Educational systems

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" ~President George W. Bush

"We are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea -– the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny. That’s ... why our students don’t just memorize equations, but answer questions like “What do you think of that idea? What would you change about the world? What do you want to be when you grow up?” ~President Barack Obama

I'm not a hugely political person, but recently I've gotten a little worked up when I hear President Obama praising the test scores of South Korean high school students. To be sure, South Korea is full of very bright, talented people who work hard to learn and who care about education. But what I have seen of educational systems in Asia, and now here in Turkey as well, has left me less than impressed.

In both the countries where I've taught, as in South Korea, university admissions are determined by a single factor: the university entrance exam. Here in Turkey, a college application includes nothing more than your name and test score. Each department of each university has a minimum score that they will accept, but with 1.6 million students nationwide competing for 450,000 spaces in the universities (according to Wikipedia), there's no room for flexibility in these admission standards. Taiwan's system is similar; recently universities have begun to incorporate biographies and interviews into the admissions process, but by and large your test score is the one piece of data that will shape the course of your entire life.

I'm not sure about Turkey, but I know that in Taiwan the university entrance test is administered twice a year: once in January to every high school senior in the country, and again in July as a re-test for those who didn't score high enough the first time. Two chances.

In both countries, the entire educational system, K-12, has been built around the ultimate goal of attaining a high score on this exam. Education is seen by many parents, students, and teachers as a means of capturing this ultimate prize. As a result, tests are the focal point of all primary and secondary schooling. Students are strapped with the equivalent of American final exams once a month. Pressure grows exponentially throughout the course of junior and senior high, until senior high when 80% of time in school is spent taking practice exams. Your entire education is a giant test prep course.

When I taught junior high in Taiwan, I was told that at least 75% of my course semester grades had to come from the three exams I gave. The other 25% was for all other classwork, homework, projects, and participation. This, of course, was incredibly foreign to my experience of high school classes where I spent days on end working on projects and papers that comprised the bulk of my grade. Bombing one test, while certainly undesirable, didn't automatically drop me down to a failing grade. But such is life in Taiwan. The test is everything, and when the test is everything, the students put all their energy into that.

With this sort of system, it's no wonder they get such high scores! However, I don't believe this automatically translates into more knowledge or "better" education.The way I see it, there are two main negative effects of this sort of system. *I'm about to make some sweeping generalizations here, so please forgive me. I could give you multiple examples of individuals who are not like this at all, and I recognize that everyone is different, but these are trends I have observed.*

1. When the test score is the goal, and education only the means, students lose motivation to learn. My students in Taiwan did not value any information that wouldn't be on the test. Practical knowledge of English usually took a backseat to the ability to fill in blanks or choose a correct answer. They wanted to simply memorize information that they could regurgitate for the test, and didn't care whether or not they actually understood it. They could memorize 500 vocabulary words and get a perfect score without being able to pronounce a single word, use it in a sentence, or recognize it when they hear or see it in a non-exam context. Now, in Turkey, my students tell me the exact same thing. They also admit that they forget everything after the exam, which is why they are so unhappy to learn that grammar doesn't go away after you learn it; it exists in real life and will pop up again when you least expect it.

They also never learn what to do with this information. My educational psychology professors hammered us with Bloom's Taxonomy, a hierarchy of the different levels of processing and understanding information. Basically there are the lower levels (knowledge/remembering, comprehension, being able to apply the knowledge to a new situation) and higher levels (analysis, synthesis, and being able to evaluate ideas). My experience in Taiwan, particularly in situations where I asked students to create or analyze things, taught me that higher level thinking is not emphasized at all. Nothing throws a Taiwanese student off like the question, "Why?" They also struggled to integrate pieces of knowledge. Sometimes I'd ask students questions about math or history, and they would usually insist, "Teacher, that's not English! That's math!" even if they had learned it. Oh well, I guess with all the publications about test scores, they probably assume we don't even teach math in American schools and the subject never comes up at all in the English language.

2. With this much pressure to score well, students spend all their time studying, at the expense of anything else in life. In both Turkey and Taiwan, students feel they can never study enough, which has led to a vast system of cram schools ("buxiban" in Taiwan, "dershane" in Turkey) to provide additional classes in every possible subject. This isn't remedial "catching up" class; even the brightest students attend cram school to get ahead. My current school is one of these, full of high school and university students hoping I can help them achieve a higher score on their exam. Some parents start their kids earlier, which is why I have a class of 12-13-year-olds who show up on Saturday and Sunday afternoons for three hours at a time to learn English. Several of them go straight to other cram schools for other lessons after my class.

My first year in Taiwan I also taught at an English cram school specifically for elementary students who came to us every day after school. This tore me apart psychologically, and after a year I switched to junior high because I couldn't handle the parents coming to me every day asking me to give their 8-year-olds more homework so they could maintain their competitive edge. Even teaching in a regular junior high was difficult because my students would come to school 7:30-5:00 and then disperse to cram schools all around town. Many of them get home from cram school after 9 pm and then study for five hours. These kids have absolutely no free time, and when they do finally get a few moments to relax, they're so exhausted they don't want to do anything. They don't even know what to do with themselves when summer vacation rolls around, since they have never had time to cultivate a hobby or develop any interests outside of school.

In short, high school is a pretty miserable time for students in these countries. At times I have been simply amazed at how well students seem to cope with the amount of pressure put on them; I don't think I would've survived high school in Taiwan.

Our educational system in the United States is deeply flawed in many ways, but as we try to reform and rebuild, I can say for sure that we don't need to go the direction of Asia if we want to keep up our emphasis on creativity, critical thinking, and innovation. I'd rather see us raise well-rounded children.