Here it comes: more on Chinese & non-Chinese education!

[www.chinesetime.cn]

From a Chinese person teaching in America; then an American teaching
somewhere else; and finally the man who kicked the whole thing off,
Randy Pollock himself. (Previously here.)

First, from a Chinese reader:
I had a pretty low opinion on Chinese education when I was in China.
Certain subjects such as history and Marxist philosophy are just
crammed in without any critical discussion. But when I came to US and
worked as TA for a top state university, I changed my mind a bit.
Almost none of my students (first-year economics) are interested in
understanding the materials critically. Most of them are just looking
for a good grade. Also the math preparation some of my students
received are so inadequate, I doubt they would be able to graduate
from high school in China, not mentioning entering a top university.
My classmate told me a story that one of his student could not do 7*7
by hand. From what I read in newspapers about quality of inner city
schools in US, the situation may be even worse than I see. So the
conspiracy theory one of your reader talked about that the poor
quality of rural area schools is set on purpose by Chinese government
to keep people ignorant is far-fetched. Compared with some of the
public schools in US where so much resource are spent with so few
results, I think the education system in China is not so bad.

I don't think Nobel Prize is a valid measure to compare different
education systems. Most of the best scientific talents in China are
attracted to US, studying and working here. This alone can make any
comparison meaningless. Also scientific research in US was weak till
20th century. I remember reading Schumpeter's discussion about why
there were so few first-rate American economists till very late in the
19th century, his explanation was that the best talents in US were
attracted to entrepreneurial adventures in a fast growing economy.
Similar things may be happening in China right now.
Next, from an American expat:
I've been reading your series on Chinese education because it so
greatly resembles my daily life as an English teacher. The thing is, I
don't teach in China, I teach in a Eastern European country.
When your correspondents talk about students who all say and do the
same thing and colleagues who will never tell you if there is a
problem, they could just as easily be discussing my school. It's
uncanny--just like Terry Foecke's experience, getting information out
of my colleagues is best done over a meal, because you'll never get
them to say anything negative during regular work hours.

I can only speculate why my experience so closely resembles that of an
utterly distinct culture thousands of miles away. Perhaps it is the
shared legacy of communism--in my country the older folks who spent
most of their lives under communist rule regularly say "sticking your
neck out is a good way to get it chopped off." Frankly though, I think
it goes deeper than that. I think America is the outlier; our brash
outspokenness is stranger than the prudent silence which dominates in
other cultures.
Now, from Randy Pollock:
Readers who question the power of liberal arts to transform students'
critical minds could find clarity in this nice piece from Cal-
Berkeley's site. At the sidebar, they will find a convincing quote
from Einstein, the best scientist ever recruited across an ocean:
"The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the
learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something
that cannot be learned from textbooks." --Albert Einstein
Critical thinking can't be taught? Nonsense. It is a skill. Over the
years I have personally seen hundreds of college students from a wide
range of national, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds learn to
think more incisively and critically. Champions of repetition and
summary have routinely evolved into convincing analysts and
rhetoricians. Reality Show addicts have learned to lay bare the flaws
of Euripides--and gone on to work for Google. To say students can't be
taught to think is like saying athletes can't be coached to play.
As a bonus on this last point, about the teachability of "critical
thinking," we have this from Tim van Gelder of the Austhink software
company in Australia. By pure coincidence, a discussion of one of
Austhink's products, for "argument mapping," is the next thing I've
been planning to post, in kicking off the "design in software"
series...
It is frustrating to see Jiang Qian, in comments quoted on your blog,
rehearsing a view that unfortunately just never dies: "In fact, as
[an attached article] points out, "critical thinking" is not a skill
like reading or carpentry that can be taught, but rather something
attached to a specific set of knowledge."

There are two related debates going back many decades now:

(1) Is critical thinking a "generic" or domain-independent skill?
(2) Can critical thinking be taught as subject or skill in its own
right?

People who answer no to the first question also tend to answer no to
the second as well.

However these positions are definitely in the minority in the
community of experts in this area.

To me, questions (1) and (2) are scarcely worth debating any more.
The existence of generic skills can be proven simply by pointing to
examples. The teachability of critical thinking can be proven by
teaching it successfully. I devoted about half a dozen years of my
academic career to working on methods for effective and affordable
teaching of critical thinking. We were able to reliably generate
substantial gains over one semester. Ergo, critical thinking can be
taught. Case closed. [For more detail, we have a meta-analysis of
hundreds of empirical studies in this area.]

What is true is that standard approaches are inculcating critical
thinking skills (such as putting people through a college degree, even
a liberal arts degree) make disappointingly little difference, and
attempts to directly teach critical thinking also usually make little
difference.

But there's a very simple explanation for this. Critical thinking is
a skill, and like any complex skill, it takes a very large amount of
deliberate practice to make any significant (in the sense of
substantial, not "statistically significant") difference. Our
educational system has never been prepared to, or indeed able to,
invest the kind of resources needed.