjects. But these students lack the very qualities the new society needs. This is why only 10 percent of Chinese college graduates are found to be employable by multinational businesses.42
In no way can China serve as the model for the future. In fact, we don't yet have a model that will meet the needs of a global future.
We will have to invent one.