BBC Show: Are British Kids Tough Enough to Handle Chinese School?

[Silent]

 

 

Indian-British kids scoring second best and Pakistani-British kids among the worst. Not even 100 years ago this was one country

Maybe but India and Pakistan split for a reason. They are (considered) culturally very different though this is mainly based on religion. Above that, generally only a subset of a population has a drive to migrate and, depending on the situation, only a subset of those interested to migrate manage to actually migrate. Migration is highly selective. I don't know the particulars in this case, but I would not be surprised if Indian and Pakistani migrants have on average hugely different backgrounds. 

[Angelina]

Islam is the official religion in Pakistan. Can we classify Pakistan as a theocracy? 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocracy

"Pakistan has Islam as its only official religion and its Federal Shariat Court has the duty of striking down any law not complying with the Sharia code of Islamic law; however, ruling falls upon legal scholars who, while required to be Muslim, are not religious clerics."

I think the explaination Geraldc provided makes more sense, but would not rule out the influence of religion.

 

 

 

edited 

[Angelina]

Oh and I think somethingfunny needs to reexamine her/his views

"No-one wants the Chinese kid in their group when doing joint projects."

You might have good intentions. Be careful not to hurt anyone.

[geraldc]

The UK school system is shifting exam dates to make things fairer for Muslim students, the next few years Ramadan will take place in what was exam season, so potentially thousands of students could be affected by having to sit exams while not eating or drinking during daylight hours. So they're going to shift exams so as not to clash with Ramadan. This is a far more elegant solution than the Chinese solution of banning students from fasting during Ramadan, which is only going to cause more resentment.

[Shelley]

I didn't think somethingfunny was talking about him/herself, more an attitude that exists in schools.

 

There were some kids in our school that wouldn't have been keen to have the smart kids in their group whatever ethnic background they came from, it would mean that their overall level would have to be higher.

 

In my school days there really was a division between the smart kids and the rest without ethnic background coming into it. As I said in my earlier post #83.

 

 

[Johnny20270]

The UK school system is shifting exam dates to make things fairer for Muslim students, the next few years Ramadan will take place in what was exam season, so potentially thousands of students could be affected by having to sit exams while not eating or drinking during daylight hours. So they're going to shift exams so as not to clash with Ramadan. This is a far more elegant solution than the Chinese solution of banning students from fasting during Ramadan, which is only going to cause more resentment.

 

 

 

Thats good! A sensible solution to a delicate problem 

[geraldc]

Some Chinese students have such poor English, so you don't want them in your group. It's such a bad problem that many think that their TOEFL results are faked or someone else has sat the exam for them.  

[Angelina]

@Shelly It's still not nice to exclude people like that. I thought somethingfunny used it to show how Chinese students were not having the right attitude to learning.

Anyway things are getting off topic. Should we start a new topic for British education/Chinese education?

This TV show only provokes people to judge other people instead of starting a real debate. The people there are nice. At least the producers have made some progress from their previous work. Maybe in a few years they will come out with something more thought-provoking.

 

 

 

edited 

[Silent]

 

She once told me that India actually has the largest Muslim population in the entire world.

Generally Indonesia is considered to have the largest muslim population. If I look at the figures of wikipedia The numbers 1, 2 and 3 (Indonesia, Pakistan resp. India) are close enough to make it debatable. This however is fairly irrelevant for the subject under discussion.

 

Background/environment makes a lot of difference for attitude towards education and the effect of education. So it's not strange to find large differences between different ethnic groups and different economic backgrounds. This also makes the experiment in the documentary fairly pointless. In a way you can compare the kids in the documentary to migrant kids. They need time to adjust to a new situation and expecting results in only a few weeks is a bit silly. 

[rezaf]

The Chinese education system is not very effective but is probably the most effective way for a large population like China. I wonder why they are making a documentary for such an outdated system.

[Johnny20270]

The Chinese education system is not very effective but is probably the most effective way for a large population like China. 

 

 

 

However the really need to get students to "think" and by that I mean think laterally or outside the box as it were. Encourage suggestions, discussion, ideas and not see them as programmable 

[Silent]

 

 

However the really need to get students to "think" and by that I mean think laterally or outside the box as it were. Encourage suggestions, discussion, ideas and not see them as programmable 

How big is this need really? Generally employees are not supposed to think too much and just do as told. The moment people start to think for themselves and act on it the people in power get in the dangerline. This is specially true in more autocratic organisations. 

[somethingfunny]

Maybe I could have put it a little nicer, but what I said comes on the back of years of talking to admissions officers at US universities and these really are the main complaints about Chinese students (made by teachers and classmates).  Chinese students (on the whole) simply don't contribute to class discussion.

 

And geraldc, take it from me, you don't need to think they are faking/cheating in the TOEFL, they are cheating in the TOEFL.  I've looked at enough scorecards that read Listening 29/30, Reading 29/30, Speaking 12/30, Writing 12/30 to know whats really going on here.  Obviously, knowing the students personally and knowing their English is awful only acts as further proof.

 

edit: Maybe I should clarify here to avoid any misinterpretation, on the TOEFL Listening and Reading are multiple choice questions whereas Speaking and Writing require creative output by the student.  

[somethingfunny]

 

 

an outdated system

 

This is hitting the nail on the head for me really.  From a British point-of-view, the Chinese style is simply decades out-of-date.  I was (un)fortunate enough to catch the tail end of the teacher-writes-on-the-board-you-copy-it-into-your-book style of 'teaching'.  Try that today and you won't get very far.

[Johnny20270]

How big is this need really? Generally employees are not supposed to think too much and just do as told. The moment people start to think for themselves and act on it the people in power get in the dangerline.

 

 

Not exactly true , all successful multi-nationals look for exactly this. I've sat on interview boards many times. Thinking does not mean a threat, its about optimising a system and making employees feel involved. The synergy effect seems quite absent in Chinese companies from my limit view

 

Means a threat for a the government though.

[Angelina]

Maybe a creative Chinese person would rather start her own business than work for a multi-national.

[Johnny20270]

Maybe a creative Chinese person would rather start her own business than work for a multi-national. 

 

 

indeed and I read that many are infact. good to see!

 

My point is: top tier companies do not look for walking computers for their roles. Its your ability figure out problems, think laterally, work with others is important. The concept of 老板 is very dated. Its a team and a team leader. 

 

Its very notable in interviews that Chinese perform badly in some areas. They are thrown by very random questions, like "how many cornflakes would it take to fill this room" and are baffled how to even attempt an answer. I remember a senior executive asking a Chinese Candiate "How many mice could you squash into a car". Who knows! They were looking at how they begin to tackle the problem. She looked at him with her mouth open. The guy who did a PhD in anthropology got the job. Chinese (I'm stereotyping here for now!) on the most part look baffled when taken out of their comfort zone.

 

Google, Microsoft Intel all run interviews like this. The technology part is just a prequisite

[Silent]

 

 

Not exactly true , all successful multi-nationals look for exactly this. I've sat on interview boards many times. Thinking does not mean a threat, its about optimising a system and making employees feel involved. 

 

I agree, this however is not the way many (mediocre) managers see it. The moment there is a critical note they feel threatened. Specially if it's about management decisions.

 

 

 

My point is: top tier companies do not look for walking computers for their roles. Its your ability figure out problems, think laterally, work with others is important. The concept of 老板 is very dated. Its a team and a team leader.

Sure, but the large bulk of the companies are not top tier but mediocre. And even in top tier companies their are quite a few jobs that are pretty much doing the same thing over and over again.

 

 

Despite automatisation plenty of people are doing basically the work of trained monkeys, following fairly standard procedures that are too expensive/complex too fully automate. You can automate a lot. The environment however changes  (government changes rules and regulations, new technology and processes are introduced etc.) Automation is inevitably lagging resulting in people doing monkey business to bridge the gap. It's a fairly small group that really needs to be creative, and the creativity should be limited to your own work. If one of the "monkey's" says that a management decision is bad because of very good reasons it's unlikely to be appreciated. If one "monkey" says the other monkey department has to change to make things more efficient it's rarely appreciated. 

[Angelina]

If one "monkey" says the other monkey department has to change to make things more efficient it's rarely appreciated. 

 

and this is what we have been doing in this thread. 

[LiMo]

The program has finished. Despite the poor behaviour many of the children knuckled down in the end. The Chinese school students beat their British schooled counterparts in maths and science (according to the Telegraph; it was aired on Monday so I had to go back and check the results). These results were based on the mean average and diverged by around 10% apparently. As has already been noted this was far from a valid experiment but it may be fair to say that -given the lack of respect and misbehaviour in the Chinese classrooms- the results favour their method even more so. I'm personally not convinced but we'll see what happens. If we end up going down the Chinese route I'll be ****ed because if I ever move to China I'll have nowhere to come back to when I want to raise my kids in a non-insane environment