Standardized Testing No Longer Norm In China; Do We Follow Suit To Compete?

GOOD:

At a time when international test results--like last year's PISA data--seem to indicate that American students are falling behind their Chinese counterparts, we're feeling the pressure to adopt a stereotypically Chinese method of educating kids: lots of rote memorization of facts and hardcore standardized testing.

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Comments

[DAE]

01:32 AM on 06/13/2011

What all the China-bashers at this site don't realize is that China is an evolving society. People here love to hearken back to the Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square incident. Or they harp on the contradictions and unsolved problems that the Chinese confront as they continue their, at times, wrenching developmental process. The Chinese have, to a large extent, put their past behind them and are moving forward. I first went to China 30 years ago. Comparing China then and now is literally like night and day. American society in those same 30 years has devolved. The China of 30 years hence will be as unrecognizable to a visitor of today's China as the China of today is to someone who visited 30 years ago. And the US? I'm afraid to predict.

[WYHKTai-Tai]

06:36 AM on 06/11/2011

Yay for China. Very glad they are recognizing and changing this. This is very much in evidence in the public schools following the private and international schools here in Hong Kong. Only a certain percentage of students thrive in that rote memorization rubric. They were losing a lot of great potential in students that don't thrive in it.

If there is one thing they and we should not discard IMHO it would simply be the hard-work ethic. How to be diligent and work hard does not come automatically, it also has to be learned.

[veteran teacher]

01:11 PM on 06/10/2011

The Education Ministry in China told us in 2004 that, "They have tested the creativity out of their students."

[ctmark]

11:48 AM on 06/10/2011

It's important to be accurate here. The new Common Core Standards for the US move in the Chinese direction. Virtually all countries recognize the limitations of standardized testing. But I agree with the essential point: The US has been too test-obsessed and it has put us way behind the world.