The Perils of Diversity

I spent the weekend at the Yunnan Minorities Park, a sort of human zoo meant to showcase the variety of ethnic groups found in the province. The stated purpose of the park is to inform people about the variety of ethnic groups found in Yunnan province, numerically the most diverse in China. What it actually accomplished was more akin to a certain robotic performance at Disneyworld.

The first lesson of the minorities village is that the most important part of any civilization is its clothing. In many cases, clothing was the only reliable indicator of what ethnic group one was actually viewing, as the quaint grass huts and overpriced drink stands tended to blend together from place to place. Also, I imagine that while hunting was an important activity for many groups, extorting foreigners through bow and arrow rentals is a relatively modern practice.

A few hours of walking also made evident the low production values of the place. Virtually all of the ethnic groups represented had a dance. Virtually none of the dancers knew the dance that supposedly embodied their entire culture. The grand showing consisted mainly of folks trotting about warily, one person in front moving with just enough determination as to not look completely silly with the rest of the folks trailing behind like kindergartners not sure if they should follow some greasy guy into his Volkswagen. Again, the costumes were the main distinguishing feature. Most of the people groups would be hard to tell apart without the giant flags attached to their bodies--otherwise, the listless meandering of the Dai was largely indistinguishable from the listless meandering of the Bai or Hui.

During the low point (or high point, depending on how you look at it) of the production, a group of peacocks on top of a cloth screen were wheeled out to center stage. While the birds sat with their tailfeathers hidden, doing nothing and looking like overgrown pheasants, "performers" with foil on their fingers popped their hands above the screen in the bird beak position, moved them left, moved them right, and wheeled the birds out again.
The performance concluded with another meandering line, this time overshadowed by a big screen projection of people doing the same dance only with some semblance of synchronicity and talent, like if the preliminary rounds of "So You Think You Can Dance" all had Michael Jackson footage in the background so everyone would know, objectively, how bad the first-rounders blew it.

So, a totally terrible experience? Actually, not entirely. As a first-timer it was definitely novel, and I expect a certain level of hucksterism at a national tourist attraction. What was depressing, though, was how reflective the park was of national policies regarding minorities.

First, consider the clothes. For many exhibits clothing was the only distinguishing feature between the various ethnic groups. Sadly, this often transfers over to government. Minority representatives to government frequently appear in their minority costumes, even though everyone else wears a suit and tie. Imagine if we appointed an ambassador to the Native Americans and then expected him to show up to Congress in a buckskin breechflap. Now, it's not clear whether this practice is required by the government or preferred by the minorities, but either way the message is clear--give up your appearance and your uniqueness disappears entirely. Of course, real cultures don't disappear when their people put on modern dress. Native Americans don't turn in their registration when they put on a T-shirt and jeans, just like German Americans, Chinese Americans, or African Americans don't cut all ties with their home countries when they refrain from prancing around in lederhosen, Mao shirts, or grass skirts. The fact that people act like this is the case suggests that something other than the real culture is being represented.

Take for example the kinds of information represented in the village exhibits. Most of the sections included a two-by-two wooden plaque attempting to summarize the whole of the culture's origin, nature, and religion. Lots of attention is given to methods of food cultivation, which was of course important in ancient times but considerably less so now when most of these cultures do things in either the modern or the common way (much of Chinese food production is decidedly not modern, using animal and hand labor, but very little of it is unique). A short footnote on religion highlights the quaint but outdated philosophy of the ancient people (the Lahu people think they're descended from gourds! How cute is that!)--in short, painting the ethnic philosophy as charming but utterly impractical. Again, this is not how real cultures function. Religions that are actually practiced either adapt or fade away. None of the Lahu I know actually believe this about their ancestry, but you would never know this from the park, or the government. Or, take for example modern Judaism. Many branches of modern Judaism are abstract bordering on atheistic (or even explicitly atheistic), but the religion has still found a way to reconcile modern thinking with ancient traditions. Even if this reconciliation occurs through simple denial or militant opposition, it will occur. The fact that this reconcilation is nowhere to be seen is yet another reflection on the government's brush-off mentality in dealing with minorities.

I shudder to think of how much of this type of "diversity" we practice in America. How often do our practices boil down to "wear your funny clothes and do your little dance, but try to have a say in how I think or act and I will break you." When things really matter, there can't just be "tolerance." There must be dialogue and compromise, assertion and acquiescence. Often, the language of tolerance has the unintended consequence of pushing true dialogue out of the realm of appropriate conversation.

Tolerance is great for when things really don't matter. Skin color, national origin, frosting preferences--most people would agree that only a belligerent moron would view these things as legitimately controversial topics. And, we shouldn't write off entire people or groups because of a few deviant opinions--tolerance can be a very helpful form of "agreeing to disagree." But when things really do matter, we should be kind enough to let people have a say, and respectful enough to say something against it if we feel led--to let these people and opinions be real parts of our society instead of holing them up in a theme park. Here's hoping we can all have lives and cultures richer than what we wear and how we dance.

Why Chinese Education is Broken (and Why Ours Will Be, Too)

Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother angered an entire generation by calling them out on raising dough-bellied couch-dwellers who will never excel at anything beyond Modern Warfare. While we may be right in our aversion to raising our children in a boot camp, there is some truth to the notion that making kids practice all the time might actually improve their skills. Talent or no talent, if you spend time doing something you will most likely get better at it.

In Chinese education, where individual talents and propensities are steamrollered over through test-centric education and relentless drill work, this has the interesting effect of producing a population with a relatively high level of basic knowledge. In my class, even students who by their own admission "aren't good at math" could multivariable calculus their way around most American grads on a unicycle. It doesn't take a history buff to get robot-like recall on names and dates. And no matter what their major, Chinese college students can't get their degrees without demonstrating knowledge of at least 4,000 intermediate to advanced English words.

So, with Chinese colleges churning out over six million new Encyclopedia Browns every spring, Chinese businesses should be on the forefront of innovation, right? As you may have guessed, there is a slight problem. My students have been studying English for a minimum of six years. They currently spend half of their course hours in English classes covering speaking, listening, reading and writing. They can even pass the tests. But, they just aren't that good at English.

Unfortunately for the Chinese, this kind of half-knowledge extends to virtually every sphere. Chinese education tends to produce a rather computerized form of knowledge: precise, accurate, and completely lacking in creative drive. And, just like you would use Microsoft Excel to balance your books and not put it in charge of your finance department, foreign investors (and the Chinese themselves) are finding Chinese academics useful primarily as tools rather than intelligent business agents and generators of new ideas.

A friend of a friend in charge of a medical facility lamented the lack of initiative in his new hires. "They're the best medical robots money can buy. They have all of the knowledge. They're just completely incapable of making the connections beyond the textbook." Even gripping stories of China's success can be tinged by this lack of drive. China's recent victory in supercomputing, for example, was achieved by utilizing parts from Intel and NVIDIA.

Before we Americans start patting ourselves on the back, however, we must realize that creativity isn't everything. At Apple there 36,800 people and only one of them is Steve Jobs. Grunt work, clerical work, managerial work--all of this needs to be done, and there will always be rewards for people who can do this well.

But more importantly, the American education system isn't as great at fostering creativity as you might think. If anything, it succeeds mainly in not killing all of it. According to one measure, creativity in America has been on the decline since 1990. Things may be getting even worse because America, in an attempt to boost its global rankings, has increasingly imitated the practices that most apparently squash creativity in Chinese classrooms.

The flailing economy has also worked against creative education by focusing students on more pragmatic approaches to job-seeking. More competition means more pressure to pad scores and course titles, which leads to more cheating and less actual learning. After high school, students may focus on degrees with solid career paths rather than actual passions. It's no stretch to see why creativity declines in this environment. When you don't like your job, you're not going to spend the time necessary to get to know it intimately, or expend the energy necessary to see it from new angles. You'll do just enough to keep you off the street and spend as much time as you can doing something you actually like. You definitely won't be vomiting up game-changing revelations on your lunch break.

So, what to do? One, get rid of standardized testing. Chinese education has shown the potential for standardized tests to elevate knowledge and focus academic energy. They have also been successful in creating a large group of workers with the same homogenous body of rote knowledge that will be clawing over each other in a pile for the same limited number of jobs.

Second, we can take a step back and think about what college is really meant to accomplish. The value of a degree comes from the fact that not everyone has one. When more people have them, we have to upgrade to something more exclusive, such as degrees from more prestigious schools, or masters degrees, or recommendations from Donald Trump. When the costs of this academic arms race start to outweigh the benefits, it's time to start looking for other ways to get ahead. For example, trade schools are relatively cheap, don't take as long to finish as traditional colleges, and may provide an entry point into a job with above-average earnings and generous hiring prospects. Life as a metal worker or welder may not provide the potential for stratospheric advancement that may be possible in, say, law or information design, but the stability is much greater.

The real failure of the Chinese and American educational systems, however, is that they do a very poor job of acknowledging alternate forms of success. This problem is worse in China where rigorous standardized tests like the Gao Kao dominate the psychological landscape of the country's young people, but we see that in America, too, when we think that success can only be spelled with "B.A." or "B.S." The real problem is that we measure success not by what we have (which has been increasing steadily for several centuries) but by what we have that others do not. College degrees are losing their value because more people are getting them. Their power is in their exclusivity. Despite all of our lip service to the civilizing power of learning, we see these degrees as useless when they don't separate us from the field. Businesses of all types suffer from a similar phenomenon--the winner isn't the one who does things well, it's the one who does things best.

Competition does have its merits, and it's not realistic to eliminate it from our society. However, it's easy to see the problems with a system that depends on it to survive. By definition, there can only be one number one. Our approach in the past seems to have been to create enough number one positions so that everybody can have one, but not only is this impossible, it lessens the value of the top position for those who actually achieve it. In the long run, it may be more practical to examine the need to be number one. There are some people for whom reaching the top is the only possible fulfillment, but I suspect that many more people would be content with a good life instead of the best life. Our governments, American or Chinese, should stop trying to define contentment for us and let us find contentment in our own ways.