“Education is what remains after you have forgotten everything you learned in school.” – Albert Einstein
It takes more than just knowledge for one to lead a happy, successful and productive life.
When I was in high school in China, one of the most popular homework assignments was to memorize. I remember once I couldn’t recite the text during the class, and neither could some of my classmates. The teacher told us to leave the classroom to write out the text 100 times. We had to sit on the cold marble floor in the hallway while we wrote. Until we finished, we couldn’t even attend the next class.
I thought it was ridiculous that I had to miss class just to write something unimportant or anything 100 times. So after I wrote out the text five times I was prepared to recite. I went to the teacher’s office to demonstrate my memorization, but the teacher was not interested in hearing. She told me “No, you have to write out the rest of the text just like everyone else. Why are you so special? It’s punishment.”
What?
I was shocked. It felt ridiculous that the teacher was more interested in punishing me than in educating me. I thought she would be impressed by how quickly I had memorized the passage.
Ironically, other fellow punished students were trying to halve the number of times they had to write out the texts by holding two pens in their hands at once.
What happened to our education?
In China, teachers have tremendous power over their students. We students are treated as robots or puppets and not individuals. Schools routinely emphasized the memorization of facts. In doing so, they missed the chance to nurture their students to learn true skills for day to day living.
I wish I learned to:
cook delicious and nutritious meals
think critically
communicate effectively
make better choices
have safe sex and know about STDs and the risks
love myself before I loved anyone else
deal with difficult people
organize
speak languages other than English
defense myself
practice first aid skills
play more sports
repair or maintain anything
be happy
appreciate one another and be grateful
better care for other people
deal with bullying
communicate in a peaceful manner
use a first aid kit
survive natural disasters
deal with stress and depression
keep my body healthy
What did I really learn in school to help me survive a life on my own?
Nothing.
No one cared if I knew the exact population of China, or the date of the Declaration of Independence. No one cared if I could name all the 13 Chinese dynasties in time order, or if I could remember all the math equations.
What I learned in school hasn’t helped me survive alone in the United States, except for perhaps English – but the school can’t take too much credit.
I couldn’t communicate clearly with a native speaker after more than a decade of learning from school. My English was good for nothing but exams.
I started improving my spoken English when I figured out my own way of learning it.
Chinese schools do a credible job of teaching the basics of English grammar, but they fail to teach students to converse. I learned to communicate by watching hundreds of English language movies and by making friends online and in person with native speakers. Here’s an article I wrote about the best way to learn a language.
One of my English teachers who could pronounce English words better than most once threw a piece of chalk at me while I was cleaning my glasses – she thought I was not paying attention. Huh, she’s not the type of teacher that cared if her students paid attention or not. Why the sudden rage? I felt embarrassed as the whole class’s attention was on me. I didn’t want to listen to a word she said after that.
Later, when the class was over, she talked to me and said “Do you understand why I was angry?” “Because I was cleaning my glasses.” I mumbled in a sarcastic way, still not happy about what happened. She started to talk in a combination of English and Mandarin “Because I care about you. Your English is so good, I expect more from you. I thought you were knitting something and not paying attention to the class.” “Oh, so that deserve you humiliating me by throwing chalk at me in front of the class?” I thought to myself, quite unsure if I should have just said that out loud. She continued “I’m sorry about that, I mean I didn’t know you were cleaning your glasses.”
Really?
She was basically saying: It was OK for the rest of the class of 42 students to not pay attention to her class, but not me. How great.
I wonder what would have happened to that teacher if I was in the United States.
The other English teacher I had in senior year of high school had probably the worst English pronunciation I’ve ever heard. I’m not saying my English pronunciation was great, but I knew at least ‘he’ is not supposed to sound like ‘hey.’ As you guessed, I didn’t enjoy much when she wanted the whole class to read after her. Of course, I always read correctly after her.
Why do I have so many opinions on the Chinese educational system?
After 12 years of hard work completing a countless number of exams, I had never even properly made my own bed. Not to mention how to take care of myself. Shame.
By the time I was 18, I took everything in life for granted. I had never learned how to appreciate life nor did I know how to cook a proper meal.
One can say, more than a decade of my schooling in China didn’t serve the purpose of preparing me for real life.
There are things in life way more important than knowledge.
A trustworthy and reliable character, a healthy mindset, a good personality, gratitude, a positive outlook, an open mind, and a good sense of humor, in my opinion, are the keys to happiness rather than purely knowing a lot of information. Especially if the information is not obtained through one’s personal experiences and experiments.
When I meet people, all they seem to care about is my story – what kind of person I am, what my personality is like, how I learned to speak English so well, and my interesting adventures I could tell them about living in the United States.
It’s a harsh thing to say, but I’ve forgotten nearly 90% of the information that I was fed by school for 12 years. I can’t think of a single piece of information that has helped me survive on my own in a foreign country at age 18.
What stayed with me today are but the articles and books I read on my own outside the class.
If I have my own school and educational system, the students would firstly, be free of piles of homework. I would put happiness, health, and morality before everything. Everything else comes only after, and not vice versa.
Secondly, I would stress the importance in proactive learning. It works so much more effectively than robotically spoon-feeding a large quantity of information to students. They need to want to learn, and know why they learn. Passive learning simply doesn’t work. It could work temporarily, but not in the long run. In China, we call this kind of education ‘stuffing the duck’, which means to overfeed and under-excercise ducks to make their flesh more tender and sweet. Presumably a technique used to create China’s famous ‘Peking duck’ delights. The second meaning is to teach students any and all information needed to test (into a higher level of school). In other words, to teach by ‘stuffing the duck.’ 1
Lastly, students would learn the most out of a variety of activities through their own experiments rather than simply sitting behind a desk and listening. Learning should be fun.
Knowledge, albeit good, doesn’t help us live more contently if we can’t use it in real life.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
– Albert Einstein
1. from Why a duck stuffed with borrowed logic?
