Education: Secrets of Chinese and Asian students (1)

‘Education is still the key to real and lasting freedom. It’s up to us to cultivate that hunger for education in those coming after us.’
Sometime this year, I paid a visit to the Chairman, Editorial Board of The Punch newspaper. My visit was an intellectual one. It wasn’t by chance; it was intentional and designed to test some of my theories and gain new insights about life and to unearth some truths regarding success and greatness in life. This became more necessary especially from someone whom I look up to for inspiration and whose intellectual fountain has for a long time continued to water the garden of my intellect. As a student and arch disciple of causation, I have watched this man, one of my intellectual mentors, rise, steadily as a reporter, donkey’s years ago to reach the zenith of quality and integrity based journalism, in Nigeria and Africa by extension.

This fascination has inspired this writer, who is excited by the elements behind the principles and laws of causation, to foray into differential researches and studies of people, from all walks of life: Blacks, Whites, Asians, Caucasians, Arabs and so on. Honestly, I have discovered that there exists a common denominator, a similar trait responsible for catapulting people from zero to zenith, no matter what field of human endeavour they find themselves. At this juncture, I remember the words of this great mind and who also doubles as a Nobel-prize winner, Noguib Malifouz. He said, ‘You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.’ In this connection, one of the questions I asked the chairman was: What is the major characteristic behind your rise to becoming the chairman of this notable and knowledge-driven organisation? ‘Lifestyle,’ he responded, calmly and confidently! I quickly did a flash back, and I remembered one of the books I had read in the past titled ‘What makes the greats great’ by Professor Dennis P. Kimbro. In this book, the learned author interviewed great men and women, trying to unravel the factors responsible for their successes, fame and fortunes. He too discovered that: It all boiled down to: Lifestyle. Daily habits and practices!

Furthermore, Malcolm Gladwell stated in his book, titled ‘Outliers’, the story of success, that: “On international comparison tests, students from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan all score roughly the same in math, around the ninety-eighth percentile. The United States, France, England, Germany and other Western industrialised nations clustered at somewhere between 26th and 36th percentile.’ Curiously, I decided to probe further. I wanted to look at the latest PISA (Programme for International Students Assessment) results. Surprisingly, the outcome of my study did not spark any marked difference. Gladwell was right! However, this writer also found out that in Reading and Science, too, the Chinese and Asian students by extension seem to have a commanding academic edge, far above their contemporaries i.e. the U.S. and Western European countries’ students.This writer also found out that: in 2006, South Korea outflanked Finland in the PISA tests, becoming the world’s cleverest country on the planet!

In passing, I wrote about this in one of my articles (Dear reader, please Google Education: The China and India advantage)! For the first time, China competed in 2009 as a non – OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) member, and the students from Shanghai, outsmarted all other nations in Science, Reading and Math, respectively. Three years later, in December 2013, the Peoples Republic of China repeated the same academic feat: in Math, Science and Reading, it was all the Shanghai students that outsmarted other students from 64 other countries that competed in the internationally respected comparison tests. This remarkable scholastic achievement became a topical issue amongst nations of the world! Observers and experts have continued to say the 21st century is the Age of Asia! Also, Tony Jackson, Vice-President of Education at the ‘Asia Society’ said: ‘The 2009 PISA data demonstrate the rise in the quality of education in Asia — among the top performance were Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Korea”.

In similar fashion, Jiang Xuequn, Deputy Principal at Tsinghai University High school in Beijing, told CNN’s Kristie Lou Stou that, “Shanghai’s education leaders invest in teaching staff by offering training and high salaries. He added that “Shanghai’s success is a product of a culture that prioritises academic achievements over other pursuits.” Globally, especially in the academic settings, from education leaders to policy -makers, the academic excellence, consistently displayed by China, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam (lately!), Japan, Singapore, has become a phenomenon of interest and study to curious scholars. Studies upon studies are being conducted, books and other literature are being churned out on bookshelves, libraries, online, academic institutions and in marketplaces, all over the world, theorising and expressing the critical causal factors responsible for this exemplary academic and cognitive skills of 21st century brainy Asian learners and Chinese students, in particular.

As a result of this, this writer decided to join the sea of researchers. Before my study of the Asian academic system, I had spent years observing and studying the academic systems of the U.S., the UK, Finland, Estonia, Germany, Ghana, to mention just a few. I temporarily abandoned this in the light of the astonishing rise of the Asians! Therefore, I embarked on a rigorous and differential research in order to have scientific grasp of the foregoing subject. In the process, I distilled, from the empire of empirical evidence collated, evidence-based reasons, which I would like to term – ‘secrets’, core causal factors, attributable to the educational and cognitive leadership of the Chinese and other notable Asian students in the globe. More so, I have cross-checked, in the light of new evidence that sparked up before taking this facts-based writes up to the press. To cap it all, I had to, also, fall back on my increasing knowledge of educational, cognitive, and behavioural psychology and my practical teaching experience reaching a decade, in order to make this piece nigh scientific!

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D., stated in her ingenious Harvard Business Review article, titled ‘Nine Things Successful People Do Differently’: “In fact, decades of research on achievements suggest that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do”. At this juncture, the zillion–dollar question is: what do the Chinese and Asian students do academically differently to outsmart others in the education ecosystem? In this write-up, I shall refrain from expressing theories devoid of evidence and to state themes that are research based.

In the first place, I would like to talk about the pro–education culture of China and its sister states. Culture has been defined as the accumulation of values, rules of behaviour, forms of expression, religious beliefs, occupational choices, and the like for a group of people who share a common language and environment (Fiske et al., 1998). Education, the rage for reading, labour of learning and the passion for intellectually-driven activities has become an integral part of the Chinese Asian societies today. In fact, some observers have said it is closer, if not greater than Confucianism. The Chinese and others in Asia have great value for education. The majority of people on this continent see education as synonymous with existence. It is a way of life.It is a key component of their collective culture! This pro-education culture is luckily, one of the core values of Confucianism. Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher, stressed the importance of education in his philosophical postulations. He encouraged his sea of adherents to pursue education. Education has become a way of life in China and other Asian countries. In China, for example, in order to encourage the importance of reading, making personal or informal education a lifestyle – part of their national culture, the government, via one of its arms — CAPP (Chinese Academy of Press and Publication) has continued to sponsor and spread the slogan. “Reading: my lifestyle.” According to a survey finding, conducted by XU Shenqquo, a CAPP researcher, Xu said with regard to China’s reading culture, “I think it is an irrevocable trend now, we are reading more and more, so much that it may well become a lifestyle trend.” It is, this writer submits! Today, in China, and especially among the East Asian countries, Japan, South Korea and others, the culture of reading, especially DHL (Daily Habit of Learning) has become part of their existential fabric. Therefore, as a student of causation, culture (especially the culture of reading!) is recognised as a primary causative agent. This DHL concept is one of the secrets and factors responsible for Asian Scholastic Excellence (ASE)!

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