The Promise and Perils of Sino-U.S. Educational Relations

Key Takeaways

• Both China and the United States are modifying their educational systems to give their students a greater advantage in the global job market. Ironically, while many primary and secondary schools in the United States are resorting to rote-learning and standardized testing to increase academic discipline, Chinese parents are opting to send their students to U.S. schools.
• The United States’ recent shift toward “Chinese” teaching methods has attracted controversy, with critics claiming that the shift is detrimental to the traditional American educational system and risks eliminating the very elements that make Americans competitive and desirable employees.
• The rapid influx of Chinese students into the American education system is overwhelming some schools and forcing many teachers to alter their curriculums, pedagogy, and methods of student assessment to accommodate them.

Educational exchanges have always played an important role in Sino-U.S. relations. Since the United States first used Boxer Indemnity funds to offer scholarships to Chinese students in 1911, educational relations have been an index and vector of national power, culture, and institutional practices. Today, the number of Chinese students pursuing higher education in the United States (and, to a lesser extent, the number of Americans choosing to study abroad in China) is greater than ever. While the participation of international students in American educational programs has generally been beneficial for cultural exchanges and classroom diversity, the rapid, and at times overwhelming, influx of Chinese students into American classrooms has become a point of contention between educators, students, parents, and policy makers.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Yong Zhao, author of Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World was quick to point out America’s obsession with the Chinese educational system, which began in 2009 when a school in Shanghai ranked first in the world on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Following the release of the PISA results, parents and policy makers in the United States began questioning the efficacy of the American education system, subsequently blaming its relaxed academic philosophy for the poor performance of American students vis-à-vis their Chinese counterparts. This in turn led to calls for more rigid testing and teaching standards. While some have been very supportive of this shift in classroom focus, others, including Professor Zhao, are skeptical that adopting traditional Chinese methods of teaching – such as a common core curriculum and increased standardized testing – will benefit American students as much as policy makers assume they will.

Zhao considers these practices detrimental to students in the United States, whose greatest marketable assets have always been natural creativity and a drive for innovation, both of which strict academic requirements tend to quash. Consequently, U.S. moves to replace music and art classes with test preparation will actually reduce American students’ ability to compete successfully in the global job market. Zhao argues that if the United States wants to remain a global competitor in the 21st century, it must ultimately continue to build upon its traditional educational strengths and forgo current plans to emulate China’s school system – an unduly rigid system that China is actively retreating from.

U.S.-China Education Exchange: Two Way Street?

Karen Fischer, senior reporter at the Chronical of Higher Education, shifted the conversation slightly to focus on the recent study abroad trends in the United States. Since 2007, there has been a significant rise in Chinese students opting to study in the United States for the full duration of their academic career. Fischer attributes this trend to a few discrete factors: a more student-friendly visa policy starting with the Bush administration, a boom in the Chinese economy and accompanying sense of affluence, and a rise in Chinese students not achieving the necessary scores on the gaokao (China’s national college entrance exam) to attend the best Chinese universities.

Fischer goes on to point out that the driving force today behind Chinese parents’ decision to send their children abroad is their choice to withhold their children from the gaokao system altogether and instead prepare them to take American college entrance exams (i.e., the SAT, ACT, and TOEFL). Though the exact reason for this paradigm shift remains relatively unexplored, Fischer speculated that students choosing to study in the United States do so because they heard of the benefits of the “American” classroom and that higher education in the United States is more affordable than in China.

As the number of Chinese exchange students grows, many colleges are struggling with questions of how to deal with pedagogy and integration; teachers are being forced by necessity to modify how they teach their courses. Equally vexing, many colleges are also struggling to find ways to integrate Chinese students into the rest of the campus community because Chinese students (as with many other foreign student groups) tend to be insular and interact within their familiar cultural niche, thus losing the rich experience of social diversity.

The greater presence of Chinese students is fundamentally changing the classroom atmosphere for U.S. and Chinese students both negatively and positively. Unfortunately, because the phenomenon is still fairly new, there has yet to be an in depth examination and discussion of how to resolve conflicting interests and expectations of both bodies of students.

Apples to Oranges

According to both Zhao and Fischer, while there is room for improvement in the American education system, the United States must end its fixation with standardized testing and rote-learning and return to tried and true methods that teach students how to debate, think about problems critically, and appreciate diversity in the views of others. On the other hand, China must also undergo meaningful and comprehensive reforms to its authoritarian regime before it will be able to improve the quality and international reputation of its educational system.

Only time will tell how current educational exchange trends will change either system and whether those changes will be for the better or worse. While the United States adapts its admission processes to better evaluate Chinese candidates, China will soon contend with the return of a massive cohort of students educated in the West. As both educational systems wrestle to emulate the other, both will also wrestle with the consequences. Although some American institutions are feeling “China fatigue,” there is no question that Sino-U.S. educational exchanges will remain an important part of the relationship for years to come.

--Michelle Neal and Sandy Pho