Abstract
Teachers in China are ‘teaching masters’ as they are highly dedicated to their profession, possess strong content knowledge and are skilful in exam techniques.
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Notes
- 1.
For further readings on the teaching of Confucius and the relevance of his teachings to East Asian societies, see Tan (forthcoming).
- 2.
Some academics are critical of the traditional teaching approach and ideology employed in China, claiming that they are a means of state control. For example, Jianguo Wu and Michael Singh argue that science teachers in China guide their students to use a ‘dialectical materialist’ point of view: ‘This is the basic communist philosophy which holds that people’s material or physical conditions of existence shape their consciousness, rather than spiritual values which are held to be distractions. This “regime of truth” is subject to political controls that shape the behaviour and belief of those working within knowledge communities, including teachers and students. It reproduces a disciplined society, albeit not without contestation, which accords with the demands of political control by the communist authorities’ (Wu & Singh, 2004, p. 34). Equally critical is Chinese scholar Zhong Qi-quan who posits that the ‘curriculum and instruction reform texts developed in China and even some of the recent curriculum reform plans developed by some regional governments were based on the perspectives of animal learning psychology. These texts and plans emphasised behaviourism, treating education and learning process as mere training’ (Zhong, 2006, pp. 372–373).
- 3.
The research findings have been corroborated by other observers. For example, a British headmaster who accompanied his students to visit a Shanghai school reported that his year 12 students studying maths A-level were astonished when they watched a maths lesson in which students aged 12 covered material similar to theirs (Barton, 2011). Kristof (2011) who is American also points out that the children in his Chinese-American wife’s ancestral village in Southern China are ‘a grade ahead in maths compared with my children, who are studying at an excellent public school in the New York area’.
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Tan, C. (2013). The Chinese Teacher as a Chess Master. In: Learning from Shanghai. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 21. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4021-87-6_3
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