Learning styles in China and the US

 Thought you might be interested in this Op-Ed piece that appeared in the New York Times today!
MJB

The Learning Virtues

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: February 28, 2013 333 Comments

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Jin Li grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. When the madness was over, the Chinese awoke to discover that far from overleaping the West, they were “economically destitute and culturally barren.” This inspired an arduous catch-up campaign. Students were recruited to learn what the West had to offer.

 

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Li was one of the students. In university, she abandoned Confucian values, which were then blamed for Chinese backwardness, and embraced German culture. In her book, “Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West,” she writes that Chinese students at that time were aflame — excited by the sudden openness and the desire to catch up.

Li wound up marrying an American, moved to the States and became a teacher. She was stunned. American high school students had great facilities but didn’t seem much interested in learning. They giggled in class and goofed around.

This contrast between the Chinese superstudent and the American slacker could be described with the usual tired stereotypes. The Chinese are robots who unimaginatively memorize facts to score well on tests. The Americans are spoiled brats who love TV but don’t know how to work. But Li wasn’t satisfied with those clichés. She has spent her career, first at Harvard and now at Brown, trying to understand how Asians and Westerners think about learning.

The simplest way to summarize her findings is that Westerners tend to define learning cognitively while Asians tend to define it morally. Westerners tend to see learning as something people do in order to understand and master the external world. Asians tend to see learning as an arduous process they undertake in order to cultivate virtues inside the self.

You can look at the slogans on university crests to get a glimpse of the difference. Western mottos emphasize knowledge acquisition. Harvard’s motto is “Truth.” Yale’s is “Light and truth.” The University of Chicago’s is “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.”

Chinese universities usually take Confucian sayings that emphasize personal elevation. Tsinghua’s motto is “Strengthen self ceaselessly and cultivate virtue to nurture the world.” Nanjing’s motto is “Be sincere and hold high aspirations, learn diligently and practice earnestly.”

When Li asked Americans to randomly talk about learning they used words like: thinking, school, brain, discovery, understand and information. Chinese, on the other hand, tended to use phrases common in their culture: learn assiduously, study as if thirsting or hungering, be diligent in one’s learning.

In the Western understanding, students come to school with levels of innate intelligence and curiosity. Teachers try to further arouse that curiosity in specific subjects. There’s a lot of active learning — going on field trips, building things. There’s great emphasis on questioning authority, critical inquiry and sharing ideas in classroom discussion.

In the Chinese understanding, there’s less emphasis on innate curiosity or even on specific subject matter. Instead, the learning process itself is the crucial thing. The idea is to perfect the learning virtues in order to become, ultimately, a sage, which is equally a moral and intellectual state. These virtues include: sincerity (an authentic commitment to the task) as well as diligence, perseverance, concentration and respect for teachers.

In Chinese culture, the heroic scholar may possess less innate intelligence but triumphs over hardship. Li cites the story of the scholar who tied his hair to a ceiling beam so he could study through the night. Every time his head dropped from fatigue, the yank of his hair kept him awake.

Li argues that Westerners emphasize the Aha moment of sudden insight, while Chinese are more likely to emphasize the arduous accumulation of understanding. American high school students tease nerds, while there is no such concept in the Chinese vocabulary. Western schools want students to be proud of their achievements, while the Chinese emphasize that humility enables self-examination. Western students often work harder after you praise them, while Asian students sometimes work harder after you criticize them.

These cultures are surprisingly enduring, Li notes, even with all the cross-pollination that goes on in the world today. Each has its advantages. I’m mostly struck by the way the intellectual and moral impulses are fused in the Chinese culture and separated in the West.

It’s easy to see historically why this came about. Hellenic culture emphasized skeptical scientific inquiry. With us, religion and science have often been at odds. We’re a diverse society, so it’s easier to teach our common academic standards in the classroom and relegate our diverse moralities to the privacy of the home.

I’d just note that cultures that do fuse the academic and the moral, like Confucianism or Jewish Torah study, produce these awesome motivation explosions. It might be possible to champion other moral/academic codes to boost motivation in places where it is absent.

 

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o    Grant Wiggins

o    Hopewell nj

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Having spent time teaching teachers in China on how to teach for understanding and critical thinking, I can say that Brooks has written a very superficial piece here. Yes, the teachers (and their students) work extraordinarily hard: I worked with teachers 10 hours a day, in a building with no heat in winter in Beijing - and then when we went home, the teachers stayed to de-brief for 2 hours. This went on for 2 weeks - during the teachers' vacation. Yet, numerous times, in the middle of busy interactive workshops, clumps of teachers were sound asleep - and we were told that this was very common in schools and universities by other teachers. The core motives here are a funny mix of diligence for diligence' sake and status, not 'learning'.

A revealing story about how far they have to go: I began my workshop by quoting from Confucius on learning, and made some interpretive comments about what he was saying. There was an audible buzz in the room. I asked my translator what was up. He said: we never interpret Confucius. You just revealed in 1 minute the difference between east and west. 2nd story: 2 people deeply thanked me at the end for responding to their Qs - they were stunned that I had no script and was responsive to their ideas and wanted to have us all discuss them - unheard of in their schooling.

 

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2.    

o    Peter

o    Beijing

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While I am not an expert on Chinese education, I have been teaching Chinese middle school (= high school) students here in Beijing for going on two years. These are students who will head to the States for their post-secondary education.

True, embedded deeply within Chinese educational culture are the ethical and educational teachings of Confucius and Mencius, just like in the West we have luminaries such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and notions of the unexamined life not being worth living. However, with respect to both cultures I believe it's safe to say that these educational ideals have been set aside for more utilitarian ends.

Here in China there is a saying, "12 Years for One Test." In other words, for those students fortunate enough to attend school for a full 12 years, their end goal is no longer the cultivation of some abstract virtue, but rather success on the "gaokao" college entrance exam. Along the way, as I see things, the primary pedagogical method here is drilling students in statutory answers to statutory questions. To be sure, along the way real knowledge and understanding can be acquired, but almost as a by-product. One of my tasks here, and it is as challenging and rewarding as it is frustrating, is in fact to get our students to engage a process of learning and, yes, the tired cliche of "critical thinking," as opposed simply to arriving at a "right answer." Do I enjoy this work? Immensely! Am I succeeding? I like to think so.