A screenshot of BBC documentary Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School
What happens when you bring the Chinese education system to Britain? A week after the debut of BBC documentary series Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, the lively debate about the educational systems in both countries continues to simmer on British and Chinese social networks and in the media.
With the first and second episodes of the three-part documentary already proving to be an eye-opening shock, next Tuesday audiences will have the chance to see the final episode, which is expected to show which system will triumph by having the students take an exam.
The unique four-week experiment introduced five teachers from China to Bohunt School in Hampshire to take over the education of 50 teenagers. These 13- and 14-year-old British high school students followed the 12-hour schedule of a typical Chinese school, which starts at 7 am. During the school day they do daily exercises in the morning and eye exercises during breaks, wear parachute-like uniforms, have PE classes, take lessons that focus on note taking and memorization and clean the classrooms at the end of the day. They also attend a flag raising ceremony for both countries' flags once a week and have even established a class committee.
"This series was produced to examine the significant differences between the Chinese and the British approaches to education," a BBC spokesperson told the Global Times in an e-mail statement.
"For several years some of the East Asian countries have beaten the UK on core subjects in international league tables, and we wanted to explore if their approach could be transferred to the UK classroom," the spokesperson wrote.
A bold experiment
Over the past few years, there have been a number of headlines about how Shanghai managed to win the top results in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and about UK education officials seeking math-teaching tips in the city. However, this is the first time that the use of Chinese teaching methods in the UK have been documented on film.
To keep things as natural as possible, the BBC used fixed cameras in the classroom so filming would remain unobtrusive and strictly followed the Chinese school schedule in order to give a true representation of how students reacted to Chinese teaching styles.
Bohunt - rated an "outstanding" comprehensive school by Ofsted, the UK's Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills - was chosen for this series mainly because it is a high achieving school and also has a good record when it came to Chinese language education. Fifty students of a broad range of scholastic ability were chosen to take part in the program. Some found it easy, while others struggled.
In the same email, Bohunt's headmaster, Neil Strowger wrote: "We've been teaching Mandarin [Putonghua] at Bohunt School for the last 20 years and have an exchange program with schools in China, so we are very interested in the country's education practice, as well as its history and culture."
As episode one showed, some students did find Chinese teaching methods a challenge. Strowger believes that much of this came down to the longer Chinese school day and the Chinese teacher's different approach to teaching. The 12-hour day was a bit of a shock to some students as a typical Britain school day is only seven or eight hours long.
"Whilst the days were longer than they were used to, the students who took part in the program did enjoy the experience and took a lot from it. The Chinese teachers did too - I've recently been contacted by one of them, who wrote to me to say how much she liked the school and enjoyed her time with the children. She also thought that the experience had improved her as a teacher," Strowger said.
In Strowger's opinion the project is not only exploring the differences in curriculum and teaching styles, but differences in culture as well. He feels that Chinese parents, culture and values all play very important parts in education.
Apples and oranges
Chinese teaching styles were on a collision course with British kids during the first episode. At first Chinese teachers and British pupils just couldn't seem to adapt to each other as the Chinese teachers felt the British students lacked discipline and the students complained they were expected to learn like robots.
The second episode, which was broadcast on Tuesday, saw British students begin to rebel against the strict discipline of their Chinese teachers and the lenghty school day.
While the results of the experiment will remain unknown until the last episode, the question whether the Chinese education system would benefit British kids is a topic that has actually attracted quite a bit of attention even before the show aired on TV.
In an article published by the Guardian on August 4, commentator Simon Jenkins referred to China's schools as "testing factories." Obviously he was not that thrilled with Britain being so keen to copy the Chinese system.
Another article, over in the Evening Standard, noted that compared with UK schools, the major difference in Chinese schools is the lack of a tiering system, which groups kids by ability. In the article's opinion, putting Chinese students of varying academic ability together helps generate intense competition between students.
Many Chinese have also found the documentary interesting to watch as it reminded them of their own school days. However, it seems that the system used in the show actually doesn't quite match up with what takes place in Chinese classrooms nowadays.
For a while now, China has been trying to get rid of the traditional "duck-stuffing" style of teaching, and instead emphasize education that adapts itself to the aptitudes of students, Lei Zhang, a Chinese teacher with more than 10 years of experience of teaching in both British and Chinese classrooms, told the Global Times. Chinese teachers have started to realize some of the problems with their teaching methods and have begun implementing some less formal methods used in Western education. "However, learning and borrowing does not mean we are devaluating ourselves," Zhang explained.
