The Myth of Chinese Super Schools

A very interesting Review by Diane Ravitch in THE NEW REVIEW OF BOOKS, Issue November 20, 2014:

The Myth of Chinese Super Schools
Diane Ravitch
November 20, 2014 Issue

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World
by Yong Zhao
Jossey-Bass, 254 pp., $26.95

On December 3, 2013, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced yet again that American students were doing terribly when tested, in comparison to students in sixty-one other countries and a few cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. Duncan presided over the release of the latest international assessment of student performance in reading, science, and mathematics (called the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA), and Shanghai led the nations of the world in all three categories.

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Sounds familiar, especially for us in Austria and Germany. It has become common to refer to the success of schools in China and South Korea, overlooking the political and cultural context, ignoring the fact of very uncritical attitudes of students as well as teachers in countries where "emancipation" is tabooed and where criticism is most often a crime... The wrong comparisons follow a calculated system, they betray the very concept of education.