LEARN FROM CHINA TO SUCCEED

A news report in the ‘Australian Age’ caught my attention, which I felt like sharing with you.

'Alarm bells': Nation's students slide in rankings

Australian students recorded their worst-ever results in an international test of reading, maths and science skills, and are now about a full school year behind where Australian students were at the turn of the millennium. The decline was most severe in mathematics.

Australia's Education Minister Dan Tehan said the results "should have alarm bells ringing". Victoria's Education Minister James Merlino called for an urgent review of the maths curriculum. The average 15-year-old Australian student is now 3½ years behind the average Chinese student and more than a year behind where Australia was in 2003, according to a triennial international test of reading, maths and science skills.

When 16-year-old Nicholas Zhang, was at boarding school in China he spent 20 hours a week studying maths . In Australia, it is only three.

The Indian scenario

Now let us understand this concern in Indian context. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 published by education non-profit Pratham shows the prevalence of learning deficit and the poverty of basic reading and arithmetic skills among students in Indian schools. The latest report derived from the collected data from 596 districts by surveying 546,527 students from 354,944 homes shows:

•          Indian students, especially those in elementary school (Classes I-VIII), are not learning enough. To cite a metric, only half (50.3%) of all students in Class V can read texts meant for Class II students.
•          There seems to have been some improvement in learning levels, especially among students of Class III and Class V, in 2018 compared with those of the previous five years. However, the improvement is not visible at a higher level, for example among students of Class VIII.
•          The deficit is across government and private schools. Traditionally, students in private schools have fared better than their government school counterparts, but that’s a relative situation. For example, while 40% of Class VIII students in government schools can do simple division, the figure is 54.2% in private schools.

The China Story

The Chinese realized that they needed to shift from a nation with large human resources to a nation with strong human resources. They needed to create a better education system so that young Chinese grow and mature into productive and innovative adults. Much like the US under the No Child Left Behind programme, they have a state-run system of public education run by their Ministry of Education. All citizens must attend school for at least nine years, known as the nine-year compulsory education, which is funded by the government. Compulsory education includes six years of primary education, starting at age six or seven, and three years of junior secondary education (junior middle school) for ages 12 to 15. After junior middle school, there are three years of senior middle school, which then completes the secondary education. China has put a heavy emphasis on rigid learning systems followed by standardized tests, which are known as “gao kao” in China. Gradually they have transformed their education from memorizing to understanding, from learning formula to deriving solutions by logic.

To ensure that those students who live in rural areas are subject to the same education standards as those children in the larger metropolitan centres China has a uniform primary schooling system and its teaching style and standards are changing with the changing times. There is a policy of rotating teachers’ assignments on a five-year basis to ensure that the best teachers are not found only in the biggest schools. Instead, high-performing teachers would spend some time teaching in the city and then take that expertise to rural China.

Our twin problems

The two problems that we in India are facing are the quality of teaching and the quality of teachers. The students are taught to memorize facts rather than to approach problems critically. Our focus on standardized testing has led to a teaching style that emphasizes memorization and passing exams. For example, maths scores are high when children are pushed to memorize complicated formulas that they could use on problems given to them. Unfortunately, this system fails to equip children with the skills and thought processes to innovate. There is no focus on critical thinking and needless to say, it is uninteresting.

This issue is important especially when moving into higher education and the workforce. A person who has been taught only specific formulas and definitions will quickly find that such textbook logic does not always translate to real-world problems. And of course, once you get into higher education and the real world, you won’t be given a textbook problem but rather a real-world situation. So our system of education leads to a degree no doubt, but ends up producing unemployables!

What we need is a system that creates innovative and unique individuals capable of thriving in the marketplace. To do this, we must find a system that promotes growth and critical thought. Creating this system is not, however, a problem with a single, simple solution. We need to revise our curriculum, our teaching and assessment styles and we need to update and improve our teachers.

Why be concerned about quality of education?

India’s demographic dividend depends on the learning level of students. The quality of education has a direct bearing on any economy. With some 240 million students or nearly 20% of the Indian population in school, their quality of learning or lack of it assumes significance for the competitiveness of the country. It has an impact on the quality of life, efficiency at the workplace, and labour productivity issues. That is the reason why the World Bank said Indians born today are likely to be just 44% productive as workers, way below their Asian peers.

A quantum jump in the education sector is the need of the hour. As the problem has now been diagnosed and public advocacy has got the momentum, the governments and civil society need to focus on three aspects—a bigger spending on education, maybe 6% of GDP instead of the present 2.7%, political willingness to improve education, and a drastic change in the quality of teacher education.

Education and skill development has to go hand in hand after High School so that we are prepared with a vibrant workforce capable of keeping up with the fourth industrial revolution. China has done it in the most exemplary way and it is not surprising that they will soon overtake the U.S to become the technology head quarters of the world. Countries like Australia and India should take a leaf out of the Chinese book of success and start implementing as soon as possible. It is already too late!