A Difference in Values: Education

I have been subbing for about three weeks now, and what I am thinking about most is the difference how Americans value their education and how other countries value their education.  Of course, I can only really speak of two countries, my own and China.  And I can only speak to China's values as an outsider, using only what I have observed.

In America, our students do not seem to value free, public education.  I realize I am about to make some gross generalizations here, so forgive me; I am aware that there are many Americans who value highly their education, I am merely talking about Americans on a whole, when you compare them to other places.  I see, day after day, kids who view their time spent each day in school as a kind of prison.  While they are there, they devote an enormous amount of energy to not doing work or to disrupting learning.  I watch students come in to the classroom, and I watch teachers waste 10 minutes of class getting everyone settled into the classroom.  I watch them be interrupted constantly because students are talking, playing with their phones, or getting into arguments with each other.  I watch them stop the lesson time and again to address these issues.  I watch students fail to grasp basic concepts across curriculum all the way up the high school level.  I watched an 11th grader fail to tell me from which country the United States declared their independence.

I began seriously considering these differing values after talking with one of the security guards at the schools, a man who was born in the Caribbean and traveled extensively while in the military.  We both witnessed a confrontation between a student and another teacher, which ended in the student walking away talking about how much he hated school, how he didn't want to be here, and that every thing was expletive, expletive, stupid, expletive.  The guard talked about how much he valued school, and how he enjoyed it.  I talked about how I may not have enjoyed high school, but I knew where it would take me...college, a better job, a better future.

In China, most students begin seriously concentrating on their academics at age six.  Yeah, that's right, age six. What were you doing at age six?  I was finger-painting, chewing on blocks, and being yelled at for running with scissors. In China, the goal as of age six is grades.  You need to get good grades in primary school, so that you can get into the best middle school.  You need to get the grades in middle school to make it to the best high school.  And I am not talking about just "good grades", I am talking about the best grades. Because if you graduate from the best high schools (where the students with the best grades go), then there is a pretty good chance (unless you totally bomb the college entrance exams) that you are going to get into one of the best universities.  And getting into the best university is the goal of almost every Chinese student and their families from the age of six.

Maybe in America Mom and Dad will make a savings account when you turn six, on the off chance you go to college, you'll have a bit saved up.  In China, families save from the time their child is born to cover whatever expenses are not covered by the government.  In addition to being in school for 8 hours every Monday through Friday, parents spend a lot of time and money on tutoring their children.  They send them to private schools on the weekend.  That's right, the weekend, the most sacred time to Americans; the time where we have the right not to do work.  Many will also attend private schools during the summer, and those who cannot afford the schools will be tutored by family or friends of the family.  These students go to school for several hours on their weekends and during the summer to do more school work, so that they will hopefully have that edge over their peers that will get them into those schools.

As for teachers, they hold a position of respect in China.  I never had students or parents or administrators tell me that my students failing was my fault.  And when students came to me asking why they did not get the grade they wanted, and I told them it was because they didn't' turn in assignments, or didn't participate in class (in our speaking classes, 50% of their grades was in class participation), they accepted this failing grade as a consequence of their actions.  They did not (as a whole) have a litany or excuses, ask me for extra credit, or storm out of the room in a cloud of profanity.  My students would constantly email me or ask me after class questions about assignments, because they wanted to get the best possible grade...before they turned it in.   In America, you are fired if your students don't pass state exams.  In America, parents tell you that it is your fault if their child cannot sit still or pay attention in class or turn in their homework--that it is the teacher's responsibility to provide all discipline for behavioral issues in class.   Of course this is not true for all parents or all schools, but it is common.

Something that these students do not seem to understand, and I am not sure I understood this at 18 either, is that high school is pretty much the last place where someone is going to care about you.  I am not saying all teachers are saints.  Some are in it because they don't know what else to do, and just like there are bad lawyers, doctors, and personal trainers, there are certainly bad teachers.  We've all had a bad teacher. But most teachers get into teaching because they want to help kids succeed.  They tend to be nurturing, to put the needs of their students long before any of their personal lives, and they spend large chunks of their free time thinking up new ways to teach their students.  I mean, teachers work for 8 hours each day and then they go home and grade student work and lesson plan.  And it's not like they get paid a whole heck of a lot, so I can't say that teachers are in it for the money.

Now, just like when I made generalizations about Americans not valuing their education, I am also making generalizations about the Chinese.  Of course there are Chinese who do not place value on education, just like their are many Americans who do.  And being a teacher in China is not some kind of educational utopia, far from it; there are problems. However, as a whole in China, the students, their families, and the society itself seems to place a much higher value on education than what I am seeing in my own country.  Free, public education...not too many countries can boast that they provide that to their citizens.  You don't even have to worry about getting into the "best high school" because, at least in theory, every student gets the same quality education in every public school in America. And if you fail a grade? Well, you just repeat it; and you get the chance to repeat these grades over and over again until you are 21 years old.  This is virtually unheard of in many places around the world; you only get one chance to make it through.

There just seems to be a vast difference in how China and America (again, making huge generalizations here) view education.  I am not sure what the future is going to look like for America if we continue to view education in this light.