Education: The burden of being Chinese

I read this very good piece by Laurence Lien on Saturday but I think his ideas were impractical. He failed to go deeper and ask the question of what make us.

The next day Li Xueying wrote an excellent piece on the HK experience of doing away with a national exams until the 12th year. The HK government had hoped that it will ameliorate the stress students had been enduring. It didn't work and the tuition industry grew from strength to strength.

This book had piqued my interest because it was among the top ten books at Popular. Through character sketches it explains how over more than two hundred years the Chinese struggled to cast off the burden of their culture that was preventing them from entering the modern age.

The point is we can rearrange the pieces of furniture in the education room but if the culture is not changed and this goes way beyond changing mindsets everything we do will not reduce school pressure. Education ministers can only offer palliatives at best but the focus remain on keeping education useful and relevant. It must provide people the means to participate in the economy, a point Laurence Lien seemed to have ignored.