1. Appropriate exam-oriented education will not destroy people's creativity.
One thing that people often criticize about education in China is that children's daily exams will hurt their imagination and creativity. The best counterexample in this respect is South Korea. South Korea's exam-oriented education is even more cruel than China's, and it implements comprehensive quantitative management. However, South Korea not only has more technological innovations than China, but also plays better football than China, makes better movies than China, and even has more professional soap operas and variety shows than China. Why is this?
To discuss the reasons for the gap between China and South Korea in each of the above segments, you can write another answer. But one thing is common. South Korea has created a healthy talent market in all the above fields. Since it is a market, it must conform to the principles of economics. An important economic principle is that people will respond to incentives. As far as the talent market is concerned, no matter scientists, engineers or football players, people will strive to get the corresponding training in order to get the jobs they want. The problem in China academic circle is not that exam-oriented education has affected children's innovative ability, but that serious scientific research has not been sufficiently motivated, and the connivance of corruption and fraud has hurt the market of scientific research talents.
Another example: IMO, International Mathematical Olympiad. Every year, IMO puts children selected from all countries together to do math problems and ranks countries according to their achievements. Therefore, most competitive countries will start training their national team players a few months before the exam. Children who can enter the national team may have experienced several years of Olympic education before this. So IMO is probably one of the most extreme exam-oriented education. What happened to the children who won IMO when they grew up? Are their innovative abilities still there?
We can learn a thing or two from the results of the Fields Prize, which is called the Nobel Prize for Mathematicians. Starting from 1990, at least one winner of each Fields Prize is an IMO winner, and 13 of the 26 winners are former IMO winners. These mathematicians who have made great breakthroughs in mathematical research used to be the experiencers and winners of exam-oriented education. What did that exam hurt them?
People often underestimate the great role of market economy in talent training and selection, and exaggerate the negative effects of exam-oriented education.
2. Quantitative evaluation is the future of public education.
First of all, clarify several concepts. The concept of education should actually be divided into two parts: family education and public education. The former refers to parents, while the latter refers to schools. In the next paragraph, we only discuss public education, that is, how schools should teach it.
Many people in China always like to say that American schools are too lax, and teachers take their children to play and engage in quality education all day, unlike China, where exams are held every day. Not to mention this herd management has caused the overall backwardness of basic science education in the United States. More importantly, in the United States, public education is moving towards quantification in an all-round way. The more developed education is, the higher the degree of quantification is.
GreatSchools Ratings is a scoring system commonly used to evaluate public schools in the United States. The scores of each school are between 0- 10. In most States in the United States, scores depend entirely on students' standardized test scores at school. Parents judge the quality of school education according to the scores of schools, so as to choose schools and school districts for their children. Therefore, improving students' standardized test scores is the primary goal of school development. The opening of this story is so familiar that it is not difficult for China people to imagine where this quantitative sports meeting will go. Finally, the teachers of the school will be assessed according to the students' test scores. This will reshape the teacher talent market and further improve the quality of students' education.
Quantitative evaluation is an irreversible trend in the process of educational industrialization.
The early "quality education" of herding sheep in the United States is like the purely manual era of pastoral, and quantitative assessment is the industrial revolution and social division of labor. You can accuse industrialization and social division of labor of causing various problems such as human alienation, but you can't deny that industrialization and social division of labor are the inevitable trend of development, and they are destined to be more extensive because they are more efficient. Pure and high-quality handicrafts still exist, but it will only satisfy those who are willing to spend more money on a particular texture in the form of niche and high price. In the education market, it is called a private school.
The marketization of education will make spontaneous choices. This is why it is meaningless to discuss whether Hengshui should exist. The appearance of Hengshui mode in Hebei instead of Beijing and Shanghai itself illustrates the answer: Hebei's economic level can only afford the education cost and quality ratio of Hengshui mode.
People often underestimate the influence of economy on education mode, but overestimate the role of artificial reform.
3. Quality education is not suitable for public education.
What is quality education? No matter what you mean by Plato's academy education in ancient Athens, private school education in ancient China, or "heuristic education" in contemporary educational books, you can't avoid one thing: this kind of education is one-on-one, personalized and targeted at specific students. In other words, the student/teacher ratio should be low enough to ensure quality.
This determines that quality education may be feasible in ancient times, but it is absolutely impossible in modern public education. Because ancient education was for rich children, not private. However, modern public education is large-scale and low-cost, in order to ensure that as many children as possible receive education, which essentially violates the realistic foundation of quality education. If you want to practice quality education in the public sphere and make every child have the ability to become a scientist, then you need a university professor to teach primary schools. This is neither realistic nor necessary.
So where should quality education be practiced? In those places where a teacher can only take a few students: doctor's school, private school, home. For most children, home is the easiest place to practice quality education. In other words, quality education should be the responsibility of parents rather than society. Most parents in China despise their responsibility as their children's first teacher.
Requiring public education in China to carry out quality education will only make industrialized classrooms in China return to herding sheep. The education that most children can get because of standardized tests will only appear in the cram schools of rich families.
4. The problem in the United States: Quality education intensifies the solidification of social classes.
If a society overemphasizes quality education, what should we do to select talents according to "quality"? Then, just like America now, only children from rich families can go to Ivy League schools. Because the most effective way to get "quality education" is to go to private high schools, and the first thing that private high schools want is money.
Of the three universities, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, 100 has the highest admission rate, and only 6 are not private. Most of the students in private high schools come from private junior high schools and private primary schools ... which means that an ordinary American middle-class family lost at the starting line from the beginning. The rising channel of society is extremely narrow from the beginning.
We can even doubt whether the so-called "quality" education and "quality" selection are conspired by the bourgeoisie to protect its own interests. Otherwise, why have Asian students been discriminated against in the admission of Ivy League schools, even though they have performed much better than white students in "quality education"?
5. What should we learn from American education?
Of course, we can still learn a lot from American education, especially how to ensure the welfare of students while quantifying the assessment:
5. 1 is the best in many exams.
One of the problems criticized by people in the college entrance examination is that "one exam is for life". Occasionally, it will cause too much harm to students. The United States has done better in this regard. SAT can be retaken every month. Just submit your best grades when you apply for a university. The difficulty in practice is to make the standards of each exam more consistent, not just to normalize students' grades.
5.2 The diversity of test standards gives children room to choose and think.
The college entrance examination uses a mold to shape children, ignoring the individual's differentiated development. However, quantitative assessment does not mean that there must be a unique assessment standard.
As an important supplement to the SAT basic exam, the SAT2 exam in the United States requires students to choose three subjects to take the exam, which is more difficult than the SAT. This gives students more space to think about their interests and choices, rather than just asking questions about the sea. On this basis, the AP exam is to choose a university subject to examine the introductory content of the university, which is much more difficult than SAT2 and the college entrance examination. In this way, children who don't plan to do math-related work in the future can only take the SAT, those who are interested in math can take the SAT2 math, and those who want to learn math can take the AP math, which is particularly fierce. This step-by-step personalized quantitative assessment standard is worth learning from in China.
Bottom line: The problem of modern education is essentially an economic problem, and it is meaningful to discuss how to improve education in China on this premise.