The subtle, quick-response game of table tennis is China’s game — Chinese players have won most of the world championships and Olympic gold medals in table tennis in the past 50 years.
While the B.C. government and the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation endlessly bat public education back and forth in a negotiations game designed to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution, China — light on its feet and responding quickly to a changing world — is busy moving its system of public education into the 21st century.
Fifteen-year-old students in Shanghai recently ranked first for mathematics, science and reading in the Paris-based Program for International Student Assessment report. That’s the same report that spread a frothing panic through Canadian academic, media and political circles because Canadian students dropped below the top 10 in math among 65 countries.
China’s education system has struggled to move away from the exam-based system that drives curriculum and results in memorizing facts to pass the test. In 1985, Shanghai began a process of reform and created exams that test the application of real-life skills. Multiple-choice questions no longer appear on exams.
Shanghai’s remarkable performance, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, gives the lie to prejudices about Asian education systems supposedly based on rote learning and leaving little initiative for students to think on their own.
Shanghai’s school leadership, according to Andreas Schleicher, head of education indicators and analysis for the OECD, is committed to educating its youth to think creatively and apply knowledge to solving problems.
As a result, schools are advised to give fewer after-school assignments and that teachers should think about how to help students use mathematical skills to solve real problems, instead of learning how to simply solve a math problem.
Perhaps the sometimes heated discussion about math teaching in Canada might have been more useful had it simply recognized that arithmetic, that branch of mathematics that deals with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, should not be forsaken in pursuit of the more sophisticated understandings and applications of mathematics — algebra, calculus, geometry and trigonometry.
Despite its successes, China continues to deal with significant problems relating to cultural history and political assumptions about public education that date back before the 1966 Cultural Revolution. For modern Chinese parents, providing educational opportunity for their kids is still up there with food and shelter. Competition for spots in “better” high schools is fierce.
The problem with all this, according to some Chinese academics, is that the politicians still tend to rely on exams like PISA as influential indicators of success. This might result in teachers doing a poor job of measuring students’ broader range of math abilities.
This urgency also puts pressure on Chinese teachers. They face their own testing requirements with an expectation to complete from 240 to 540 hours of further training every five years.
In Canada, none of that pressure exists and the kids are still doing comparatively well. Amid all the tearing of hair and rending of garments about reported decline in Canadian math scores, recent PISA results show that Canadian teens ranked first among their English-speaking peers and seventh in problem-solving, behind Asian countries such as Singapore and South Korea.
“Today’s 15-year-olds with poor problem-solving skills will become tomorrow’s adults struggling to find or keep a good job,” said Schleicher. “Policy-makers and educators should reshape their school systems and curricula to help students develop their problem-solving skills, which are increasingly needed in today’s economies.”
Good advice for those now focused on labour relations about where to redirect B.C.’s political and professional energy, if that contract negotiation ever gets settled.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
