Academic culture shock.

If you have ever taken the time to discuss academic systems with different people from all over the world, perhaps, you too, have encountered the academic culture shock, I met with recently.

When I was a pupil, at school, in England, I thought that school was long enough. It began at about 9 am and finished around 4 pm. Then we would have homework, which people did with various degrees of some attention: some putting in hours, others ignoring it and coming up with perennial excuses to explain its absence. This was what I came to think of as a normal, acceptable level of school demand.

Recently, however, I had the chance to talk with a group of Chinese mainlanders about their school experiences. Not expecting a very different answer to the one I had experienced in my childhood, I asked them when they started school in the morning. Various answers were given. "7.25 am"; "7.20 am" and "7 am".

"When did school finish?", I then asked.

"9.40 pm", "9.50 pm" and "10.30 pm", they gave, in the same order.

Therefore, the shortest school day, in this group of nine Chinese mainlanders turned out to be fourteen and a quarter hours. The longest school day was fifteen and a half hours long.

I was rather stunned to hear this as it sank in just what their school lives must have been like, to endure such hours, year in and year out, from childhood to adulthood.

"Our school day was shorter - but then we had homework to do after that." I pointed out, trying to bring these disparate school lives together in some way.

"We had homework, too." One said, in an emotionless voice, that spoke more of what it must have been like, than any histrionics could have done. "We would go home and do our homework and get to bed at 1 or 2 am. Then we would have to wake up at 6 am for school."

Silence was my only reply. I found myself slowly shaking my head, quite unable to take in what such a schooling must have been like.

They found my reaction amusing, and laughed a little, perhaps recognizing in my stunned silence the truth of their own experiences.

"That is why we came to Singapore to study.", one confessed.

Yes. Here, in Singapore, a nation of famously hardworking students, they would find comparative ease, for although Singapore's students worked hard compared to those in the West, schools here were much more relaxed than in China. Singaporean schools actually had relatively brief hours.

Upon further enquiry, it turned out that their breaks during the day amounted to one and a half hours. Half an hour was for lunch. One hour was for sleeping. At least, that is how one student apportioned the time.

I think it is true to say that no nation on Earth has harder working students, than China. Were it so that hard work alone could conquer the world, then the future is undoubtedly Chinese. Yet, I think it is not so. These students told me how unhappy many of them were at this regime. They also told me how boring lessons were. I rather felt that many of them didn't get much out of the experience. One of them even said: "It was torture."

Hard work has value. Yet, I feel that when it is pushed to a pathological extreme - as it is in China - it becomes a kind of national illness. China's students lead the most circumscribed, controlled lives imaginable. They do not have what most people would regard as a childhood. They have what could be called a "bookhood". Their entire childhoods are consumed by a mountain of books; boring books, books they don't want to read - but have to.

For them, it is such a relief to be in Singapore. Here the demands, though significant by world standards, are at least not inhumane. Here the workload is manageable and not insane: at least, from their exhausted perspectives.

Tellingly, each of the nine PRCs I spoke to in that group felt that China's education system was wrong. They all felt that it should be changed, that what it was doing to students was terrible. They felt free to speak out, because they were not in China and I was not Chinese. Indeed, each of them had the same tale to tell of leaving their country, to escape the education system. Their motivation, therefore, was a negative one: it was not a positive decision to seek out Singapore, but a need to avoid the negative experience that was Chinese education. All of them were happier here, despite missing their families.

It is a long time since I have been shocked by something someone said. Yet, I found myself genuinely shocked to learn of the academic demands of the Chinese education system. I had known that they worked hard...but I had no idea just how hard. It is quite cruel.

For the rest of the world, there is a lesson here, about China. It is a nation whose students are pushed to the human limit. Every waking hour is consumed by schooling. I doubt there has ever been another nation so driven in this way. That is what the rest of the world is competing with. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Does this excessive hard work in school give the Chinese an edge? Or does it create exhausted resentful children, who will rebel at the first opportunity? Is China building greatness or destroying itself, with this manic educational regime? The next few decades will be revealing.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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