Two screenshots from the BBC documentary. Photos: youtube.com

As the BBC documentary series Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, airs its final episode this week, British and Chinese teachers are joining the debate as to which nation has the better education system.

As more and more Chinese students go to study overseas, impressing their fellow students with their academic performance, a trend has emerged as educators in the Western world begin to wonder what they can learn from Chinese education methods to develop their students' competitiveness.

The three-part documentary introduced five Chinese teachers to Bohunt School in Hampshire in Southeast England where they would take over the education of 50 teenagers. These 13- and 14-year-old British students followed the 12-hour schedule of a typical Chinese school, with the school day starting at 7 am, and attended lessons that focused on note-taking and memorization.

Top marks or total flop

While the students in the documentary seemed to struggle with the strict Chinese-style schooling, a teacher from an elite British school interviewed by the Global Times believes that Chinese methods would suit his British students.

"If these five teachers were teaching at Eton, all of the students would be happy," said the English teacher who previously taught at Eton College, an exclusive British boarding school.

Many Chinese parents encourage their children to participate in extracurricular activities such as weekend classes related to their interests to make them more versatile and to increase their competitiveness in the global market.

The British teacher believed that Chinese education methods could be a good fit for Eton's environment, as top private schools in Britain also provide their students with extracurricular activities to create a well-rounded education for their pupils.

However, some other British teachers argue that an over-emphasis on rote memorization could "lead to disinterest in the lessons."

"The Chinese teachers expected that each student would take a great deal of authority over their own learning, while the [British] students were not prepared for this style of learning, such as taking comprehensive notes, copying them out at home, and diligently completing homework tasks," Jolyon Aarons, Graduate Researcher at the School of Chemistry, University of Southampton, told the Global Times.

"This lead to a disconnect, where the students realized that they were not learning anything and so got bored and failed to see the point in paying attention, while the teachers got frustrated that the students were not learning or behaving," said the researcher.

Aarons's argument can be seen in action in the second episode of the documentary when British students began to rebel against the strict discipline of their Chinese teachers and the lengthy school day.

British netizens have also joined the debate, with many bemoaning the students' lack of respect for their Chinese teachers.

One wrote "As usual, British teachers [are] blaming tedious teaching "someone droning on" - [while having] no insight that own indulgences [are] betraying UK kids."

Another user wrote, "discipline should come from parents first, school second. Lazy parenting is one of the UK's biggest problems."

But some netizens criticized the Chinese teaching style because of its emphasis on rote-learning.

One wrote "it's all well and good if you want an effective, cold, mechanistic accumulation of skill. If you want to innovate, nope."

Actual application

Qiu Zhengzheng, an education expert at New Oriental, a provider of private educational services in China, said he believes that the Chinese students' solid foundation of knowledge has helped them excel in the US SAT College Admission Exam when they apply to study abroad in the US, and they are able to quickly adopt to local teachers and catch up with local American students.

Aarons, the researcher at the University of Southampton, also agrees "some level of rote learning is necessary to form background knowledge."

However, he also argued that "objective, critical minds must also be developed," and that "questioning points of view should be encouraged rather than stifled."

Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the China National Institute for Educational Research, believed that schools in Western countries like the UK are unlikely to introduce Chinese education methods.

"Most Chinese schools only have one syllabus for all students, but in Western countries, many schools divide their students based on their levels of aptitude and conduct different syllabus for them," Chu told the Global Times.
Newspaper headline: Learning teaching lessons