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.
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