FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Chaos in the classroom

Chaos in the classroom

Chinese teachers at a British school spark global debate on education styles

The first episode of a BBC documentary series “Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School” made its debut on Tuesday, and soon became one of the top topics on social networks in both China and Britain, with many education specialists commenting and retweeting.
In the documentary, five Chinese teachers took over a British classroom with 50 teenagers aged 13 and 14 in Bohunt School in Hampshire for one month, and taught them in a typical Chinese way: no talking, no questions, wearing a special uniform and experiencing the harsh classroom discipline within an extended school-hour from 7am to 7pm.
Students in the experimental programme had to do morning exercises, took compulsory physical education of long-distance running, and were also required to do eye exercises during breaks. Some of the students were caught on camera in tears – as was one of the teachers.
At end of this episode, most of the teens found it difficult to adapt to the Chinese methodologies. Some of them even described their Chinese teachers as “rude” and “unreasonable”. Their teachers were not prepared for the stark differences between Chinese and British students as well. One of the teachers couldn’t help but complain that the classroom was always “chaotic” to the head teacher.
Many Chinese netizens, especially the post-1980 netizens, said that the documentary reminded them of past schooldays. Meanwhile, they criticised the British students as “unmannerly” and “lack of respect to others” after watching the documentary.
Chu_hsi, a weibo.com user, said: “I agree that Chinese classroom discipline is too strict, to some degree. But a free style classroom means that students can discuss academic issues in better atmosphere, not eating, putting on make-up or doing whatever you like. The British students lack the most basic politeness. This is the issue of upbringing.”
His comment won more than 2, 000 comments of praise on Weibo.com in a short time. Meanwhile, lots of British netizens had the same feelings. On Twitter, Jo Boyne’s comment “I hope the parents of some of these children are horrified to see how ill behaved and disrespectful their kids are” got plenty of approval as well.
However, in the latest interview with Chinese media, Li Aiyun, the mathematics teacher in the programme from Nanjing Foreign Language School, said that his British students were nice children with good manners.
“In the first episode, students look lax and absent-minded sometimes. To me, this is understandable. Normally, there are less than 20 students in a British classroom. Now they have 50 students. What’s more, they have to stay at school for 12 hours each day, even longer than the school-time in Nanjing Foreign Language School. They are not accustomed to it for sure,” he said.
Compared with British students, Li stressed that Chinese students usually study harder and have a clearer goal due to their parents’ demands and their own planning. But British students have their own characteristics.
“British teens always say ‘make the world different’. They care less about good marks or low marks, but pay attention to extracurricular activities. They have very good coping capacity and hands-on skills. In addition, they are mostly good at making speeches,” he added.
Furthermore, Li pointed out that China’s tough education system produces strong results in subjects like math and science, capturing the interest of educators in the US and Europe where some feel the child-centred approach does not do enough to teach the basics.
Kathryn James, deputy general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers in Britain, defended the British school system and said it had advantages over China’s.
“Student autonomy, questioning and the development of skills to allow students to think for themselves are the key elements in British pedagogical approaches – and do not appear to be part of the Chinese approach,,” she said.
But the majority of Britons lamented the quality of their own country’s education system.
“If British schools, in the main, are places of constant supply of entertainment to pupils, then the name of these institutions should be changed from schools to something else, maybe comedy clubs instead of schools – where the chief clown is normally the head teacher,” another Twitter user commented.
Twitter [email protected] considered that British parents should examine themselves after watching this documentary. “Children should learn to show respect to their parents at home and to their teachers in school. However, the children in the documentary show that their parents, without any doubt, set a very bad example to them in daily life,” he said.
 
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