[Vnbiz] The Educated Giant

[Pham Hoang Duong]

Dear CACC,

Just found good art from The New York Times abt education. How long do you think we can catch up with them? 20, 50 years, few centuries or never??????

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The Educated Giant


May 28, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Taishan, China

With China’s trade surplus with the United States soaring, the
tendency in the U.S. will be to react with tariffs and other barriers.
But instead we should take a page from the Chinese book and respond by
boosting education.

One reason China is likely to overtake the U.S. as the world’s most
important country in this century is that China puts more effort into
building human capital than we do.

This area in southern Guangdong Province is my wife’s ancestral
hometown. Sheryl’s grandparents left villages here because they thought
they could find better opportunities for their children in “Meiguo” —
“Beautiful Country,” as the U.S. is called in Chinese. And they did. At
Sheryl’s family reunions, you feel inadequate without a doctorate.

But that educational gap between China and America is shrinking
rapidly. I visited several elementary and middle schools accompanied by
two of my children. And in general, the level of math taught even in
peasant schools is similar to that in my kids’ own excellent schools in
the New York area.

My kids’ school system doesn’t offer foreign languages until the
seventh grade. These Chinese peasants begin English studies in either
first grade or third grade, depending on the school.

Frankly, my daughter got tired of being dragged around schools and
having teachers look patronizingly at her schoolbooks and say, “Oh, we
do that two grades younger.”

There are, I think, four reasons why Chinese students do so well.

First, Chinese students are hungry for education and advancement and
work harder. In contrast, U.S. children average 900 hours a year in
class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.

Here in Sheryl’s ancestral village, the students show up at school
at about 6:30 a.m. to get extra tutoring before classes start at 7:30.
They go home for a lunch break at 11:20 and then are back at school
from 2 p.m. until 5. They do homework every night and weekend, and an
hour or two of homework each day during their eight-week summer
vacation.

The second reason is that China has an enormous cultural respect for
education, part of its Confucian legacy, so governments and families
alike pour resources into education. Teachers are respected and
compensated far better, financially and emotionally, in China than in
America.

In my last column, I wrote about the boomtown of Dongguan, which had
no colleges when I first visited it 20 years ago. The town devotes 21
percent of its budget to education, and it now has four universities.
An astonishing 58 percent of the residents age 18 to 22 are enrolled in
a university.

A third reason is that Chinese believe that those who get the best
grades are the hardest workers. In contrast, Americans say in polls
that the best students are the ones who are innately the smartest. The
upshot is that Chinese kids never have an excuse for mediocrity.

Chinese education has its own problems, including bribes and fees to
get into good schools, huge classes of 50 or 60 students, second-rate
equipment and lousy universities. But the progress in the last
quarter-century is breathtaking.

It’s also encouraging that so many Chinese will shake their heads
over this column and say it really isn’t so. They will complain that
Chinese schools teach rote memorization but not creativity or love of
learning. That kind of debate is good for the schools and has already
led to improvements in English instruction, so that urban Chinese
students can communicate better in English than Japanese or South
Koreans.

After I visited Sheryl’s ancestral village, I posted a video of it
on the Times Web site. Soon I was astonished to see an excited posting
on my blog from a woman who used to live in that village.

Litao Mai, probably one of my distant in-laws, grew up in a house
she could see on my video. Her parents had only a third grade
education, but she became the first person in the village to go to
college. She now works for Merrill Lynch in New York and describes
herself as “a little peasant girl” transformed into “a capitalist on
Wall Street.”

That is the magic of education, and there are 1.3 billion more behind Ms. Mai.

So let’s not respond to China’s surpluses by putting up trade
barriers. Rather, let’s do as we did after the Soviet Union’s launch of
Sputnik in 1957: raise our own education standards to meet the
competition.



You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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Pham Hoang Duong
 
Maersk Broker Singapore
 
 











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