After a long and hard year in Beijing, I'm back in Toronto reading and reflecting. Before I left Beijing in early July, I had finished student recruitment. At the end of our admissions camp, we admitted 40 students, but the top half turned us down to attend other international divisions. Hurt and angry, I became even more so when my staff told me that many of our programme’s parents, even though they had praised our English reading programme, wanted us to focus on standardized test preparation in year two.
All summer, I struggled to explain these two major setbacks. I thought I had made a compelling case that the best way to learn English is by reading, and in so doing our students would thrive on the US college campus, and develop a life-long habit of reading English newspapers and books so they could succeed in the global economy. Otherwise, our students would enter college allergic to books, a disability and fear that would trap them in a Chinese bubble in both college and in life.
So why do Chinese parents insist on their children taking test prep courses rather than reading books to prepare for the SAT? Why are they so obsessed with getting their child into college when so many American and Chinese college graduates can’t find work? Why are our parents unhappy with our programme even though their child has become more motivated and diligent?
Ultimately, I can’t reconcile our parents’ thinking and their actions. I honestly believe our parents want the best possible education for their child, but I also see them hampering our efforts. What’s going on?
A new book Incognito by the neuroscientist David Eagleman offers an intriguing possibility – that I can’t figure out Chinese parents because their thinking is controlled by their conscious self, while their actions are controlled by their subconscious self. The conscious self is how we want to appear in public, but the subconscious self is the repository of our experiences and our emotions, and ultimately that’s where our true self lies.
David Eagleman explains that the conscious self is the CEO, while the subconscious is the corporation. The CEO sets goals and direction, but it’s the subconscious that plans, organizes, and executes. To accomplish its mission, the subconscious has many parts that arrange themselves as a ‘team of rivals’ that struggle for primacy while always working towards the goals established by the CEO, explains Eagleman. Evolution has discovered this to be the most efficient relationship for two reasons: plausible deniability (to maintain our social position and reputation), and effectiveness (to be able to obtain what is in our best self-interest).
Two concrete examples to illustrate the interplay between the conscious and subconscious can be found in William Cohan’s new book Money and Power, which explains how Goldman Sachs survived the 2008 sub-prime crisis. As its CEO Lloyd Blankfein became wary of Goldman’s sub-prime positions, the book suggests Goldman Sachs bundled the riskiest mortgages to create securities, sold them to clients, and bet that they would fail. What made such subterfuge possible is said to be the fact that Goldman Sachs was a ‘team of rivals,’ with the clear-eyed traders cynically shorting the securities, while the silver-tongued investment bankers first convinced themselves that the securities were great investments before selling them to their clients. If Blankfein had coordinated everything, the various departments couldn’t have worked together by working against each other, and he couldn’t have denied fraud allegations with a straight face, which is what he subsequently did.
Then consider the case of Hank Paulson, who was number two at Goldman Sachs when he along with John Thornton and John Thain launched a palace coup to topple Jon Corzine. Once in power, Paulson was supposed to gradually relinquish power to Thornton and Thain, but he is said to have discovered he liked having power so much he pushed out the two Johns.
According to this view, Paulson rose to the top because he let his Machiavellian auto-pilot take control while his conscious self-maintained a trusting, naïve veneer: If Paulson ever let on he had a greater ambition than selflessly serving the best interests of Goldman Sachs, he could have never ousted Corzine.
So let’s return to Chinese parents, and figure out not who they think they are, but who they really are. After a year of dealing with our Chinese parents, here’s how I think they think: ‘I love and want what’s best for my child. College in America will prepare my child for the global economy, and he’s fortunate to be learning creativity and critical thinking skills at Peking High International. Yes, Mr. Jiang may be a bit too naïve and idealistic, but I trust him to have the best interest of my child at heart.’
But what does their subconscious believe? The trick to understanding their subconscious is not to peer inside their mental landscape because it’s a ‘team of rivals’ designed to mislead and beguile. The trick is to see the Chinese landscape they’ve witnessed these past 50 years, and the emotions they’ve absorbed as life lessons: the disillusionment brought on by the tyrannical chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the fear wrought by the uncertainty and inequality of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the greed created by the corruption and moral bankruptcy of Jiang Zemin’s China, and now the angry pride unleashed by China’s dizzying and intoxicating economic rise.
At a subconscious level, here’s what our programme’s parents really believe: ‘I succeeded because of my ability to maintain and manage guanxi, not because of critical thinking skills and creativity. My child will succeed based on his ability to conform to Chinese society and to obey me. My child will study in the United States to meet other rich and powerful Chinese. That my child crams for the SAT rather than read books and that he lives in a Chinese bubble will prove to me and to Chinese society that he’s a loyal and obedient Chinese, and that will ensure his transition back to China after he’s bored with the bright lights of New York and the blackjack tables of Las Vegas. Why should my child learn English and American cultural values when China is superior to the West? Creativity and critical thinking skills are Western imports, and ought to be distrusted as dangerous influences.’
So while consciously our Chinese parents are supportive of our pedagogy (they have no choice), they will subconsciously do whatever they can to sabotage our efforts, including complaining about how much their child reads in English, arranging SAT prep classes on weekends, and questioning our pedagogy to other parents who are considering enrolling.
And this sabotage can only become more blatant and destructive, as our programme matures and strengthens. So what do I do now? Um, I don’t know – maybe my subconscious can figure something out.
P.S. In last week’s posting, two readers commented that the posting was intellectually lazy. In hindsight, I now see the posting was a rant, so thanks to my readers for keeping me intellectually honest.
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Oro Invictus
While I certainly lament both the author’s position and the plight of those children sabotaged by the sociological impact of nominally communist yet functionally ultra-capitalist Chinese society, I must note I find Dr. Eagleman’s theories to both overly simplify the human psyche as well as serve as a retread of earlier psychological treatises. While I appreciate his model is not a truly binary system, it ignores group mentality and does not fit well with social evolutionary dynamics. I can see why it would be appealing for using such a system to explain interactions between humans in business, but therein lies the problem: Business and monetary systems are but outcroppings of the basal human desire for tangible rewards, it is not a fundamental aspect of our psychology.
Still… I suppose, as a means to express the vast number of vicissitudes present in human thought and perspective, it does serve it’s purpose; perhaps he intended this as a simplified instructional model, not a true description of the various pathos involved in human interaction.
Passerby
Mr. Jiang,
I think you have over-intellectualized something that most average Chinese parents can understand intuitively; that learning is important but credentialism is MORE important. If they have to choose between (a) average learning and excellent grade (= credential) (b) excellent learning and average grade, they would choose (a) for two practical reasons: A) Excellent grade will get you somewhere or at least will open doors and B) most learning that has any practical value comes from actual on the job experience and not from some academic learning/experiment.
But wait, you think what I just said applies to Chinese parents only, you are wrong. Go talk to students in Western countries, I mean (not the loser type students but) the more serious students in Western countries, they think exactly, SAY IT AGAIN, EXACTLY, the way that Chinese parents think.
To help you get off your high horse of learning, look at these very detailed data collected about grade inflation in the US at this source:
http://www.gradeinflation.com/
fred
I totally agree with Passerby. Learning English in China is not the end, but a means to the end. Few Chinese learn foreign languages for enrichment just like few Westerners learn Chinese for the sheer joy of learning. If the author continues to hold this sentiment against the Chinese parents, I would suggest that these same parents should look for learning centers somewhere else.
S P Dudley
Your experiences are not uncommon with parents who see academic excellence as the only true pathway to success. Substitute “Chinese” for “Korean,” “Taiwanese,” or even “Jewish” and you can fit the model nearly exactly.
While the Communist mentality theory is interesting, it doesn’t really explain the thinking as well. In lieu of independent study, cram schools offer parents what is to them a concrete way to guarantee a result of success as much as possible. Why trust your kid to study hard on their own when you can pay someone to force them for you?
The trouble is that A) there’s really no hard evidence that schools like Kaplan or Kumon actually will get your kid into Ivy League schools, or even substantially raise their SAT or ACT scores and B) Even if they do work, truthfully such abilities do not accurately reflect actual student achievement at the collegiate level. Often what you get are students who are good at rote and test-taking but botch critical thinking.
The single most important aptitude for either academic or business success is self-motivation. This unfortunate fact runs completely counter to what our current generation of over-managed parents has been taught, as well as how they’ve been taught to think about themselves. Today’s generation of parents believe quite firmly that their children are extensions of themselves and as such everything they do, say, or think reflects upon the parents. As a result parents override their children far too much to “guarantee” a result of success, but hollow out the individual inside. It’s not a Chinese characteristic, it’s global in nature and it’s practiced in New Delhi and London and San Francisco as much as in Shanghai and Singapore.
Haav
I agree with Passerby’s advice to Mr. Jiang completely. Parents know better from their collectively real world experience.
dongshizhang
Your values are in the right place Jiang. You are making a difference.
Certainly grades are the face value of performance (or torturous groveling), but in the long run the pursuit of knowledge, creativity, and critical thinking will exponentially improve an individual’s professional capacity. Keep it up…
Todd
Passerby,
I think you’ll find that both you and Mr Jiang are working at the same problem from different angles. I agree in principle with the idea that much decision making is made subconsciously – only with careful self-analysis can we determine exactly why we make the decisions that we do. However, many of these decisions, while made instinctively and thus opaque to our consciousness in the short-term, are made for entirely rational reasons.
If Mr Jiang asks his parents why they are acting the way that they do, they are not necessarily going to reply with your answer. Those that have different, or obstructive answers may be lying, or they may have other reasons to make that same decision. However it’s more likely that they simply haven’t thought about their actions. Yet even without consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the decision, they have unconsciously made a rational choice according to precisely the incentives that you describe. And indeed, without your careful analysis of precisely what those incentives are, their decision making remains opaque both to Western readers, and to many of these parents themselves.
Now, being an unconscious decision-making process it will, from time to time, result in strange inefficiencies, many of which are due to evolved biases. But on the whole people act in precisely the way that their incentives predict, whether or not they have taken the time to consciously analyse those incentives.
ttaerum
China does not understand China – sometimes China is mystified by China. China is a middle aged man who was born into a world of Mao Tse Tung in a shack by muddy rice paddies and rusty bikes and now lives in a mansion by a busy steet and shiny cars. When growing up the man learned that what mattered was party affiliation and self discipline. If entrance to a college required climbing K2, they would have spent their savings sending their only child (a son) to climb Mount Everest in preparation for the easier climb of K2. Nothing would stand in their way.
And this is what ought to be of concern. It has amassed an enormous amount of wealth. It has been entrusted with the technologies of the world. It has been given the currencies of every nation. And it grew up in a world of Mao Tse Tung in a shack by a muddy rice paddy and rusty bikes. As Xeukin points out, it is the sum of experience that determines action.
Jeremy Craig
I’ve been in the SAT prep business for nearly 20 years, the last 11 years in Singapore with some forays into China. Without getting into the intellectual part of the post I will comment that the focus on SAT prep over actually learning English is rooted on Chinese history. For centuries bright Chinese students of means have crammed to take examinations. In dynastic times the top scorers got cushy government jobs and today it is a coveted place at Bei-Da, Tsing-Hwa, or another top university – which generally leads to a good job (in theory anyway).
These tests are almost entirely based on rote memorization, first it was Mencius and Kong Zi but now the Da Kao tests other things. This same approach is taken with the SAT and thousands of students are studying in 200 hour SAT prep programs with yahoos like New Oriental and perhaps increasing their score enough to get into a decent American school. Here is the rub: there have been multiple reports of these poor kids rocking up at a school like UIUC and not being able to hack it as their oral and aural skills are woefully lacking, not to mention the fact that they can’t write an essay that they didn’t memorize beforehand from a “prep book”.
The College Board is slowly becoming aware of this and I was told that they would start looking for essays that match (eg. memorized) but CB has vested interests in trying to work with the Chinese MOE so I’m not sure what will happen. Of course, the CB pay so little attention to the world outside of America that I don’t think much will change. Witness the IB with their international network of offices and the CB with one person looking after everything from NYC.
Anyway, my two cents….
Passerby
I am really sick and tired of this rote learning versus whatever debate.
Rote learning has become such a dirty word the same way that phonics was made into a dirty word in the whole language learning debate.
Many years after the whole language learning methodologies debate, it is now clear that both concepts (i.e. phonics and whole language) have relevance, and that when truly examined, they are almost inseparable. Today, neither is the be-all or end-all for teaching students how to read.
Similarly, I don’t think you can truly have the ability to engage in “critical thinking” without a strong foundation of basic facts that have, yes, been drilled into you at an earlier age. You can’t “understand” water without knowing that it is two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. The words we use to communicate (and writing included) must be drilled into you to overcome illiteracy. Critical thinking and understanding – vague and ill-defined as these terms are in this debate – can only be thought of as the capstone of an education. Today’s so called progressive educators want the bread without planting the wheat. It’s really pathetic.
So people, please, STOP treating the term ‘rote learning’ as a dirty word. The value of rote learning to higher learning is REAL.
Bill
I think this is more simple. What every chinese person craves most is respect (face). High test scores get the parents more respect than reading ability. They can brag about these to the other chinese parents. If you want to help the kids, you need to make reading comprehension a “credential” as has already been mentioned. The core motivation, though, is and will be what brings the most respect (or face). Chinese are not at all like any western culture. The goal here is not a good life or, even, a good job. The credential is the goal. Because being able to say “my child got a high score” or “my child got a PHD from an american university” brings respect and is always the immediate goal. Only after getting all the credentials available will the thoughts of the parents (or the children) turn to getting a good job.
robert
This article is very good, for me it extends far beyond the topic outlined describing the reasoning for Chinese parents determinations. Much of this concept presented in this article could easily be applied to a widw array of situations ranging from politics, markets or social interactions. Many very interesting points to consider. Thank you to the writer for this.
Crispus
I am in complete agreement with Passerby on rote learning.
Most of us had to memorize multiplication and division tables and use these daily without much thinking. Trust me, the serious proof for the expression “1 x 1 = 1” is beyond almost all reading this.
I taught Accounting in China for eight years and found it a challenging experience.
Accounting is not about numbers but is a system based on definitions, concepts, methods, rules and laws. Thus Accounting is about words, the use of words, what words mean and about language. It is not intuitive. At times, accounting works because structure and discipline must be applied in counter intuitive ways. Without rote learning of the core elements, accounting can become confusing. Without the core elements, “critical thinking” is not possible.
Most students looked at my white face and decided I had little of value for them. When I said you must memorize this, they didn’t bother. Unfortunately, given their inability to work the simplest problems, I don’t think they took their Chinese Professors seriously either.
My satisfaction is in the 15 to 20% of the students that learned. I am also pleased with the 30, or so, students that went on to Western universities and are studying for, or have earned degrees, in Accounting.
Klerk
Passerby, practicing for getting a slightly higher score at a pseudo IQ test like the SAT is not the same thing as root memorization of actually useful stuff. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers etc. learn useful stuff, prepping for scoring a bit higher on the SAT or GMAT is NOT the same thing. Too much prepping is tragic because prepping is a zero sum game, those kids could have had an excellent command of english, math and vocationally useful or generally elevating skills. Also, asians have their kids prep for standardized tests more. FACT. You’re uninformed. And naive. Google it =P