China's poorest beat our best pupils

[Parts]

Reporting from Shanghai -- Chinese adolescence is known as a time of scant whimsy: Students rise at dawn, disappear into school until dinnertime and toil into the late night over homework in preparation for university entrance exams that can make or break their future.


Study in China is very hard. For most high school, students must wake up about 6 o'clock and arrive school at 7 o'clock. There is no school buses in my small city (Hubei). So I have to ride my bike to school even in the winter (temperature below zero degrees C). And I spend 13 hours in school, 11 hours for class and 2 hours for lunch block. There are 40 mins per class but I have 10 class everyday. The last class is a long class started at 6 p.m. and end at 10 p.m. We had two types of class you can choose in high school, One is more scientific, like biology, chemical, and physical; One is more about literature -- history, government, and geography. But there are three subjects people must take, Chinese, math and ENGLISH. In my class, my friends all don't like English because all of them will never had chance to go aboard. And maybe they will stay in the small city rest of their life. So they didn't study at all. Same thing happened in all the subjects. So they hated school.

(From an essay by an exchange student)...The test in China is not very good. The teacher didn't care about do you learn in class or at home. The teachers just want to see your grades in the exam. So, as everyone know, some people cheat, and some people did very good job on cheating.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mercedes-schneider/chengs-views-on-chinese-a_b_4800192.html

Sounds like a fun childhood.

Then they get to have a fun adulthood living in the dorms making iPhones 

The report was created by under cover workers at Jabil Circuit in Wuxi, China. They found workers who put in 11-hour shifts with only 30 minute breaks to eat. Much of that break time was taken up by standing in security lines, so staff had only 5 minutes to eat.

The workers, who are paid around $245 a month, live in crowded, dirty dorms. As the factory runs 24 hours a day, they sleep in shifts, up to eight to a room.

Link

[Jack]

It's an unfair comparison.

Not certain about that. This isn't anything reported by China. If the article is correct, it appears unbiased. It would be interesting to see the data of the actual study though.

The OECD study was based on performance in independently-administered exams in reading, maths and science sat by 15-year-olds in 65 developed nations.

The study, involving more than 500,000 pupils worldwide

Maybe it's an unexplainable anomaly, like the amazing health statistics of Cuba, or maybe the Chinese are actually intellectually superior; not sure.

[Queen Victoria]

Here's a link to a summary of the report.  The report was too technical for me to read, but feel free to drop your nickel.

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results.htm

WTF?  "While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student."  I don't know where they get those figures from.  In Louisiana less than $20,000 is available per student each year.

ETA - just dipped a bit into the slide show.   First impression is that they're basing most of the Chinese results on data from Hong Kong.  I'm not sure (being an ignorant American with no geographical knowledge), but doesn't China have more people than Hong Kong?  And it was transferred from Great Britain in 1997, not that long ago.  BTW, Hong Kong has the highest average IQ according to Wikipedia. 

[Jack]

Thanks, Queen Victoria. The charts are really good. Not sure why China has three separate cities as divisions within this study but since Shanghai ranked at the top, it appears to be the larger focus. Couldn't help but notice the majority of Oriental countries in the study dominate the top of the performance charts, while not necessarily true of the chart on parental pressure in surveyed parents who expect their children to obtain a degree. You inspired me to look a the world IQ map too. Very Interesting.

[Jack]

The three separate cities for China really bugs me, and can't help but wonder if they only chose one city in the US for this study and which city, or cities if there were more than one. Hope it wasn't a city from my state; it ranks very low even by our own national standards.

[Queen Victoria]

The three separate cities for China really bugs me, and can't help but wonder if they only chose one city in the US for this study and which city, or cities if there were more than one. Hope it wasn't a city from my state; it ranks very low even by our own national standards.

Somewhere on the site they said 6,000 students in 161 schools in the U.S. were studied.  Would like more information. 

[bodie]

I was reading about a couple who sent their only child into a mountain village to live with Grandma.  To escape the pressure of the cities where children are rounded up and are made to go to school.  They said the girl was happy but has no future.  They were also heartbroken that they had not made the 350 mile round journey to visit her very often and she calls Grandam 'Mummy'.

They are busy working 15 hours a day making cheap shite that we (in UK) can buy in Poundland.

Information from China is sketchy because of government restrictions.  Never know if the 'accounts' I read are accurate or maybe exaggerated from people who generally have no voice.

[Jack]

The three separate cities for China really bugs me, and can't help but wonder if they only chose one city in the US for this study and which city, or cities if there were more than one. Hope it wasn't a city from my state; it ranks very low even by our own national standards.

Somewhere on the site they said 6,000 students in 161 schools in the U.S. were studied.  Would like more information.

Yes, knowing which schools would be interesting. Would also be interested to know the purpose of the study and intended actions of its results. OECD is an economically motivated world organization, which China isn't a member. Am assuming that's the point of the focus on personal income vs aptitude.

[RageBeoulve]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10645090/Chinas-poorest-beat-our-best-pupils.html

Children of factory workers and cleaners in Far East achieve better exam results than offspring of British lawyers and doctors, says OECD

The report said: “In the United States and the United Kingdom, where professionals are among the highest-paid in the world, students whose parents work as professionals do not perform as well in mathematics as children of professionals in other countries — nor do they perform as well as the children in Shanghai-China and Singapore whose parents work in manual occupations.”

 British schoolchildren are lagging so far behind their peers in the Far East that even pupils from wealthy backgrounds are now performing worse in exams than the poorest students in China, an international study shows.

The children of factory workers and cleaners in parts of the Far East are more than a year ahead of the offspring of British doctors and lawyers, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Researchers said the study, which looked at the performance of 15-year-olds in mathematics, showed countries to could overcome traditional social class divides to raise education standards among relatively deprived pupils.

The report was published as a senior European Commission politician attacked the standards of British schools and warned that UK politicians must improve the education system before focusing on changing the country’s relationship with the EU.

Viviane Reding, the vice-president of the European Commission, warned that ministers should focus on raising school standards instead of blaming the country’s problems on foreigners. In a speech in Cambridge she suggested that the UK’s poor education system is the reason Britons cannot compete with foreigners for jobs. She said politicians needed to “work on the quality of education and welfare, so that people in this country can find employment and enjoy reasonable social standards”.

In China they have about 50 in a class!  The only thing I can think of is maybe they are put under more pressure.  I wonder if depression and anxiety in children is more common in China?

Having no prior knowledge I immediately ask the question: Are they educated in state funded schools, or is their education provided by the private sector? I understand that China has communist roots soooooo....

I'm interested now. Fuck. Imma look.

[bodie]

It's a secret, Rage 

Nah, from what I can gather schools are provided by the gov. in cities and towns but not rural locations.

[Queen Victoria]

Since the study mentioned/focused on Hong Kong, this is from Wikipedia.  PISA was the one mentioned in the study.  It seems that there are few true government run schools.

Hong Kong's education system used to roughly follow the system in England, although international systems exist. The government maintains a policy of "mother tongue instruction" (Chinese: 母語教學) in which the medium of instruction is Cantonese, with written Chinese and English. In secondary schools, 'biliterate and trilingual' proficiency is emphasised, and Mandarin-language education has been increasing. The Programme for International Student Assessment ranked Hong Kong's education system as the second best in the world. Hong Kong's public schools are operated by the Education Bureau. The system features a non-compulsory three-year kindergarten, followed by a compulsory six-year primary education, a compulsory three-year junior secondary education, a non-compulsory two-year senior secondary education leading to the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examinations and a two-year matriculation course leading to the Hong Kong Advanced Level Examinations. The New Senior Secondary academic structure and curriculum was implemented in September 2009, which provides for all students to receive three years of compulsory junior and three years of compulsory senior secondary education. Under the new curriculum, there is only one public examination, namely the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education.

Most comprehensive schools in Hong Kong fall under three categories: the rarer public schools; the more common subsidised schools, including government aids-and-grant schools; and private schools, often run by Christian organisations and having admissions based on academic merit rather than on financial resources. Outside this system are the schools under the Direct Subsidy Scheme and private international schools.