EDUCATION | Documentary raises debate on merits of Chinese-style teaching

A documentary exploring how Chinese-style education might work abroad has provoked considerable debate in both the UK and China.
The BBC show, entitled “The School that Turned Chinese” is currently airing on Hong Kong’s TVB Pearl. Fifty children aged between 13 and 14 were subject to an entirely different style of education – one inspired by the Chinese style, though apparently greatly exaggerated. For a period of four weeks, students were required to wear special uniforms, pledge to the flag once a week, and accept a 12-hour school day starting at 7 a.m. The pupils were required to adjust to lessons that prioritized note-taking and repetition.
At the end of the four weeks, the students will be pitted against their counterparts in the UK to determine whether the Chinese education-style produces better academic results.
Intended partly as an experiment and partly as entertainment, the documentary raises discussion about the merits of the two education systems.
Teresa Vong, the former director of the Educational Research Centre at the University of Macau’s Faculty of Education, said that she did not think the British education system would benefit from adopting a more Chinese approach.
“In effect there are a number of internal conflicts inside the British education system, for instance: tensions between the government and the local authority; budget cuts; few people entering the teaching profession – particularly in mathematics and science,” Teresa Vong observed. “The issue with the TV program is that it is ignoring the real contexts of England and narrowly focusing on the teaching approach.”
The decision to air the documentary-drama was inspired by the success of Shanghai province in topping the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tables – an index that compares education attainment across the world.
The expert on teaching practices questioned the validity of the PISA examinations as a credible ranking of academic performance. “The original idea of PISA is a kind of non-curriculum-based assessment, [meaning] students do not need to study and drill a lot [before taking the tests],” she explained. “However, it seems that the participant nations ignore this original idea to enhance their national scores.”
“As far as I know, most top schools in Shanghai are die-
hard fans of drilling students for examination,” the scholar added.
The PISA examinations cover the three key areas of mathematics, science and reading. Macau ranked sixth in mathematics, and joint 16th in both science and reading in the latest rankings, which were assembled in 2012. All three areas were improvements on Macau’s results in the previous PISA ‘cycle’ in 2009: 12th in mathematics, 18th in science and 28th in reading. Staff Reporter