The American Dream

Things made a bit more since today after having a class with a group of teachers and later with a group of principals with the same topic of conversation. What are the differences between American schools and Chinese schools? I begin by having them participate telling me what they imagine American classrooms looking like. Universally, they sounded like this:

• In American classes, students lounge around on the floor during classes.
• At most, there are 20 students per class.
• American students are more talkative in class, but that's to ask deep and penetrating questions.
• American students and teachers are always great pals.
• American classrooms are "more open," meaning few if any rules.
• American classes are extremely fun, involving lots of games.

More importantly, they all - every one of them - unhesitantly believed American education was better. An example was a principal who told me that 20 years ago educational scholars from China visited America and American scholars visited China. Both teams came to the conclusion that they well disciplined Chinese classrooms were better and the undisciplined American classrooms were worse. In those 20 years, however, no Chinese citizen has won a Nobel prize while Americans have won many.

With that, what we're doing out here makes since. I've often complained about feeling like the foreign teachers are expected to be English-speaking clowns. Come in, play games, make the kids have fun and love English and like magic the language will sink in. Disciplining children is not allowed. What we're doing, it seems, is recreating the Chinese image of the American classroom setting. They want us to come here and do to their students what they think was done to us. They want that magic spark that we were given to rub off on the next generation of Chinese.

Unfortunately, this image of the American classroom is incorrect. While Montessori schools and small private schools do exist, they are rare and most American students endure something very similar to the Chinese classroom.

While most American teachers would love the conditions that Chinese people are describing, the apathy and attitudes of American students prevents it from being a reality. I often corrected their notion of a rules-free zone by outlining each behavior associated with Childhood - horse playing, running, touching - that American teachers spend an extraordinary amount of time preventing for liabilities sake. Thus American teachers daydream of complicit and obedient [and imaginary] Asian classrooms where students want to learn and beg for three hours of homework a night.

In coming days and weeks I want to look at this issue more deeply. I want to more clearly identify, by the numbers, where the strengths of the Chinese classroom are and where the strengths of American education are. I'd also like to explore the idea of why, despite the huge number of science graduates in China, there have been no Nobel Prizes.