Cleverlands Read online

  You can see then that the Asians do still recognise that there are differences in innate ability between people; they just don’t see it as being as important, because they don’t think it contributes to performance as much as effort does. The title of this section, ‘A clumsy bird that flies first will get to the forest earlier’ is a traditional Chinese proverb, meaning that even someone that is naturally clumsy or stupid can perform better than others, if they try hard enough.

  Those who are familiar with the work of psychologist Carol Dweck might recognise the parallels between East Asian educational culture and what Dweck calls ‘growth mindset’. Growth mindset describes the beliefs that people have when they think that intellectual abilities can be cultivated and developed through application and instruction, and it can be contrasted with a fixed mindset, which describes the belief that intellectual abilities are basically fixed – that people have different levels of ability and little can change that. Which mindset children have has huge implications for how they behave when faced with challenge.

  Dweck has found that those who believe that intelligence is fixed are therefore motivated to avoid challenging tasks, lest it show that they are not intelligent – something that they don’t believe they can do much about. On the other hand, those with a growth mindset are motivated to seek out challenge, as they believe that their intelligence can grow through taking on challenges and working hard at them.146 Remember the differing responses of the Japanese and Canadian students to ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in Heine’s study? They mirror the behaviours one would expect from those with a growth and a fixed mindset almost exactly.

  People with different mindsets are also prone to think about effort and practice differently. If you think that intelligence is something you have a certain amount of, and that’s that, you will want to appear naturally smart, which means that you won’t want people to see that you have to put in effort to achieve something. This is an attitude I’m familiar with, having grown up in England and been a teacher there. On the other hand, if you think that intelligence can grow, there is no shame in being known to make an effort, as you perceive this as making you smarter, not as evidence of your stupidity. Pualiengco and Chiu investigated these attitudes in European American and Asian American students by giving them a challenging task to do, and a practice task beforehand.147 After the practice, they were given two opportunities to publically report to their peers on how much effort they’d put into the practice; only the European Americans played down the amount of effort they’d made on the practice task, which the authors suggest was to protect their self-image should they then do badly.

  Dweck has developed scales to measure these mindsets, and within her American samples finds that about 40 per cent of students have a fixed mindset, about 40 per cent have a growth mindset and 20 per cent are somewhere in between the two.148 This raises an important point about all the cross-cultural research hitherto described; while there are marked differences between students of different cultures, these mask the differences within cultures. Not all Westerners believe that intelligence is fixed. Not all Chinese believe that intelligence is malleable, but far more of them do, and this is likely due to the culture they’ve been brought up in.

  Confucian Learning Culture

  I met Nancy in a Parisian-themed coffee shop in the basement of a Shanghai shopping complex. Like many Chinese people I met, she insisted on paying for my coffee, even though she was the one helping me out by talking to me about her education. Nancy is a university student with a cheeky grin and a love of the English language, who lived in a different part of China until her parents moved to Shanghai, bringing her and her little brother with them. We were chatting about essays, as you do, and she described how a common type of essay they’d write at school would be a personal motivational pitch, about how they had big goals, and would work really hard to achieve them. They’d often draw on famous role models to illustrate their drive to succeed – like Kuang Heng, a scholar from the Han dynasty.

  Kuang Heng was from a poor family, so couldn’t afford lamp oil to aid his study at night. He felt this was a waste of good study time, so he bored a small hole in the wall of his house, letting through the light from his richer neighbours. By this light he studied through the night, and became an outstanding scholar. Nancy told me another favourite of hers was Li Bai, a renowned poet whose poems include Waking from Drunkenness on a Spring Day who read extensively as a young boy, and was able to compose poetry by the time he was 10. Chinese children are brought up on these stories and others like them, which encourage the virtue of working hard.

  The origins of this idea come from Confucius, an ancient and highly-influential philosopher who lived in the sixth century BC. According to Confucius, the path to virtue included self-improvement through knowledge. Learning is a goal to be achieved through personal striving to perfect oneself. So working hard and persisting through challenging times are important not only because of what one can gain through doing this, but are a fundamental part of being a moral or virtuous individual.

  This came up quite accidentally in a conversation I had with Rony, an extraordinarily insightful young man who was educated in China but now runs a tutoring business in Canada. We were in a noisy café talking about moral education, and how approaches to it differed in different countries, when I asked Rony, ‘What does it mean to be moral, to be a good kid, in China?’ His reply surprised me: ‘Self-discipline, hard-working, smart for sure. Then you’re the model student.’

  At the time this left me confused, as this is not what I understood by the term ‘moral’ at all; I thought of morality as being mainly about how you treated others. But I then came to realise that the Chinese have a different, broader way of conceptualising morality. According to Jin Li, the Confucian intellectual tradition holds that ‘Learning enables one to become a better, not just smarter, person. The ultimate purpose of learning is to self-perfect and to contribute to others at the same time.’149

  It would be a bit unfair if self-perfection was the goal of morality, but only some were able to achieve it due to their innate learning ability. But another notion about learning held in the Confucian tradition is that ‘Learning does not privilege anyone, and neither does it discriminate against anyone. Everyone is capable of seeking and achieving knowledge regardless of one’s inborn capacity and social circumstances.’150 It seems likely that growing up in a Confucian culture contributes to Chinese children’s growth mindset.

  Parents and Teachers

  How does this reach them though? We’ve heard already that children are told stories about famous scholars who work hard, and that greetings cards in China focus on the journey and the process of working hard rather than the pride of achievement once you reach your goals. Two more immediate sources of the messages about the roles of intelligence and effort come from the adults that children spend the most time with: their teachers and parents.

  There were two occasions on which the Chinese teachers I was speaking with became visibly awkward when they began telling me about their impressions of English and American education systems, as their impressions were not universally positive. Wendy, a maths teacher, had been to England to teach maths for a few weeks as part of a UK government programme to learn from the Shanghainese, and Lina had spent a year teaching in the United States. I asked them what they thought about these foreign systems, and after commenting on how the teachers made a great effort to make the lessons engaging, and how they’d enjoyed this, they appeared a little uncomfortable and both made similar comments. ‘One thing I found strange though, is that the teachers in England gave students different levels of work. Some students only did very easy maths. How can they keep up if they don’t do the same standard?’ This reminds me of a comment made by Bart Simpson in one of his more astute moments. ‘Let me get this straight. We're behind the rest of our class and we're going to catch up to them by going slower than they are? Coo coo!’

  In China, all of the lesso
ns I saw had all the students attempting the same work. Though some raced ahead, no one was given an easier worksheet, or told to work on a separate task with a teaching assistant. Of course some found it trickier, and the teachers would help these children during and after the lesson, but they were still attempting to help them reach the same level as the rest of the class. They were given challenges rather than concessions, and were expected and supported to rise to them, promoting the idea that all can achieve if they put in enough effort.

  Praise is used differently by teachers too. Jin Li writes about this from her own experience: ‘In all my school years, when we had a quiz or exam in class, the teacher frequently asked the most hard-working student, not the highest-achieving one, to stand up to receive applause from peers for his or her great learning virtue.’151 This praise for effort rather than achievement is one of the most effective methods of promoting a growth mindset in children, according to the marvellous Carol Dweck.152 Like many ideas in this book, this doesn’t mean I’d advocate a sudden switch to these approaches in British schools. For a class in which some children have fallen further and further behind each year, and others are recent learners of the English language, giving the same tasks to all children would be inappropriate. And if children have already spent years in a system which promotes a fixed mindset, getting a hard-working student to stand up for applause might well embarrass him or her as, in such a system, having to work hard is a sign of a lack of natural ability. These approaches need to be taken right from the beginning.

  That is what is happening in China through the messages they get from their parents. Chinese parents tend to play down their children’s successes, because they see it as their role to promote effort in their children, and fear that emphasising their achievements might lead to a lack of motivation to learn. For similar reasons they are more prone to highlight their children’s failures, but this isn’t always as harsh as it sounds to the Western ear. When British or North American parents point out a child’s failures, if they ever do, it is seen as particularly crushing or damaging to a child’s self-esteem, because they tend to believe that traits are fixed, and so whatever caused the child to fail will remain with them permanently, making them a failure. So we tend to praise children’s positive traits – ‘Aren’t you clever!’ – rather than acknowledging their weaknesses. Rony tickled me with a deliberate exaggeration of this from his experiences tutoring maths in Canada. ‘When an Asian student does a maths problem wrong, he is told that it is wrong. When a North American does it wrong, he is told he is creative.’

  When parents from Eastern cultures point out a child’s failings or mistakes, its whole purpose is to allow the child to grow and improve. Ng and colleagues asked children themselves about how their parents responded to their successes and failures at school. They found the Chinese children didn’t report their parents as being more negative, but did report that they got involved after failure – supporting them to learn from those mistakes, and being more involved in their children’s education than American parents were.153 They don’t lack warmth,154 but they are not as concerned about boosting their children’s self-esteem through unearned praise.

  Sometimes, when I’m talking to people about my work, they ask, ‘How can you learn anything from China when the culture is so different?’ Most of the time I reply that there are some practices that are culturally dependent and others that are more transferable, but here I want to make the case that there are things we can learn from the culture itself. Parents of young children and primary-school teachers could help children by teaching them the importance of learning virtues – hard work, perseverance, resilience – along with more traditional virtues such as kindness and honesty. They could avoid praising children for being smart or clever (hard to do, I know), and instead focus on their efforts and strategies. And they could be less afraid to point out children’s current weaknesses, so long as it was in a supportive context and combined with advice on how they might go about improving themselves.

  Chapter 12: Chinese Legends, Guanxi and Migrant Workers

  Thousands of troops on a single log bridge.

  (Chinese proverb)

  Not only did Angela have three to four hours’ homework a night; she also spent most of her weekend attending extra lessons in Chinese, English, maths, opera singing and basketball. She had very little time to herself. Of course I’d heard the stories about tiger mothers – Chinese parents who force their children to take all sorts of extra classes and make them practise these activities in the extreme – but Angela’s weekly schedule still surprised me because Jenny was the complete opposite of how I expected a tiger mother to be. In my mind, tiger mothers are overly strict, unsympathetic to their children’s hardship, wear stilettos and threaten to burn their children’s cuddly toys. Jenny wore pumps and Alice bands, told Angela what a good girl she was and didn’t want her to go to university abroad because ‘I would miss my baby’. On the way home from school one day, she stopped at the entrance to the compound to retrieve something from the post box – two Taylor Swift T-shirts as a surprise gift for Angela. She was clearly not a tiger mother. Why didn’t Angela have any time off then? Jenny explained this to me as she was preparing the dinner: ‘Everyone is going to these classes. If Angela didn’t go too, she would feel anxious because she would fall behind her classmates.’ She shut the fridge door. ‘But this isn’t the only reason – it is also so that she can get into a good high school, so that she has a better chance of doing well in the gaokao and getting into a good university.’ She shook her head. ‘There is so much pressure though, the students in Shanghai are very, very poor (by which she meant ‘‘unfortunate’’).’

  Thousands of Troops on a Single Log Bridge

  The gaokao is the exam that Chinese students take at age 18 to get into university. It is a series of papers that together take nine hours over two days, and test the students’ knowledge of Mandarin, English, maths and either sciences or arts. To say that this exam is a big deal would be an understatement. Apart from those students that manage to gain entry to university based on ‘exceptional talent’ (the ultimate goal of extracurricular classes), your gaokao score is the only thing that determines whether you get into university, which one you get into, and which subject you can study. The university you get into determines the kind of job you will be offered on graduating, and hence the salary you command and the kind of lifestyle you can have.

  It even indirectly affects your marriage chances. I stumbled across a marriage market in the People’s Park in Shanghai, known in Mandarin as the ‘People’s Park blind-date corner’. Parents lined the sides of each path with information about their offspring – their age, job, income, education and Chinese Zodiac sign – looking to arrange introductions for their grown-up children. If you do poorly in your gaokao, your chances of finding a marriage partner are severely reduced. Due to these high stakes, attempts at cheating are common; in Henan province last year, officials were driven to flying drones above the students in the gaokao examination hall to check for radio signals from smartphones, and every year some students attempt to pay professional test-takers to sit these exams for them.

  More than nine million students sit this exam every year, and though it has long been seen as the only route to success, fewer than seven million make it to university, and only a few thousand qualify for the most coveted places at the most prestigious universities; hence the gaokao being oft described as ‘thousands of troops on a single log bridge’. The gaokao itself has only been around since 1952, but is part of a Chinese tradition of high-stakes exams promising a leap to fame and fortune that goes back thousands of years – since the civil service examinations became a major path to office during the mid-Tang dynasty. The scholarly heroes that Nancy learnt about at school were drilling holes in walls and studying the classics in order to take this life-changing exam. The Confucian focus on effortful learning exists in a culture where exams have been of the greatest importance for over a tho
usand years, and where they remain so; it is no wonder Chinese students are under a lot of pressure to study hard.

  This pressure comes from their parents, who typically set extremely high standards for their children’s school performance, sometimes manifesting as dissatisfaction with whatever their current performance might be.155 It can also come from their grandparents, who often play a significant role in Chinese children’s lives, looking after them while their parents are at work. While this is, in many ways, a positive thing, it can add to the already intense pressure on the children to do well at school; particularly as China’s one-child policy means that four grandparents’ and two parents’ hopes can all be pinned on just one child. While I can’t imagine what this pressure must be like, having been brought up as one of five by relatively laid-back parents, I was saddened by a poem I saw stuck up on the wall of an English reading and writing club that I visited. It was written by a 10-year-old girl, and was titled ‘Exams’.

  All exams are significant,

  And I am going to FAINT!

  For my poor mid-term scores

  Which drive grandma dizzy

  And make my grandpa crazy.

  My world is not fantasy,

  And my mind is in vacancy.

  My teachers are getting chilly,

  And thinking if I am silly.

  My classmate is not a bully

  Just making unfriendly raillery.

  I am so afraid of the terrible shouting

  And endless moaning.

  How I wish I have nubility,

  To improve my ability.

  From now on I get to know

  That life isn’t interesting

  And I must be hard-working.

  We Have No Choice

  Despite the impressive academic achievements of students in Shanghai being supported by the intense competition for a few top university places, none of the parents I met wanted this pressure for their children. In fact, I had an email from Jenny, Angela’s mum, while I was writing this chapter, and her second paragraph read, ‘It is very cold in southern China this winter. Today is the coldest day in Shanghai in 30 years. Luckily, we are in the winter holidays, but Angela had to attend an extra maths class. Chinese students are very, very poor [unfortunate]. We have not the power to change it.’