The 'education' of Chinese children...

Mark Kitto, a white American who first went to China as a student in 1986 and returned in 1996, married a Chinese national and lived there for the past 16 years -- wrote a compelling commentary article for the New York Times. It was reproduced in TODAY (Aug 20) under the headline "You'll never be Chinese".

His is a must-read article; what struck me in light of recent postings of mine is this extract:

...there is one overriding reason I must leave China. I want to give my children a decent education.

The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate. It is a test centre. The curriculum is designed to teach children how to pass them.

In rural China, where we have lived for seven years, it is also an elevation system. Success in exams offers a passport to a better life in the big city. Schools do not produce self-reliant young people with inquiring minds. They produce winners and losers. Winners go on to college or university to take "business studies". Losers go back to the farm or the local factory their parents were hoping they could escape.

There is little, if any, extra-curricular activity. Athletic children are extracted and sent to special schools to learn how to win Olympic gold medals. Musically-gifted children are rammed into the conservatories, where they have all the joy in their talent drilled out of them. (My wife was one of the latter.)

The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered a failure. Bad performance is punished. Homework, which consists mostly of practice test papers, takes up at least one day of every weekend.

Many children go to school to do it in the classroom. I have seen them trooping in at 6am on Sundays.

China does not educate its youth in a way that will allow them to become the leaders, inventors and innovators of tomorrow, but that is the intention. The party does not want free-thinkers who can solve its problems. It still believes it can solve them itself, if it ever admits it has a problem in the first place.

[Do read the entire article. Here is the TODAY link:]

http://www.todayonline.com/CommentaryandAnalysis/Commentary/EDC120820-0000014/Youll-never-be-Chinese

---------------------------------------------------------

People not only lose their cellphones in strange places, they have a love-hate relationship with it. Otherwise, why would anyone want to oreganise a mobile phone-throwing contest (actually, I think it is a great idea)?...

New world record set at mobile-phone throwing contest

http://news.xin.msn.com/en/weird/new-world-record-set-at-mobile-phone-throwing-contest-1

----------------------------------------------------

Anyway, I thought I should alert someone now living in Sydney to my blog entry with the picture of a cellphone accidentally dropped down a toilet bowl by her sister. Back came this reply:

"Haha. I had also dropped my handphone into the toilet four years ago."

So, now I know of at least one family where 100 per cent of the offspring have dropped a mobile phone into the can.