Ruled by School

By Beth Green

A public high school English class Beth
visited in Guizhou, China in 2009

They zoomed by on rusty bicycles, dressed in uniform polyester track suits that betrayed their school affiliation. Scraped-up rubber-soled shoes dragged on the pavement as brakes, while a buddy (or sometimes two) clung on the newspaper rack behind. The first time I noticed the kids in my neighborhood in China, I mostly noted their prowess in dodging through gaps in traffic that I, as a Westerner, perceived as an impenetrable mass of cruel speeding metal.

A few weeks later, my street-crossing skills having developed to a point where I could actually notice anything else, I checked my watch when I saw the scores of students zipping across the busy street to our housing development. It was already 10 p.m., but these high schoolers looked like they were just then making it home.

Around that same time, I began to teach my first English lessons to Chinese children at a private training center. For me, the job was quite a switch from teaching businesspeople in Europe—there, I’d worked Monday to Friday during regular business hours. But now, I taught nights and weekends. This was perfect for me, as I now had the weekdays free to explore China. But, inversely, what did it mean for my students?

With interest, I noticed that even our kindergarten-level English lessons went on till 9 or 10 p.m.; our grade-school level classes on weekday evenings were attended by kids hauling literal suitcases full of homework; our middle-school kids wore their school uniforms even on weekends. These kids’ lives were ruled by school.

World newspapers have already reported it: China has taken top marks in theworld’s scorecard for math, science and reading. My students were, to read about it in the news, braniacs in the making, trouncing the competition at international levels and jam-packing their brains full of the all-holy knowledge that was bridging the gap from the Second World to the First.

But when, I wondered, did these kids get to be kids? School is an important part of growing up (I am a teacher after all), but, in the West we’re taught that we are the sum of our experiences, not the grand total of our knowledge.

When did the youth of China get to have fun? In my English class, it turned out, and precious few other times.

There’s a Chinese maxim, which all students learn. In Chinese it probably sounds like any other proverb, but in English, you can see the emphasis: “Study Study Hard, Day Day Up.”

Many of my students, and not only the richer ones (though, it must be said, because I was teaching at a private training center, which required a not-small payment of yuan in exchange for tutelage, most of my students were at least middle-class) opted to board at school after age 11 or 12, not because their schools were far away (one girl told me her middle school was just down the road from her parents’ home) but so there would be less distraction from the all-important homework.

Homework (that dreaded H-word) made up such a large part of my students’ lives that it was a rare class indeed when my students didn’t bring it up—even in modules where I wasn’t assigning any homework.

“What did you do yesterday?” I’d ask, in my on-going war for correct usage of the past tense. “Homework,” I’d hear mumbled from all corners of the room. “What are you going to do the day after tomorrow?” I’d ask, jazzing up the group for a lesson on future tenses. “Homework,” a student would cry, flinging her hands up in the air and then mock-slamming her forehead on the desk. The only time I could get away from homework when talking about their daily routines was when I’d ask, “What do you do in your spare time?” Then, the answer was positively depressing: “Sleep.”

Beth with an adult English class in China in 2007

The debate between which educational system is better—the Western or the Asian—I cannot answer. Test scores speak volumes for discipline and the value families place on education. However, as anyone who has read the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua knows, pushing kids to achieve-achieve-achieve can backfire as well. The scary statistics on student suicides also make an emphatic point against such high-stress education. But, I can offer some anecdotal evidence from my own years teaching.

My students in China found it easy—laughable, in fact—to memorize short vocabulary lists. Grammar rules were duly noted and could be recited (if not always followed). Games like “Hangman” or charades were played not on intuition or by inspiration but through a strategy (if it was a five-letter word, the students would often flip through the textbook, looking for words of the same length and not bothering to call out letters of the alphabet).

But, public speaking? The semester the foreign teachers decided all high-school level students had to sign up for, prepare and then deliver a two-minute presentation (on any topic—one girl talked about her shoes, another about a favorite Korean pop star), you’d have thought we’d asked them to break wild stallions. I had few students who were comfortable with addressing a group, even if they had time to prepare and rehearse—and, with no penalty for making errors, as we gave them marks just for doing it.

Group work was similarly difficult, even downright scary for them. My students shared with me that their public schools had zero emphasis on teamwork or on projects. While, sure, you can learn math, physics or English without doing a group project, there are few jobs in today’s world that don’t require some group participation.

A student practices writing an informal letter

Writing essays or mock letters—which is a standard requirement for many international English tests, for example the ones required of university students before they are allowed to study abroad—was a whole other quagmire of problems and misunderstandings. Several students attempted to memorize entire books of handy business letter phrases, then fit them together like a puzzle. In theory, that sounds good. In practice, I can tell you, it isn’t pretty.

So, those kids in Shanghai who knock the socks off their American counterparts with their blazing-hot test scores? Kudos to those kids, they’ve worked hard for their grades, and likely have sacrificed what we in the West nostalgically idolize as our “childhoods” for them. And, the rest of the world? Westerners are doing good with learning practical skills in their school experiences—can we learn some discipline too?

What do you think? Is there more to school than just tests?

Educating Rita-Joon

By Heidi Noroozy

Tehran can seem like a drab city with its gray buildings and ever-present smog. But anyone who thinks there’s little color to be seen has never visited the city during the school year. Iranian schools are gender-segregated up to the university level, and it’s a common site to see flocks of schoolgirls heading to class or home again in brightly colored uniforms, looking like exotic birds in their pink, purple, and sky blue tunics, with hoods (magna’eh) of a matching or contrasting color.

My husband and I have no kids, and our niece is only three, so my experience with schools in Iran is not extensive. I’ve helped young relatives with their English lessons, only to find that language instruction is heavy on theory and light on actual conversation. As a result, my attempts to get them to speak English with me is often met with utter silence accompanied by much blushing and staring at feet. Iranians who want to become fluent in English generally take private lessons.

I’ve also often encountered these “flocks” of schoolgirls at museums, when their teachers take them out for an educational field trip. Usually, they find me—with my blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale skin—far more interesting than boring old history. And yet I know they study very hard when no khanoum khorigee (foreign lady) is around to distract them. Education is hugely important in Persian families from all walks of life—and not only for the boys.

The Islamic Revolution ushered in a lot of changes in women’s status, most of them not very good. Under Iran’s Islamic laws, a wife can initiate a divorce only under 12 circumstances (things like drug addiction, physical abuse, and abandonment on the part of the husband). A woman has few legal rights to her children, and her testimony in a court of law is worth half that of a man’s. But where access to higher education is concerned, the balance is flipped—in the favor of women.

Depending on which figures you go by, between 52 and 65 percent of Iranian college students are female, and this number is as high as 70 percent in some fields, even traditionally male-dominated ones such as science and engineering. My husband’s family reflects this trend. His younger sister, who was nine years old at the time of the revolution, is now a highly trained physician with a specialty in eye surgery.

Sociologists explain this surge by the fact that deeply religious families have become more willing to send their daughters to college, while more men are skipping college altogether in favor of making money right away (and an academic degree is no guarantee of employment). I wonder if it’s also due to emigration. I have no figures to back this up, but culturally Persian women are often reluctant to leave their families and start life afresh in a new country. Still, two-thirds of the students who passed Iran’s stringent university entrance exam this year were female.

But not everyone is happy with this high percentage of women at universities, as attested by a story that broke last week. When classes resume later this month, 36 Iranian academic institutions will ban women from 77 courses of study, not all of them what you might expect. They include English literature and education as well as nuclear physics, archeology, and business management.

The University of Petroleum Technology will no longer admit any female students at all, claiming that the harsh conditions in the field are unsuitable for their “delicate natures,” although this explanation does beg the question: Why did they accept women in the first place and why ban them now?

The most common argument is an age-old one: empower women through education and watch first the family and then society as a whole collapse. Patriarchal communities around the world have come up with this one from time to time. The heart of the matter is this: Some conservative clerics in Iran feel that the country’s universities are breeding grounds for subversive activity and want to refocus attention on Islamic principles.

Call me an irrepressible optimist, but I don’t think this ban is going to take root. At least not the goal it intends to achieve. The social reform that began under President Mohammed Khatami hasn’t been crushed yet despite many setbacks. Which means that Iranian women are a permanent fixture in public life, and they will always find ways to participate and contribute their full talents.

So the next time I visit Iran and find myself surrounded by schoolgirls peppering me with questions about life in “Amrika,” I will still picture them in the roles they will choose later in life: university professors, industrial engineers, nuclear physicists, and members of parliament. It may be a long time yet before one of them is president, but they can't be relegated to home and hearth.

A Virtually Perfect Revolution

There’s a Bollywood megastar who’s famous for removing his shirt on the big screen to show off his well-sculpted torso. Today’s piece is not about him but about someone who shares his name – Salman Khan – and who could soon become a household name in his own right (so we hope) for his incredible, and very different kind of work on the small screen.

This “other” Salman Khan goes by Sal and was born in New Orleans to immigrant parents from Bangladesh and India. Sal grew up to be a brilliant student – not only was he valedictorian  of his high school, but he earned three Ivy League degrees (in mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard). He went on to become a hedge fund analyst in Silicon Valley until a few years ago, when he did a small favor for his cousin that led him to his true calling.

It started in 2004 when this young cousin, back in New Orleans, needed help with her math homework. Sal spent time tutoring her over the phone from California and used Yahoo Doodle notepad to give her a simple online visual of the math problems he was explaining. Soon other cousins wanted to join the discussion and learn from their helpful older cousin, this MIT graduate with a math degree. But teleconferencing up to six cousins per call got complicated, plus they wanted to bring their friends in on the free instruction, so Sal had to get more resourceful. He began recording his tutorials – using the same simple black backgrounds and colorful, chalk-like fonts – and overlaying them with his calm, gentle explanations. He then uploaded them to You Tube and watched as they received, say, six hits per lesson, then 14, and soon 20, and so on.

At a certain point, it became clear his cousins and their friends weren’t the only ones clicking on these links. Sal soon began receiving emails from students of all ages and, get this, from all over the world to thank him for helping them pass their math class or else making one of their least favorite subjects interesting. See where this is going?

Two years ago, Sal walked away from his lucrative hedge fund career to revolutionize education. As he told one reporter, with minimal effort on his part, he can provide free education to empower anyone, anywhere. Today, the Khan Academy channel at You Tube offers 2,300 free, online lessons in mainly math, chemistry, and economics, with plans to expand to history and biology next. These lessons have been viewed more than nine million times.

As a true testament to Sal’s vision, Bill Gates (who supports the academy through his foundation) says he uses the You Tube courses to teach his own kids. In 2010, Google gave the academy $2 million to create more courses and translate its library into 10 of the world’s most spoken languages. The same year, Sal made it on Fortune’s prestigious “40 Under 40” list. The academy is now working on programs to take free education to parts of the world, such as isolated parts of Asia and Africa, where it's least accessible.

In the meantime, the next time your child struggles with his or her homework, you know where to direct them – not only for, say, math guidance but to inspire them with this powerful testament to the difference one individual can make.