Tiger Mothers and the Dictatorship of Talent

[This is the final version published today on Hechinger Report's Lessons from Abroad. ]

Chinese mothers living in America are often torn over whether to send their children to schools that drill them in hopes of producing good test-takers, or to embrace a less rigid education. It’s a conflict that pits the cultural values shaped by the two-millennia-old Chinese exam system against the view that ultimately creativity leads to success.

The debate is evident in online forums for Chinese mothers, as they discuss the pros and cons of the so-called “tiger mother” approach to raising children: snuffing out a child’s desire for a normal social life—no sleepovers, play dates, school plays or sports, and certainly no computer games or TV—and an expectation of straight A+s on all tests. Recently, one of the leading forums, spurred on by a New York Times article, featured a debate about whether the Waldorf approach to education can produce “real tigers in the future.”

Waldorf schools, according to the description in The Times, emphasize teaching students through activities like knitting socks and slicing food while minimizing the use of computer devices and technology-assisted learning in their classrooms. This unique pedagogy is “focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.” One parent, employed by a high-tech start-up, echoes this philosophy when explaining to The Times why he sent his three children to a Waldorf school: “Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers.”

It is the key word “engagement” that interests me more than the debate over the plusses and minuses of educational technology. Because of an absence of engagement, China—the world’s largest educational system—faces great difficulties in fostering innovation. The United States will likely retain its strength as the world’s leader in innovation thanks to a system that builds upon this notion.

Last fall and spring, I gave an overview of China’s education system to a broad audience at the China Scope Conference at MIT and Columbia, focusing on China’s long history of using nothing but exam results to select bureaucrats and determine the size of cohorts—which resulted in tremendous competition for social mobility. Schooling became essentially a competition among families rather than individual students. All of this still holds true today. Chinese students—who are often treated like assembly-line products in schools that only teach to the test—graduate from college only to find themselves unemployed.

David Brooks of The New York Times wrote in 2007 that such problems were the result of a “dictatorship of talent.” Brooks made his observations during a trip to Shanghai, which last December attained the highest PISA scores in the world.

Brooks borrowed the concept of “meritocratic paternalism”—elites ruling a society can make the best decisions for their people, like fathers have traditionally done within families—from one of his Chinese friends who argued for and defended the advantages of the Chinese way, using examples of the country’s economic success over the last 30 years. Ironically, it is the same economic development that makes American education accessible and affordable for many Chinese families, who send their children to study in the United States to nurture the “merits” in them. Yet increasingly, the students returning to China take government jobs and become part of the Chinese elite rather than striking out as entrepreneurs. Their career paths might be a clear sign of how little U.S. education altered the deeply rooted Chinese philosophy in such students.

It is neither rare nor regrettable that many leading scholars who achieved great distinction in their fields have returned to China and become governmental officials. Internationally renowned mechanical engineer Dr. Wan Gang and economist Dr. Yi Gang—who now head China’s Ministry of Science and Technology and Bureau of Foreign Reserves, respectively—and many others have exhibited impressive leadership. However, more and more parents prefer to see their children earn $300 per month in bureaucratic government jobs (after they obtain degrees abroad) simply because of the stability—and likelihood of under-the-table benefits—that such positions afford.

We might all agree logically that it is next “to impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are.” Maybe a truly game-changing reform is to replace the “dictatorship of talent” with a “democracy of talent,” the center of which would emphasize engagement and peer interactions rather than obedience of fatherly know-it-all teachers. Efforts in this direction have been made by educators and policymakers in China since 1998, but students and parents have largely resisted the engagement, children-centered campaign. Instead, students and parents have doubled-down on the exam-centered approach. Chinese education companies such as the New Oriental Group, Ambow and Xue-Er have made huge revenues in the test-prep business driven students and parents desirous of higher scores.

The offspring of “tiger mothers” in China are not going to take over the world as some American parents have worried. American schools and parents have the upper hand. People in Silicon Valley have been truly driving innovation and the world’s economic growth. As long as we all pay attention to what they believe about education, the momentum—the continuous wave of creative ideas—will be sustained by the children who are in schools that foster their creativity. After all, the Valley’s success has grown out of a democracy of talent, so let us hope American schools—whether Waldorf or not—can keep students engaged in learning and critical thinking to maintain the seeds of success in tomorrow’s global competition.

Democracy of Talent?

The discussion or rather self-reflections about the "tiger mothers" and "paper tiger kids" phenomena has never faded away from the headlines of Chinese expat forums. Recently, a hot debate on one the leading forums is whether the "Waldorf Approach" to education can make sure to produce "real tigers" in the future.

If you google "Waldorf education", you will notice a most-emailed-article on NYTimes this month. It is about one of Waldorf Schools, which is located in Silicon Valley, that emphasizes on teaching students knitting socks and fractioning cakes while minimizing the trace of computer devices and technology-assisted learning in their classrooms. This unique pedagogy is to "focus on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans." A Microsoft engineer-parent echoes with this philosophy when explaining why he sent his three children to Waldorf, "Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers (computers are distractions)".

This article aroused wide disagreements among readers, which you can glance in the comment section. However, it is the core word, "engagement", that interests me more than the debates over the effects and potential harms of educational technology. Because the negligence of such a component is leading the world's largest educational system, China, to face great difficulties in fostering innovation; while the US will retain its strength as the world's innovation leader thanks to the system that builds upon this notion.

Last fall and this spring, I gave an overview about China's education system to a broad audience at the China Scope Conference at MIT and Columbia. While there were many issues to cover, in the talks, I focused on China's thousand-years-old exam history to select bureaucrats, the size of cohorts and thus tremendous competition for upward mobility, and essentially a competition for life among families other than individual students, which all hold true till today. And those issues, by the end of day when a Chinese student graduates from college, unfortunately means unemployment and un-employability of the "assembly-line products" through schools teaching for tests.

Op-ed columnist David Brooks carefully coined those problems as "The Dictatorship of Talent". Although his observation was done in 2007 during a trip to Shanghai, the city which topped PISA's test earlier this year, my presentations indeed walked through the same issues as those mentioned in his article.

One of the issues that tearing the Chinese expat mothers living in America apart is whether to send their kids to a school that drills students heavily to prepare them as good test-takers, or to embrace a Waldorf-like schooling. And this mental conflict rises between the cultural genes shaped in the 2000-years-old Chinese exam system, and to the view that creativity will lead to ultimate success in information area.

Brooks borrowed the concept "meritocratic paternalism" from one of his Chinese friends who argued for and defended the advantages of Chinese way, using many evidences of economic success of the country in recent thirty years. It is the same economic development that turns American education accessible and affordable for many Chinese families, who send their children to study here to nurture "merits" in them; at the same time, the increasing wave of students returning to China and becoming part of the "paternalism elites" of Chinese society might be a clear indication of how little the American education shifted the deep-rooted Chinese philosophy in those students.

So all of us might agree logically that it is close to impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are. Maybe a truly game-change reform is to replace the "dictatorship of talent" with a "democracy of talent", the center to which is the emphasizing of "engagement and peer interaction", not "obeying to a father-like, know-all teacher". Efforts have been made by educators and policy makers in China on this direction since 1998, but it was the students and parents that were resisting the "engagement, children-centered" campaign. Instead, students even worked harder ever since then with exam-centered approach.

In other worlds, kids of "tiger mothers" in China are not going to take over the world as American parents worried. The card of the game is at the hand of American schools and parents. People in Silicon Valley have been truly driving the innovation and growth of our world, so as long as we all pay attention to what they believe about education, the momentum, the continues spell of creative ideas coming up from the Valley will be carried on by the kids who are in schools that preserve their creativity. After all, the Valley's success has grown out of democracy of talent, so let us hope American schools, whether Waldorf ones or public ones, can keep students engaged in learning and critical thinking.

Where is the next Steve Jobs?

The whole world is mourning the passing-away of the great visionary of our times. While Apple's stockholders wondering about the company's future, people are trying to measure the impact of the loss of Jobs from different perspectives (many articles on this topic on major media).

Joy Chen, former vice mayor of Los Angles, who is now a head-hunter and has been maintaining a good blog site to teach young people about how to cultivate the best out of themselves and prepare them for global competition. Ms. Chen's new blog raised a good call with such a title, "Now Your Turn, Create Something", to guide the younger generation to see how we can learn from the achievement of Steve Jobs.

Although she mentioned that "creativity is any act of creating something new", which I strongly agree, I think we could never underestimate the harms of a rigid, exam-oriented education system could do to our children, current students and future builders of the world.

Prof. Wadhwa just did his testimony at Capital Hill on how to stop the brain drain that US is facing potentially. The war for not only "the next Steve Jobs" but the next patches of minds that can foster the emergence of great ideas like PC, iPad, etc. is now. Hopefully we can see some interesting government responses from China/India about the new labor and immigration related bills here in the US, which might show us some hints about the future map of global distribution of "intelligence treasures" like Steve-Jobs-es.

Posts to come...

Recently, from a book talk at B&N's on "The Submission" by NYTimes regional director, to the speech of the designer, Michael Arad, of the World Trade Center's memorial site at Columbia's Avery Hall, till today's Cafe Social Science series at the PicNic by Prof. Peter Bearman on documentary collective memories about 9-11 with oral history method, and many other events, I have had several thoughts that I would like to share here from my own perspective as we co-lived through this period of history. Will write on:

- The day of 9-11, very last day of the military camp for freshmen of my college and very first day of our college life.

- Reactions of my fellow students in China on that day, and now after 10 years, their changes.

- How the event reshaped many values about life, belief, peace, rights, tolerance, globalization, etc. of the younger generation of China.

- Some impacts noticeably different of 9-11 on my generation in China and my peers in the US and what it means for our world today.

A little piled up with my research projects but I have had so many thoughts lining up in my mind to be written, stay tuned.

Imagination Beyond Tumbling Markets

Stock markets globally had experienced the most volatile week recently since 2008. You can almost smell the fear on the real street: the fear from a blurred vision about the world's future, and biased frustration from the weak economic indicators.

Sometimes, we need a little reaffirmed confidence about our species' boundless imagination: the eternal ignite for growth.

Like this one--- HBR's frequent contributor, life science philosopher & entrepreneur, Juan Enriquez, in his talk at TED on Genomics and the great scientific economic, public-health, cultural potentials there if our societies master the new language about life and if we accumulate more knowledge about the coding embedded in genomes.



Another really good episode I found on TED today was a speech by Jay Walker, the "Edison in the new era" and founder of priceline.com and a series of great ventures. His introduction on the wonderful personal collection in his "Library of Human Imagination" definitely is not a placebo but a vivid and powerful evidence of the ability of human capacity for continuous advancement, as long as we keep embracing what he believes: there is infinite power in our brain.

Hands Off Please, Mr. Minister

After following @USEdGov for a while, I noticed that Mr. Duncan and his colleagues travel a lot, as much as their counterparts in China, I would say. You can check here to see all the visits of federal edu administrators national trips and their agenda.

Now let us do a little mind work, imagine the settings below for a new trip Mr. Duncan has to do:

1. The US Ed Min decided to do a national evaluation of all higher ed institutions' qualities (on teaching, researching, internal management, services, etc.). All institutions, private or public, 2 year or 4 year, on/offline, all mandated to participate in this campaign and the funding and federal aid their students can get depends on their final rankings.

2. Given the funding incentive above, all institutions are "forced" to respond to this upcoming check.

3. A committee is formed at the federal level with "experts" on educational assessment, they will be traveling around and check out each institute's status.

Now, assume there is a university X, they have 3 different dining halls on campus, all outsourced to professional catering services, all priced their average meal at $5. This is what is gonna happen when a ranking-related "national check" is coming:

1. Someone heard that the baseline score on "services to students/ dining" is $3/meal available on campus, the more expensive the meal, the less score you get.

2. After learning about the above "insider information" about the benchmark for ranking, University X decided to end the contract with one of the three catering companies, so that they take one dining hall back for the university to run on their own. They hired staff, purchased equipment, assigned accounting/cleaning/security services. --> all action is to CREATE a "$3/meal" dining hall available on campus.

3. But the $3/meal dining hall's capacity is limited, it can't host every student. So the university assigned that only Class 2008 and 2009 with their ID could dine there, other students have to go to the other two $5/meal dining places.

4. As every student might respond, they will sneak into the cheap dining hall with borrowing a friend's ID, or "bribe" the security guy "Sam" who checks IDs. As long as Sam accepts bribes less than $2, students will be motivated to do so.
--> After a month, this dining hall is over-crowded.

5. So the university decided to add one more security guy to work with Sam together, to double check each other's performances. Gradually, they became friends, and students bribe them together.... Then, the 3rd, the 4th, 5th..... security personnels.

6. Eventually, this dining hall is providing meals with a very bad quality that is less than $3 value, and the university is paying a very high operational cost on it, and no student is happy with it about its restrictions on fair access, its quality, etc.


Now, imagine that all academics respond in the same way. Faculty members abandoned their own syllabus, but have to teach according to a "national curriculum" accurately, even about which questions to ask in a mid-term...

No academic freedom.
No innovation.
No ideas' exchanges.
All started from a bad decision the Ed Min made at the Federal Gov, which they believe comes from a good intention that to make sure of the quality of education nationwide.

Luckily, all the above stories are hypothetical, Mr. Duncan and his team works with one of the most decentralized school system in the world and they are not able, constitutionally, to carry out such "mandatory evaluations" and link its results with federal funding to institutions that "obey" the federal curriculum.

But unfortunately, all the above story happened in China. The more national money available to the ed min, the more frequent such policies are carried out. I borrowed the story on Price Regulations and Its Consequences from here, to discuss how disastrous a bad government policy on education could be.

China's College Entrance Exam--A Good Business?

So the final scores of the college entrance exam in China is out. Assisted with computerized scoring system, many college junior and senior students, as well as graduate students, helped with tens of thousands of teachers nationwide on evaluating the tests in different subjects.

9.63 million exam takers, means 9.33 million students* 4 subjects (Chinese, English, Math, Sciences/ Humanities) per student * 20 min on evaluating each exam book = 12.32 Million working hours needed to grade the tests.

12.32 million hours, if teachers and test grader assistants are paid on average $3 per hour, the total cost of just on graders, is $37 million.

As far as I know from my family relatives and friends' personal experiences of helping with the grading, the pay is most of the time on the range of 30RMB to 50 RMB per hour, which equals to $4.62 to $7.7, with really sweet subsidies on hotel accommodations, food, snacks, etc.

That is just the manpower part. The cost of forces focused on security for the grading process is another big expense item. During the grading, all test graders, whether you are a high school teacher or part-time assistant, everyone is "quarantined" in buildings that serves as both working zone and accommodation zone. Existing and reentering will be like passing the security of CIA building (my assumptions from these spy movies!), several rounds of checks to be done and paper work to sign.

Let us give a "facility overhead multiplier" of 0.15 to the man power part, which will make the total cost of grading the CEE so far reaching $37/3*5 * 1.15 = $71 million.

I searched and found that on average the fees paid by exam takers per person is roughly 130RMB, or, $20. So the total fees collected from students are $ 186.6 million.

I know that making student final test score/results available online and via telephone system also costs a lot, but whether it can justify the $110million surplus?

It seems that running a test business is really a sweet business, no doubt ETS, College Board, IB, etc. are all spending so extravagantly on advertising. Don't know who will be the first ice-breaking dealer and get a share from the National Edu Board ministered CEE in China?

The Next Step of the 9.33 Million Fighters

The Hechinger Report followed up with me after the China Scope NYC Conference in March 2011, and they produced a chart of better quality than my own ppt illustrations to demonstrate the hours Chinese students spend on studying by stages of a student when s/he is climbing up along the school system.

And then the big days came for the 9.33 million fighters on Jun 7th to 9th: Gao Kao-- the college entrance exam. This year, according to the Chinese Education Ministry's University Recruiting Plan, 72% of the exam takes, or, 6.72 million freshmen students will enroll to college in September. Would the exam-kungfu-warriors be expecting that a lot of them will spend a significant amount of their precious college years "meditating" in classrooms like this?



Especially when the graduates from college this year hits a historical peak 7.58 million, with a 89% employment rate after 6 months of searching , I hope the class of 2011 will not have to fight again as how they did through their K-12 years when they will go to the labor market in 2015. After all, a scene like the one below is not encouraging to anyone who believes that "education makes a difference" when they know the crowds are fighting for jobs which pays less than $300/month.

Educational Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship

Good findings on a newly published HBR article on educational innovations.

Educational Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship

Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude over Aptitude)

I definitely wanted to talk a lot more about the tips given by this TechCrunch article from my personal experiences of running my own company in the past 4 years. I agree with his hiring rules on "A Players", "motivators", and the kind of people who shares and enhances the company culture. Would touch on this topic when I can.

Is History Revisiting?

You can hear shouts, beeping into your eardrum, "freedom, jobs, hope, etc.", these luminous words, breaking the silence of the blinding glare of the African continent under the sun, trenching the banks of the Nile.

They said, "Tian'anmen Square is coming back to Tahrir Square"; no, no bullets please, no massacre please, people in the other parts of the world pray while the protesters forged ahead, piercing into the immense tense of the curfew.

I wasn't there in Beijing in 1989, nor at Cairo in the early spring of 2011. But I can still recall the scary snapshots from the news, in the suffocating summer of 1989, when my dad picked me up from school and riding by the square of my hometown, a 2nd tier city in north China, I remembered the faces of the starve-striking young college students. I also remembered my parents trying to cover my eyes when the 7pm CCTV Daily News was broadcasting the aftermath of a conflict in Beijing (among who?) in that June and a young solder, lying next to the body of another young man, both dead, with the solder's belly cut open and his intestines hanging out of his body, smoked, with flies roaring above...

I linked an emotional disgust to any kind of violence since then. I know that the progress of history needs blood sacrifice sometimes. But what if history does not swirls up, but revisits again and again?

There are many ways to interpret the motivations, institutional reasons and historical perspectives of the protests going on in the Middle East now. Although I am personally very interested to know the relationship of the level of social capital and human capital of one nation to its people's requests for more rights and democracy, but for now, I only hope that NO VIOLENCE toward people will happen, ever.

Hello 2011!

Another 7 months faded since I published my last blog article on this site and 2011 is here. In the last 7 months, I was not totally washed into my own research, I do have lots of thoughts to share but somehow producing research papers in English made blog writing in Chinese more attractive so I did write for my Chinese site, which is more about life and cultural experiences than here.

Anyways, I am not finding an excuse for abandoning here. Instead, I felt the calls from inside my mind about doing a better job in cultivating my little garden here diligently and deliberately. I have been consuming too much good knowledge products in English and I feel so obligated to return some outputs of my own. Time for resuming my responsibilities.

As a natural "bridge" linking my productivity in Chinese writing and English writing, it might be appropriate to cite a recent Chinese article of mine here. It contains lots of recent thoughts about the hot debates ignited by the Battle Hymns of the Tiger Mother, China's topping the PISA test and President Obama's call for actions from the American people to win the future for the nation.

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看《虎妈的战歌》，追着看了更有意思的美国人民的各式评论和生活在这边的华人父母的回应，一下子就凌晨1点多了。接着，顺手点开了一些和中国教育相关的英语博文，人们会谈到上个月上海被抽出来的学生代表中国的“平均水平”在OECD的PISA考试中拿到了三项世界第一，谈到新的“Sputnik Competition”和美国的危机，谈到最近的胡奥会和百亿百亿的订单。Bloomberg Business上，有一位美籍印度裔的专栏作家，曾经的start-up企业家、现在的UCBerkeley研究员、哈佛客座教授Vivek Wadhwa看问题比较准，他说，US Schools are Still Ahead–Way Ahead. 相信大批送子留洋用脚投票的家长们不会不同意Wadhwa的观点。一个例证是，上周四参加一个China Institute的一个早餐论坛，讲中国教育市场对美国投资者的机遇；一位前硅谷创投人士、在北京继续创业成功的深蕴中国教育体系的美国人Tom Melcher激动而又坚定地描述大洋那边的那个巨大的国际教育市场，他说，每年在美国留学的国际学生（其中将近30%来自中国，2010年）为美国带来的整体收益是20 Billion，200亿美元，这是什么概念呢？这是波音历史上对华最大单、胡主席送给奥总统的超级大礼的最重要的一项，200架飞机的价值，可能要5年才能交付完毕。

上文提到的Vivek和Tom两个人的背景都是让我眼前一亮的那种。Vivek的主页上，他的研究领域的关键字：

Entrepreneurship
Global engineering education
Immigration and the reverse brain drain
Workforce development
Globalization of research and development/innovation/outsourcing
而Tom, 先是花了数十年在McKinsey学功夫，然后一口气在硅谷创业成功5家公司，为了让孩子学好中文，举家搬迁到北京，先用2年的工夫创业搞了四个网站一家公司打包卖给了一家纽交所的上市公司；之后一直盯紧了中国的人才政策和教育市场，不仅出了一本大中国大卖的关于留学美国的畅销书，投了几家不错的公司，现在全力以赴在做Zinch中国一个新兴的帮学生申请学校的社交网络“媒体”。

我眼前一亮，是因为，这些内容庞杂在很多人看来没有关联但是一直吸引着我的兴趣的乱七八糟的关键词、被这些勤奋的人在亲身实践，我就可以“踩在他们的肩膀上”吸取他们的经验和智慧来更好的理解这个市场和human capital accumulation & creativity的主题。

×××××××××××××××这里要打岔和插播广告×××××××××××××××××

国内一个很著名的海归科普记者兼作家“土摩托”老师，他的博客，一方面是绝对的科学理性派，同时，他总会在博文的结尾介绍一篇他喜欢的音乐。我听歌不多，对各式的流行音乐的兴趣和修养也不够；但是，我喜欢古典，喜欢爵士，喜欢BBC、PBS，喜欢各种内容丰富体现“科学哲学素养”的记录篇，这几年看了很多，所以，打算在我的中文博客里每篇的末尾，介绍那些宝贵的知识产品。

另：提到中文博客，是因为我的确曾经认真、而且继续认真地要经营好我的英文博客。当我在云端之上长长的旅行途中、阳光温暖的下午或者是心情静好的夜晚，在大量阅读的喜悦或者怅然或者沉重之后，总有一个声音在提醒自己—尽管我心里没有一个具象的神驻扎，但是，写作是我的救赎和感恩的方式，它帮我明智。我一个非常饭仪式感的人，应该做好每日的作业，write。

又：我真的认为，写作是一件私事，所以，各位看官不要有评论或者回复的压力。自我对话本身的快感和日后有意或者无意再次翻阅自己的话的乐趣，就是我在happy地敲字的意义。

×××××××××××××× 今天的第一篇Documentary××××××××××××

Geldof in Africa。

“The first thing you notice, is the light.

L ight everywhere.

Brightness everywhere.

This is not a dark continent Europe used to call, at all…

This luminens continent, drenched by sun, pounded by heat, shimmering its blinding glare…”

歌手、诗人、社会活动家Bob Geldof这样开篇。看了不下二十个版本的关于非洲自然、文化、宗教、食物、社会发展各个方面的纪录片。但是Bob Geldof这个版本还是在开篇10秒内，就让我认定其为最好的（之一）。这里可以免费在线观看。

好，因为你看到的不是“这里是非洲的X国，生活着这些和那些民族，他们能歌善舞，XXXX”。 你看到的和听到的，都是赞美发自内心的爱。