 Good afternoon, and welcome to the Asian Review. I'm your host, Lily Ohm. The debate between the American and Asian education system has been going on for quite some time. Today we have with us Mr. Mark Hennington. He's a faculty and administrator at a local private school to talk with us about just that. Welcome to the show, Mr. Hennington. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Would you let us know how long have you been teaching in the United States? I've been teaching 26 years in the United States. I taught 14 years in Canada before that. And you've had some experience out in Asia as well. Yes, I did work in China and also worked in Siberia. Would you mind sharing with us your experience in those places and what do you observe about the way that the students in those places learn? Well, Asia is rather famous for, I don't think it's a stereotype, of really hardcore learning. What Asian schools have, and Submarine schools do too, actually, is the culture of education. Everybody holds education in very, very high esteem. Teachers are regarded as professionals, not sort of curricular technicians. And as a result of that, and that cultural drive towards excellence in education, the kids are highly motivated to learn and highly motivated to get into university. Where do you think they derive such motivation from? Is it from parents, families, teachers? All of the above, I think. It's the media. Certainly parents and siblings and friends. It's just a cultural expectation that, first of all, you're going to do well. And secondly, that any child can do well. So even if I'm not your father, I know that that child can be expected to do very well in school. And what about in the United States? Do people tend to embrace that academic achievement is primarily derived from inherited intelligence versus hard work? I think that to discuss the American education system as if it were one system can get you into trouble. I'm thinking of a book called The Manufactured Crisis in Education. It was published about 20 years ago, but it made a point that's still true that where you study in America, what culture you come from, what economic background you come from, has a very, very heavy influence on your likelihood of success at school, and also the expectations that you face at school. And so there are patches in the United States that do emulate Asian education in that way. And there are other areas where it's less true, and those are primarily associated with poverty. Well, I've heard that argument before regarding the socioeconomic status, and I just want to debunk that because when we look at that, we'll take a look at the scores afterwards, but when we look at the international student assessments, countries like Vietnam, countries like Latvia, they were outperforming the students in the United States. And Latvia, I mean, the average income when you adjust for purchasing power is only half of that of the United States. And the average income of Vietnam is one-tenth of the United States when adjusted for purchasing power. So how would that stand as far as... Well, let me just add to what you're saying to agree with you that there are areas in China that are very impoverished compared to sort of Beijing, Shanghai areas, and they outperform American education system as a whole too, even though they're rural and by our standards would be considered poor. It's certainly not the only thing, but the aspect of poverty that I'm focusing on really isn't the lack of money. It's the desperation and it's the violence and the culture where... Well, for example, Big C's Chicago gang loyalties feature very prominently in a child's life, depending on where they live, of course, or Los Angeles, same thing. But if you happen to near Harvard, for example, northeast, you're less likely to encounter that kind of problem because the entire culture has got a focus on education, not just some aspects of it like your parents and your teachers. And you talked about the reverence for teachers. Do you think it's carried a little bit too far in Asia in the sense that they are more hesitant about speaking up in class because they are told that the teachers are always right, you've got to respect the teachers. So they're very hesitant about disagreeing with the teachers, whereas in an American classroom, the students are more outspoken and they're encouraged to give their input in class. Yeah, I think that one of the issues that that points to is the fact that the tests we're discussing are measuring very narrow things and they're not measuring other things that do get more stressed in other schools. Let me just tell you a story about a conversation I had with a Japanese ambassador once. There was a talk that he was giving on Japanese education and he talked very, very proudly of education up until the end of high school. And then he was lamenting the fact that very few Japanese educated Japanese ever won a Nobel Prize. Those who did were trained in the States. And I asked him, you know, to what did he attribute that? And he said, well, by the time kids are finished with high school, they're so sick of school that they just want to cruise in university. So there is embedded some dangerous hooks in that structured form of education at its most structured. So yeah, independent thinking is highly treasured in the States, particularly now when it's impossible to say what the children are going to be facing in 20 years from now. What will they be expected to know? What will they be expected to do? And so I think that where I've been teaching our motivation is not to teach students a bunch of stuff that would show up well on content tests, but the ability to be intellectually flexible to challenge everything, challenge authority. It's been a big deal in the States lately, the notion of fake news. So how do you verify your information? What do you do with it? That kind of thing is getting a lot of emphasis here. I don't know if it is in Asia or not. It might very well be, but I'm not aware that it is. I just want to be careful about us discrediting the PISA scores by OECD altogether because they don't just test the students on the content. They also test them on their cognitive ability. So I don't think it's entirely about knowledge acquisition, but also about level of problem solving. You're absolutely right, and I was focusing on that other part. I've never encountered the concept of open books until I came to the United States. In Asia, or at least in Singapore, I know that we don't have open book tests. What do you think about students being given access to the textbook when they are doing their examinations? I only ever experienced that once myself as a student, and my friend and I prepared for the test, and we had post-it notes everywhere, and we knew that book and where to get the information really well. So we had prepared very thoroughly. We were the only ones who did. It was class of 400. We didn't have the test because we could find the stuff. So if you just go in with a textbook, and you're not familiar with the layout of that textbook, and you have an open book exam, you're going to be no better off really than with a notebook exam because you won't know where to find the stuff. So I think the ability to categorize information, locate information, is extremely important. And if open book tests are used to further that, very highly of them. If they're used just because I can't be bothered making a test, it will challenge you. I wouldn't recommend that. That's a wonderful point. Thank you so much. What about supplementary classes? In Asia, it seems that school is just one part of the day. After school, they have to go for extra supplementary classes. Do the students in America do much of that? Not nearly as much. And frankly, I'm rather pleased that we don't. Because what gets lost in supplementary classes after school and on the weekends is the opportunity to be a child. In South Korea, for example, where education is also very, very successful, families often send their children to certain areas to be well educated. And they're called goose families by the South Koreans because in order to reunite, they have to migrate like east to get back together. And I think that that comes at a price. At the school where I taught, we were really conscious of our students over committing themselves, taking too many courses, taking outside activities. We just want them to be a child for a while. And we would advise them, not always successfully, please don't sign up for so much. Just take time to go to the beach, surf, and sort of value that. Yeah. So not so much academics, but do you think the students here are taking on maybe too much extra curricular activities? I mean, it's so often to run through somebody in Hawaii that's doing hula, violin, soccer, Japanese language. What do you think about the extra curricular? I think it's really dangerous. Perhaps an overstatement, but I think if you don't teach a child or give a child an exposure to unstructured time, they all know what to do when they're on their own and expected to do something by themselves or even just entertain themselves. So I think those hyper-scheduled children are losing an aspect of humanity that I think is pretty, that they lose. Well, let's shift here a little bit and talk about the teachers. We see a lot of strikes in America regarding teachers' pay by the teachers' union and whatnot. Do you think the teachers here are getting compatible salaries? Oh, well, you mean here in Hawaii or here in America? In the United States. I mean, I know it's hard to cast a broad spectrum, but let's just do it. So yes and no. Very often not. And that, once again, is linked to poverty in an area because the way school taxes are allocated tends to match the way the resources are allocated, more generally in the general wealth of the society. And so underfunding schools and underpaying teachers is not a very satisfactory way of addressing any educational problems at all. And on top of underfunding them or underpaying them, they are encountering problems as far as workload. They are spending, for example, in Beijing, a teacher only teaches one subject two hours a day. And the rest of the time, she or he will spend on consulting with other colleagues, correcting papers and preparing for the classes. As a teacher locally, do you find that you have sufficient time to do class preparation? The school where I taught, yes. When I worked on a modular schedule, not a routine schedule. So both teachers and students would have a block of an hour or two hours off at any given time, varying over a six-day cycle. So my experience has been very positive. But that's a private school. Public schools, I think, are facing a very different situation. In public schools, they're obligated to teach all children, no matter what, which can have disciplinary ramifications. And also the teachers are on contracts. So they have a sense of, honestly, insecurity, even though they have contracts. That's why the unions are in place. Are they overworked? Not perhaps that they're overworked, but that some of their work is misplaced. I'm thinking of the Common Core curriculum. Excellent reasons for having such a thing. And China is an example of that, where this district and Beijing have a Common Core. But in the United States, the way it has been used, it puts such a focus on testing that the curriculum becomes that which will have you do well on the test. And having written a lot of tests, I can tell you that it's hard to write a test that delves deeply into how a child thinks. It's very easy to write a test to just ask them to know things. So if I'm in a rush, the test I'm going to prepare is probably going to be pretty shallow. Well, thank you so much, Mr. Huntington. I'm going to take a little short break here, and when we come back, we're going to discuss more about the differences between the Asian and American education system. Thank you. This is Stink Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. 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This is Asian Review. I'm your host, Lily Ong. And today we have with us Mr. Mark Hennington to talk to us about differences between the Asian and American education system. Thanks again for being here, Mr. Hennington. Mr. Hennington, before we left for the break, we talked about the workload of the teachers in the United States. What about the responsibilities? Because in Asia, it seems that they are more focused on a scenario, a teacher teach. Here, it seems that the teachers have to be the psychotherapists. They have to coach students to be winners in sports, musical comedies. That's an excellent point. Since I was a child, schools have changed a lot in North America, and a lot more of those issues that are not strictly curricular issues have definitely shown up in the schools, and they need to be addressed. Starting with hunger, which now schools need to address. So that's a good point, and it certainly does distract teachers from curricular things. If by curricular things you mean a very narrow set of what you would expect as opposed to the broader psychological and psychosocial effects, yeah, I think there's a real disadvantage. I have also heard that in China, the teachers actually aren't paid very well as a rule, but make a lot of money tutoring after class. And so, that is of interest to me. It's not feeding somebody, but it's definitely going outside of normal classroom hours to do what would appear to be a different form of instruction than it took place during the school day. And in comparison to Asian schools, how do you think U.S. schools deal with students that are falling behind? Because in Asia, they tend to cash them when they see them gaining a downward momentum. Do American schools in general deal with those? I can't answer in general. I think a lot of attention is given. Certainly, the attention given to children with learning differences has, in the 30 years I've been in the states, significantly changed. And now we're aware of those. And in all the schools I know of, we have resources. And the classroom teachers are being trained in how you address this problem if you have one dyslexic child in a classroom of 30. How can you construct a lesson that's not going to lose that child? And so, the teachers are getting professional development to help them do that. So, I think we're getting better at it in America than we have been. Are we as good at it as our in Asia? Probably not. Depending on where in Asia you talk about, where in Singapore and Shanghai have outstanding programs? Well, in Singapore, schooling is just about mandatory. Whereas in the United States, they can opt to drop out. Technically, after age 16, is there an age limit in Singapore? Well, you have to just have to finish. Yes, ideally. Yeah, so it's 16. Well, let me just say, two nieces and a nephew who have not gone to college and they are outstandingly creative and successful. One is a world-class choreographer. One is an expert in computer security. One is a very artistic. So, the notion that one size fits all in terms of education is also misplaced, I think. And in England, there used to be technical schools or vocational schools. Now, in the United States, community colleges are beginning to fill that gap more. But our insistence that every child go to university, I think, is a mistake. I know in Japan that there's terrible anxiety around testing for admission to university. In Siberia, about one in four high school children will make it to university. And I was talking to a graduating class of seniors in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. And they were all wonderful children. And I said, well, what are you going to do next year? And they all said, well, we're going to go to university. I said, well, what will you do if you don't get into university? And they all just said, oh, no, no, no, no. We have to get into university. We have to. And I'm sort of worried about those who didn't after I left what became of them. Because we certainly don't have lack of examples as far as those successful dropouts. But I think the larger majority of the dropouts, what happened to them? I think those are the groups that we have to be concerned. Well, why don't we take a look at the OECD scores? Because I think the educational attainment of a state's population translates into the economic growth of a country. So let's take a look at the OECD scores and then we can evaluate the economies. Okay, this is 2009. Okay, this is 2009 score. Let's zoom in. Okay, so in the top five we're seeing Shanghai, Shanghai, China. And this is just Shanghai and China, not entire China. In the top five, mostly Asian countries, we do see Finland up there for science and reading. Let's look for United States. So U.S. is 31st in math and reading 23rd in science is 25th. So this is 2009. Let's take a look at 2012. This is the overall ranking. Again, Shanghai, China is top in mathematics, science and reading. We're seeing the same few countries, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, part of China in the South Korea. Finland is up there too. This is all the way in 36th place. Let's take a look at the latest one, 2015. Okay, here, if we could zoom into the top. Oh, okay, that's all right. So we see Singapore topping math, reading, science. Again, the same country as Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Japan. We're also seeing Finland in reading and Estonia in science. So when you look at these scores, does it, you know, is it disturbing to you? Is it disturbing to me that the United States is so low? Yes, it is. But I do know that up with the countries that you mentioned are also countries like Finland and Canada that have very different approaches to education than Asia and their methods also work. So what I draw from that is that there's not one right way to educate. The fact that the United States is as low in the rankings seems a shame to me because we are, arguably, the wealthiest country in the world. Certainly terribly wealthy in resources. We should be doing better than we are. That said, I'm not in favor of comparing one country to another comparing test scores. That said, I would think we could do a lot better if we focused on it. If we identified all the really successful educational models and then trained people how to use those from other countries or from even within our own country, that would be very helpful. So that would be spending more money on teach training. For example, perhaps less money on standardized testing. Well, Singapore actually doesn't spend that much money on education. We only spend 3.1% of our GDP on education. Whereas most of the old city countries, they spend close to 5% on education. But what Singapore does is it spends its money very wisely. So if we are given the choice between a better teacher and a smaller classroom, we go for the better teacher. So we have quite a high number in our classroom, but then we make sure we train a teacher, which brings me to the next question about teacher training. What does it take to become a teacher in the United States? Well, there are lots of different routes into it. One is to get a master's degree in education, which is a four-year program. Then you can get a certification, either one year or two years after your degree. And if you teach in private schools, you don't need to have that certification. Private schools look for obviously a certain level of education, but then a lot more. The interest in working with students and children. I think what Singapore does, it does extremely well. And I think that the point I started out with, the cultural expectation of excellence is very, very high in Singapore, which is a fairly concentrated area and a fairly concentrated population. And their methods clearly are outstanding. I think part of our motivation, from the stance of Singaporean is that we have a field of poverty, because we used to be a swampy, backwater village, and as our founder, Lee Kuan Yee used to say, poetry is a luxury that we cannot afford. So he was always science or math or those fields. And as far as teacher training, only the top third of the high school graduates, they can pursue the teaching route. So it's just the top one third percent. And they have to undertake two years of training to be teacher, two to three years of training to be teacher. Very interesting and very different. Plastic pay is on a higher scale. So teachers in Singapore are like teachers in Finland. They're held in very high esteem. All right. I want to share a finding with you is from a data. So when a group of American and Chinese parents were asked, what grade do you think your child will bring home? And both groups say maybe 70%. But when they asked the Chinese parents, what grade would you be satisfied with? It was eight points higher than what the Chinese parent expected. With the American parent, it was three points lower than what they expected. And also when they asked the American students, do you think you're performing well in school in comparison to your peers? They said, yes, we are, but do you think you're comparing as well as your counterparts overseas? They were not so confident. Do you think this has to do with the markedly low expectation standards of the parents and the teachers? I think there's clearly a difference in the expectations and that plays out in reality. I know that if we look at the population of the United States of college graduates, given the same question, do you think you're ready? They all say yes. They're very, very confident and think they're prepared for the jobs. The employers who employ them say only about 25% of them are as prepared as we need them to be. So that's an issue and it's having economic repercussions. And just to end our discussion here, I just want to quote Thomas Friedman. He says that as the world becomes more interdependent, engaging human capital will be more critical. So going forward, we need to up our education level. We need to up the education level and also up the extent to which we work collaboratively. I know for years of teaching, children hate group work because one person winds up stuck with all the work and somebody else doesn't do it and all that stuff. We have to teach children to work collaboratively because you have to work collaboratively. But especially if you're thinking globally and interacting globally, you have to know how to collaborate. You can't know where you belong on a team. You have to actually, all of you, create together so it's not like having a place on a team. It's knowing how to collaborate, different skill and terribly important. I cannot agree more on that. Well, thank you, Mr. Harrington. I wish we have more time. We'll have come to the end of our show. Thank you so much for being on our show and thank you so much for watching.