The PISA test results gave our political and education leaders another opportunity to criticise British schools. But, as Sue Lyle points out in this Creative Teaching & Learning (issue 4.3), the picture is much more complex than it at first might seem.
The schools in Shanghai that did so well and were held up as such shining examples had recently dismissed, at 14 years old, all but 20 per cent of their populations.
What was left was a 20 per cent cohort of children who represented the academic elite of the area, and possibly the country. It is analogous to the grammar schools here, which Wilshaw has bravely refused to allow to expand in Kent, on the grounds that they are ‘stuffed full of middle-class children’ and would in no way improve social mobility.
On top of this selectivity, the Shanghai student elite are, to quote Norman Matloff, an American Professor also expressing some scepticism of the results, academic athletes who are trained to pass tests – including the PISA tests. America had the same sort of results as the UK, with us middling in the league tables, a long way behind Asian countries.
Like athletic training, Chinese education is drill, drill, practice, practice. Students in the US, Matloff reminds us, have much better things to do with their time, including leading world popular culture and starting up multi-national internet companies. As anyone who has met Chinese headteachers will tell you, they are desperate for some of the more creative pedagogy that takes place in the UK.
Even former Premier, Wen Jiabao, Matloff points out, has complained about China’s rote-memory approach to education. And Chen Lixin, an engineering professor at Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi’an, has warned that China produces students who can’t think independently or creatively, and have trouble solving practical problems. He wrote in 1999 that the Chinese education system ‘results in
the phenomenon of high scores and low ability’, an observation germane to PISA results. In the 2009 tests, ‘students scored low in independent reading strategies, meaning they rely on teachers’ instruction on what to read,’ according to the Shanghai Daily.