Don’t Kowtow to the Gaokao

We know the ethnic stereotypes: American college kids are known for their keg-clanging parties and industrial-strength livers, and Chinese students are generally perceived as unassuming and hard-working. And for being good with numbers. I’ll even confess that I touched down on the Beijing tarmac last year with the secret hope that, if during my year abroad I rolled around in their wizard dust long enough, I might absorb some math skills. Like long division.

We’re familiar with the facts: On the international Pisa tests last year, the Shanghai virtuosos locked up first prize in every test category, including math, science, and reading. In science, the United States limped in at 23rd of 65 countries, nestling itself comfortably between Hungary and the Czech Republic. Then, after a recent report found that the average American college student studies only 14 hours a week, the case for American complacency suffered its second round at the pillory. President Obama has now declared an “education arms race” with China, and the unspoken ultimatum hangs in the air like an ugly grade: Start studying or China will sweep us off our global throne.

What are the Chinese doing right? To many, Chinese education is a black box. The impression most of us have of the typical Chinese student is woven together from a bricolage of culturally pressed images—the honors student and the four-eyed physics wonk, the math nerd and the Rubik’s Cube black belt—but the fuller account of why Chinese students are who they are rarely floats into the public consciousness. That fuller story involves the gaokao.

The gaokao (rhymes with bow wow) is the college entrance exam that Chinese students take at the end of high school. In preparation, students select either sciences or humanities early in high school and study for up to 16 hours a day, often working through weekends, for the rest of their high school careers. The test itself can last several days, and ambulances and paramedics pepper the exam facilities to revive those who faint from exhaustion. If you ace the test, then you go to a topflight school  and are set for life (Chinese universities don’t care about anything other than your test score). If you’re sick during the test or for some reason perform sub-par, then you may take a “gap year” during which you study to take the test over again. My Beijing teacher told me that her high school sometimes gave her only half a day off per month from studying.

And we thought getting into Harvard took work.

Work is what it’s all about. For most of my year in China, I was a student at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Its majestic campus is home to established professors and brilliantly gifted students. My Chinese classmates could integrate and derive and differentiate equations with ease. But for all their firepower, where was the intellectual spark—the creative flare that can spring you out from inside the box?

There are boons to the gaokao system. Chinese students learn a lot from the process. The test also promotes meritocracy, rewarding the hard workers over the apple-polishers whom teachers shower with good grades. Above all, the test encourages old-fashioned hard work—students who perform badly may see their life aspirations begin to clot before their first kiss (many Chinese high-schools forbid relationships lest they interfere with schoolwork).

Yet my Chinese friends would have been the first to tell you that the gaokao encourages a lockstep approach to learning. One friend told me that her literature professor taught great books mostly by lecturing on the writer’s biographical information and various publication dates. Perhaps that’s what happens when you locate the golden snitch in a single test score: students come to kowtow to the gaokao, more or less allowing their education to revolve around its golden measuring stick. “You learn,” a friend told me, “not to always be right but at least to never be wrong.”

Students become outcome-oriented. Test results become the be all and end all of one’s education.

This system produces high-voltage, water-cooled brainiacs who will channel their knowledge into an economy that is already rolling. Yet all this time spent on an educational conveyor belt can chill one’s creative flare. I talked to one Chinese father who said that his seventh-grade son’s writing ability had not improved since second grade.

Contrast all this with the American system, in which colleges select applicants based in part on recommendations and personal essays, which work to paint a portrait behind the GPA. Who you are is just as important as what you’ve done. This side of the Pacific, it’s easier to take intellectual risks and color outside the lines. That our life trajectory does not depend on our transcript gives us a safe space to struggle and fail.

As we try in the near future to reform our own education system, there will be pressure to look to China’s as the model. Resist.

Gregory D. Kristof ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Hurlbut Hall.