Exam fatigue stumps Chinese students
By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING - In Chinese education, the examination is paramount. Students must
memorize vast amounts of information to pass major tests, with the biggest
determining factor in who attends elite universities and who does not being the gaokao,
a grueling entrance exam.
This focus on exam-based education is the biggest contributor to China's
dropout rate, education experts say. According to a report published in May,
the dropout rate in some rural areas was as high as 40% (although official
Ministry of Education estimates are 5% in urban areas and 11% in rural areas).
The report was based on a study conducted by the Institute of Rural Education
at Northeast Normal University, which surveyed
17 junior high schools in 14 counties in six provinces and found that even in
relatively prosperous areas, the dropout rate could sometimes hit 40%. The
report attributed the findings to "school weariness" - fatigue and disinterest
caused by rote learning and cramming.
"Examination-oriented education imposes too much pressure on students," said
Tao Hongkai, a sociology professor at Central China Normal University. Tao, who
has decades of experience in high school education in the United States,
directs the university's quality education research center. "Students feel some
courses are difficult to learn, and the knowledge they grasp isn't useful in
real life. They lose interest, which leads to dropouts."
A 2009 survey found that 50.4% of high school students suffered from school
weariness in China, which education experts blamed on existing education
methods, notably the cramming method of teaching and the intense focus on exam
scores.
In 2008, Guo Zaoyang, a teacher at Huangchuan Middle School in Lianyungang,
Jiangsu province, started a popular blog in which he criticized teaching
methods in China using his real name - a rarity in China's blogosphere. (Guo,
however, declined to be interviewed for this article.)
In an April posting on his blog, Guo speculated that school weariness, caused
by exam-based schooling, is the leading cause of the high dropout rate among
junior school students.
"Examination-oriented education opens the doors to hell," he wrote. "The
teaching methods teachers use are the cramming method, spoon feeding method."
He added: "Students memorize and examination scores are closely related to how
much time has been spent on the course. China's schools teach their students
nothing, what these schools are best at is making students lose interest and
hate their studies."
With an emphasis on test scores, students are sometimes discouraged from
writing exams entirely, lest they bring down a class' average score. In one
case, Xiao Zhen, a sixth grade student in Shaanxi province in northwest China,
was banned by his teachers from taking exams for an entire year because of his
poor study skills, according to China Business View magazine.
Education reform has become a top priority for the ruling Chinese Communist
Party of China (CCP). Since the mid-1990s, China's higher education system has
been overhauled, with large-scale upgrades of colleges and universities and
expanded enrollment.
In June, the politburo, the CCP's top decision-making body, released the
National Outline for Medium- and Long-term Educational Reform and Development.
President Hu Jintao stressed that education was the key to social development
and promised to improve quality and accessibility in the coming decade.
The document, which highlights China's strategic goal for education before
2020, promises to reform the annual gaokao and force high schools,
colleges and universities to adopt more flexible enrollment policies.
The plan pledges to guarantee equal access to education while improving quality
and balancing the development of compulsory education in urban and rural areas.
In 2009, the central government approved an education fund of about 198 billion
yuan (around US$21.19 billion). About 28.7 million children from poor families
received financial aid for their schooling. The government plans to increase
the ratio of education expenditure to gross domestic product to 4% by 2012 from
3.48% in 2008.
"By pledging to increase public expenditures on education and promote fair
distribution of education resources, [the plan] has laid a solid foundation for
China to develop into a powerhouse of human capital," argued state-owned Xinhua
News Agency. "China will no longer be able to rely on ample supply of cheap
labor for economic growth."
Yang Dongping, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology's School of
Humanities and Social Sciences and the president of the 21st century Education
Research Institute, said the government's development plan would help establish
a new education philosophy in China. He said that experiential education
methods are already being tested in China, including one case in eastern
Shandong province, where teachers leave students to learn primarily on their
own, offering help only if a student requests it.
But Tao said true education reform will be difficult in China. Education
officials are being charged to reform the same system from which they
graduated, and surrounding the education industry are well-entrenched and
profitable businesses.
"China claims to have quality education," Tao said, "but I don't think there's
any quality education here. I think China's teachers don't even know what
quality education is."
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