More on China and 21st Century Skills

by Clay Burell

categories: Standardized Tests, Teachers Ideas and Resources

Published April 17, 2009 @ 06:35AM PT

More sharing from cultural psychologist Richard E. Nisbett's The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why. (The last two posts on it didn't get a lot of comments, but they got a lot of tweets on Twitter and backtracks on Technorati, so I'm assuming some lurkers liked. Regardless, I do. Once you get past the book's introduction, which seemed so full of obvious I almost put it down, it's quite an interesting read.)

One of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life was teaching Asian history - in an international school in Shanghai, China. I won't wax gooey about the history buff's pleasure I experienced almost daily during the Chinese history months, when I'd prep lessons and do refresher readings on such things as the great 4th C. BCE Taoist sage and laugh-a-minute philosopher Zhuang-Zi, who embodied the wisdom of humor in the face of suffering in a way the whole world could learn from, and then saw that 2,500-year-old smiling wisdom on the sidewalks of the peasant neighborhood I walked through on the way to and from work each day. Really, I won't wax.

I also won't wax about similar history-teacher-highs during the unit on Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution during the 1960's, which gave depth and cinematic significance to the elders in that same peasant neighborhood, practically all of whom lived through that nightmare, though you'd never know by their general good cheer. (If you haven't seen Zhang Yimou's film about it, To Live, by all means put it on your List of Things to Do Before You Die.)

What I will do, though, is share something new I learned in Nisbett's book about what, before reading it, was a social practice I'd thought unique to the Communist enforcers during the Cultural Revolution, and didn't realize was a general trait of East Asian cultures. I'm talking about "self-criticism." The Communists used self-criticism as a sort of half-shaming, half-brainwashing public ritual, it seemed to me, in which they'd force suspected "Capitalist-Roaders" and other non-orthodox types to stand before huge assemblies, sometimes wearing Chinese-style dunce caps, and criticize all their own short-comings as good communists. (Call it a Communist twist on Sunday confessionals.)

Nisbett, though, shows that the practice is much older than that, and also more widespread. It seems it's less a Communist thing than a Confucian one. Unlike the West's individualist premium on self-esteem, the East's emphasis on social harmony makes self-criticism seem less like the form of punishment I'd come to see it as in the context of Mao's time, and more like an important pedagogical practice to teach individuals to - irony alert - know themselves. (Call this one an Apollonian imperative with a Confucian twist.)

"The goal for the self in relation to society [in Confucian Asia] is not so much to establish superiority or uniqueness [as in the individualistic West]," Nisbett writes,

but to achieve harmony within a network of supportive social relationships and to play one's part in achieving collective ends. These goals require a certain amount of self-criticism - the opposite of tooting one's own horn.

Nisbett then gives one of two money quotes, for me, in the next sentence:

If I am to fit in with the group, I must root out those aspects of myself that annoy others or make their tasks more difficult. In contrast to the Asian practice of teaching children to blend harmoniously with others, some American children go to schools in which each child gets to be a "VIP" for a day.

This draws out the value of socialization and collaborative skills that are so central to proponents of the (horribly-named) "21st Century Skills" model. And it's precisely what the push for high-stakes testing of students and schools undermines schools' freedom to teach. (I read this over and over in comments here and elsewhere: the emphasis on tests means more time devoted to math and reading and, above all, test-prep, and less time to social studies, science, recess, group-work, on and on.)

A quick story: I took a year off from teaching this year to write a book. To keep from dipping into savings, I took a couple of part-time jobs. One of those jobs is writing and announcing news on the Korean government's English-language radio station. One of my co-workers on that job was a woman who was, I have no doubt, an A student. She read and wrote well, she announced well; she did both, in fact, better than most of the other bilingual Koreans at the station. And she lasted less than a month before quitting.

She quit because she apparently hadn't "root[ed] out those aspects of [her]self that annoy others or make their tasks more difficult": She was afraid of recording and editing the BBC international news feed. She was afraid of the computer printer. She refused to select the line-up of stories for her newscast, and to sequence them as she saw fit. Week after week, despite my own repeated offers (always the teacher) to help her learn these tasks in whatever way best suited her learning style, she refused to learn them, and continued to insist others do them for her. If she hadn't broken under the pressure and quit herself, it was surely only a matter of time before she would have been fired.

There's nothing particularly deep here, I know. This is just a story of a woman whose education gave her high marks for being able to read and write and speak, whose education succeeded admirably, in fact, in giving her strong literacy skills - but failed to give her the equally important life skills she needed to succeed.

Nisbett's book is helping shape some of my instructional practices when I return to the classroom in August in Singapore (to teach Asian history again!): this particular section has prompted me to add a "self-criticism" slice to my assessments, and maybe to tell a story that will make that ritual relevant to the students I make do it. Because I want them not only to know stuff, and to make good grades; I also want them to be able to fit in and succeed. I can't help but think that my ex-colleague wouldn't be an "ex," if only her school had allowed her to root out her annoying weaknesses before entering the workforce, instead of after.

Speaking of my old Chinese neighborhood, here it is: Zhudi Town, 10 miles outside of Shanghai:

(My ex-wife made this her last year in China. These are the people I was talking about above. It's a really good snapshot of contemporary Shanghai once she hits her stride at about the one-minute mark. You can see four more clips of the series starting here.)

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(As for that second "money quote," stay tuned. I've yammered long enough for one post.)