The Chinese are coming! British education policy, c.2008-2018

‘Are our kids tough enough?’

‘What do I know about China? I know that there’s lots of people there and they’re very clever’, Ciara, aged fourteen, tells us in an interview recorded in 2015. This chimes with what I was told when I was growing up, too: because we live in an increasingly competitive, globalised world, make sure you study hard, or the Chinese — who are very clever, and, more importantly, there’s lots of them — will take your job. (It was not made clear whether they would do this by coming over here, or by taking our business over to the Far East.) I was actually somewhat disappointed that the Chinese did not live up to my expectations when I finally came face-to-face with large numbers of these alleged genius automatons at university.

More recently, the shine has started to wear off of both East Asia and its associated educational culture. Japan, despite seeing similar GDP per capita growth to Britain in recent years, is now written off entirely as a stagnant backwater. Korea is now best known amongst policymakers for its disturbingly low fertility rates, which many at least partially attribute (in my view correctly) to that country’s educational system. And China has now transitioned from ‘slightly dark’ (perhaps to be emulated) to ‘very dark’ (not to be emulated under any circumstances). Meanwhile, in Britain itself, enough parents will by now have been disabused of their previous views after being told stories by their children of having to work on group projects at university with Chinese students who can barely speak English, yet who somewhat mysteriously still manage to pass their degrees (presumably in part through cheating).

Ciara was being interviewed for the 2015 BBC Two programme Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School (2.3 million views on YouTube). As the title suggests, this was not a show that prided itself on its subtlety. ‘Bohunt headmaster Neil Stroger runs a successful comprehensive’, a slightly snotty-sounding narrator informs us, ‘but he knows that his students face an increasingly competitive world’. ‘Chinese students are the people that our children will be having to compete against for jobs in the future’, Stroger says. This is followed by various shots of massed Chinese students on a sports field, exercising in sync; another shot shows a group of Chinese marching in rank and file and hoisting the national flag with much aplomb. ‘Chinese education is based on authority, discipline, and ruthless competition’, the narrator continues. Cruel, mind-numbing, and authoritarian — and maybe even a little ridiculous? Perhaps. But the ‘league tables’ don’t lie: China greatly outperforms Britain, especially in Maths. Can our kids, coddled by ‘child-centred learning’, really compete?

In order to find out, Stroger has decided that his school will participate in a unique experiment: five Chinese teachers were invited over to teach a class from Bohunt — a high-performing comprehensive in Hampshire — for one full month as part of an ‘experiment’ comparing British and Chinese teaching methods; the Chinese teachers having, among other things, much bigger classes (fifty students), much longer school days (twelve hours), and a much heavier emphasis upon rote learning (or, as many ‘traditionalist’ teachers like to call it, ‘teacher-led instruction’). Another somewhat surprising feature of the educational debate at this time is also highlighted: Bohunt is argued to take a more ‘progressive’ view than the Chinese because it taught pupils differently according to their ability. It seems that the total absence of ‘setting’ in China partially inspired Katherine Birbalsingh’s stultifying neo-disciplinarianism, which also staunchly opposes using ‘sets’ except when strictly necessary — instead favouring brutally grinding children, sharp or dull, into a homogenous paste in the name of a supposedly ‘traditionalist’ pedagogy (what exactly is so ‘traditionalist’ about something so egalitarian is anyone’s guess).

The Chinese teachers are all extraordinarily earnest, proud evangelists of their method; in the end, it is hard not to somewhat warm to them in spite of how tedious their lessons must be, especially the enthusiastic Maths teacher, Zou Hailian. ‘We believe in effort. If you put in effort, you will achieve’, says Science teacher Yang Jun, neatly summing up striverist pedagogic doctrine. One senses that the show’s producers pushed them to emphasise just how ‘Chinese’ their approach is, in order to entertain the audience. The walls are plastered with quotes from Confucius: ‘knowledge makes humble; ignorance makes proud’, one quote reads. The children are made to ditch their smart shirts and blazers for the hideous tracksuits favoured at schools in China. The Chinese teachers even imported the faintly ridiculous morning exercise routine; curiously, this was seemingly the only Chinese import that Stroger ended up approving of, perhaps explaining the TikTok algorithm’s passion for showing everyone Chinese primary school childrens’ impressive feats of synchronisation.

Inevitably, the biggest challenge for the Chinese teachers was discipline — not something that they were at all used to dealing with, given the environment back home. Although some students actually didn’t mind their teaching methods, others, apparently fairly well-behaved with British teachers, simply rebelled against the new system, and attempts at shaming them into changing their behaviour predictably backfired. One Chinese teacher argued the problem was that, due to the Welfare State, British children were not sufficiently incentivised to study, because they knew that they could get money without doing any work; the Government needed to cut benefits more aggressively, she concluded. In the end, the Chinese teachers, to their great shame (as they blamed themselves for not being able to keep control of the class), needed to be partially bailed out by Bohunt’s staff to enforce their rules.

At the end of the month, the class taught by the Chinese teachers were given an identical test to a class taught by the British teachers. Spoilers: the Chinese class end up beating the British class, though we might sensibly doubt the scientific validity of the experiment. No matter: the show was a hit, sparking national debate. ‘Progressive’ teachers attacked the Chinese teaching style for being in equal parts boring and cruel, while ascendant ‘traditionalists’ used the show to promote their preference for discipline and rote learning. But in this debate, it was clear who had the upper hand.

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Clearly, this programme didn’t come out of nowhere. In ‘The Posh Turn’, a J’accuse columnist argues that ‘the British ruling class was the earliest and most faithful disciple of “multipolar world” theory’. In Britain, ‘the Rise of China’ (*nods*) was never a ‘slightly dark’ opinion solely held by dangerous dissidents like Philip Pilkington; everyone from The Economist magazine to John Major was thinking along these lines. Perhaps borrowing from the British experience of the ’60s and ’70s, where Britain’s long-standing relationship with the Gulf states helped ensure that London became the premier destination for recycling petrodollars, David Cameron and George Osborne sought to welcome investment from ‘the Chinese’ (an expression usually paired with gritted teeth). This economic and geopolitical strategy culminated in the notorious picture of David Cameron and Xi Jinping drinking a pint together in a Buckinghamshire pub.

This latent Sinophilia of sorts combined with existing educational debates in Britain. Concern about the state of British education, especially poor discipline, was hardly new; indeed, the rolling back of the worst extremes of ‘progressive’ education was a multi-decade, bipartisan process that began in the ’90s, if not earlier. Open support of ‘progressive’ pedagogy would have been politically foolish, if not suicidal, for Left as much as Right.

Nonetheless, in 2010, things gained steam. Concerns about ‘an increasingly competitive world’ — an oblique reference to the ‘rise of China’ — were voiced. Education Secretary Michael Gove decided to make the ‘international rankings’ a centrepiece of his political rhetoric. The 2009 PISA report ‘…underlines the urgent need to reform our school system… we need to learn from the best-performing countries’, Gove stated in a press release. Much as the OECD’s ‘league tables’ of GDP growth in the ’50s were used to try to stir a complacent British public out of their slumber on the economy, the same was now being attempted by Gove with the PISA rankings and education.

Around this time, British policymakers were still enthralled by the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics — somewhat creepy, yes, but certainly impressive, they thought to themselves. Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2012) was also an inevitable bestseller, and I would guess that it was, if anything, more influential in Britain than in the United States. I made sure to read my mother’s copy to try to get advance warning of whatever diabolical scheme she might be cooking up with that book as her inspiration.

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The following year, a remarkably similar show, School Swap: Korea Style (3.7 million views on YouTube) was aired on BBC One; the presenter, Sian Griffiths, was (and still is) the education and parenting editor at The Sunday Times. With the sounds of ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ (whoops!) and ‘Gangnam Style’ playing in the background, the show explains its premise, which is simple: three Welsh teenagers, Ewan, Tommy, and Sarah, all from the presenter’s old school, are sent to Korea for three days, where they will live the life of a Korean student at an elite high school, staying with a host family, and eating, drinking, and attending classes (both at and, importantly, also after school) with their host family’s son or daughter.

The absurdity of the supposed ‘experiment’ is evident from the get-go. The three Welsh pupils attend a pleasant and well-meaning, but academically rather dozy (though not terrible) comprehensive school in rural Pembrokeshire. None of the three are bad students per se. Indeed, one of the three, Ewan, the son of an investment banker working in London, got twelve A*s in his GCSEs, and all three have a positive opinion of their school, albeit not necessarily because of its commitment to academic excellence — Tommy seems more keen on playing rugby than studying, and Sarah praises the school for their excellent pastoral care when her mother was diagnosed with cancer in her GCSE year. By contrast, the two schools — a boys’ school for the two boys, and a girls’ school for the girl — that they are being ‘swapped’ to in Korea are amongst the most academically intense schools in the country, both located in Gangnam, one of the wealthiest areas of the capital city, Seoul. Neither the teenagers nor the school they attend are the Korean students’ equivalents in Britain in any meaningful sense. If the host was actually interested in having a fair ‘experiment’ (she isn’t) then it would surely have been more sensible to send over pupils from an elite day or grammar school in London, where the educational culture is much more intense.

Despite the ‘experimental’ side of the show being taken far less seriously, School Swap: Korea Style is rather less on the nose than Are Our Kids Tough Enough?, and does not really play for laughs. Nonetheless, the messaging is virtually the same: East Asian education is cruel, and at times faintly ridiculous, but in a globally competitive world, it may well be necessary to learn (if not copy) from them.

The presenter makes sure to repeatedly hammer home the importance of the ‘global competition’ and ‘the rankings’. Wales, Griffiths informs us, finished in a pathetic 42nd place in Maths in the 2012 PISA rankings; in an interview, she presses the hapless Welsh education minister to explain Wales’ poor educational performance. Naturally, at no point did anyone ever think to explain what was at stake: what exactly would Wales gain if it improved its ‘ranking’ for ‘Maths’? Was this solely for the gratification of the students, or the parents, or indeed the Welsh government? Or was the idea that more ‘Maths’ (as defined by PISA) would save the failing Welsh economy? It would perhaps be sensible to think more deeply about what we are hoping to achieve before proposing turning our society upside down; appealing to ‘the rankings’ doesn’t cut it.

After all, there is plenty of the ‘cruel’ side of East Asian education on display here, and, unlike in Are Our Kids Tough Enough?, it is not just for laughs. One important respect in which the show is different from Are Our Kids Tough Enough? is that the Koreans, unlike the self-confident Chinese, are far from evangelists for their style of education; indeed, there is hardly a single positive word about their education system uttered on camera by any of the Koreans interviewed. The closest that any Korean comes to praising their own educational system is when Young-chan, who Ewan is paired with, says that the ideal system would be somewhere between South Korea and his impression of Wales. The Korean half of a Korean-Welsh couple, who on balance took the view that they would prefer the lax Welsh educational system for their infant daughter over the Korean, seemed to have a similar opinion. But an outright endorsement of the Korean system by a Korean was nowhere to be found.

Despite a total absence of hostile questioning, the headmaster of the boys’ school was almost apologetic, obliquely blaming the Korean educational system as a whole (rather than himself) for his school’s extreme educational culture. Using a flurry of buzzwords, perhaps as a crutch for speaking in a language that is not his own, the Korean education minister informed the host that the Korean education system, despite the country’s excellent performance in the PISA rankings, has serious problems — it puts too much pressure on students, shuts out extracurricular activities, and does not foster ‘creativity’. A student at Seoul National University, who is training to be a Maths teacher, finds it extremely painful to discuss his teenage years at all, revealing that to get into university he studied for sixteen hours a day for three years straight, and that he knew two people who had committed suicide, one at least partly due to educational stress. Young-chan’s father — now working as a nuclear engineer, but apparently originally from a poor, rural family — tells Griffiths that in order to get his son into a better school, he had to move so far away from his workplace that he lives in a boarding house and only sees his family on weekends.

On the ‘faintly ridiculous’ side, there is an interview with Maths teacher Cha Gil-young, who has become a millionaire through giving paid lectures to middle and high school students online. He is interviewed while he is getting his hair done in a ‘crazy’ manner; this, he tells us, is to show his ‘explosive’ passion for teaching. Clips are shown of him donning various props, including a chicken suit, to entertain his viewers; another clip shows him recording a ‘good luck’ song for those taking the suneung, the Korean college entrance exam, with the K-Pop idol Lee Chae-yeon. Elsewhere, parents are shown praying for their child to do well in their exams at a Buddhist temple; symbolically, they burn their child’s textbooks when (or if) they succeed.

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Inevitably, Birbalsingh had her own take on the phenomenon that was Amy Chua, editing the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers (2016), which, borrowing from Chua’s title, explained her pedagogy. At this time, Birbalsingh was steadily ascending to national stardom. She spoke at the Conservative Party conference in 2010, and in 2014, she established the Michaela Community School — which has previously been discussed in Volume II — to put her ideas into fully practice without local authority interference. This was all vigorously endorsed by the Conservative Party. Gove himself had been criticised by the teaching profession for a vision of the History curriculum that, in their view, seemed to overemphasise the memorisation of facts. He had also repeatedly attacked the Labour Party for allegedly failing socially disadvantaged students. Was ‘learn[ing] from the best performing countries’ — among them, China and South Korea — the solution?

Michaela’s pedagogy blatantly borrows heavily from East Asian practice — despite claiming that the intention is to provide a ‘private school ethos’ but with ‘no fees’, or, alternatively, that they are merely supporters of a ‘traditional’ style of teaching. Anyone who knows anything about private education in this country should be well aware that Michaela is nothing like any private school, boarding or day, no matter how self-consciously ‘traditional’ it is, and not just because of the demographics. In fact, nowadays, the majority of private schools are more ‘liberal’ than the average state school — not that this should be surprising, given the difference in their intake.

At Birbalsingh’s Michaela, discipline is extreme. Teacher authority is absolute. There is a heavy emphasis upon rote learning. And, importantly, the aims are fundamentally egalitarian, with a form of ‘tough-love progressivism’ as the school’s dominant ideology. Teaching to different abilities is generally discouraged; the teacher must remain at the front of the class. At Michaela there does appear to currently be some degree of setting — a previously more dogmatic opposition presumably colliding with the reality of their intake — but this is a compromise with reality that is clearly deeply disliked by most of the teachers. As our Pimlico Journal columnist from Volume II noted, the better students at a school like Michaela will inevitably

…passively sit when they’ve completed the umpteenth comprehension writing task which the other half of the class takes twice as long to do. They do seem legitimately bored of lessons that, however individualised in their delivery, are designed primarily to support and buttress the least able…

This is the fundamental logic behind neo-disciplinarianism. If you provide enough behavioural conditioning and enough prescriptive structure to academic tasks… even less able students will be able to competently complete GCSEs, which as a form of examination optimise for rote learning factual information to be regurgitated in standardised writing formulas…

The precise detail of the Michaela system aside, the generally egalitarian outlook here seems to have (somehow) been endorsed by the Bell Curve-reading Gove and his advisors, who surely must have known the absurdities that such a system would create. But being too cowardly to restore academic selection, and up to their knees in egalitarian political rhetoric, what else could they do?

Cameron and Osborne’s ‘Pivot to China’ may now be long dead, but the consequences of British policymaking world’s love affair with East Asian pedagogy are still with us today. Rather than breaking out of the egalitarian ideological prison that had entrapped their predecessors, the outgoing Conservative Government scrambled to find ways in which they could make comprehensive education work, hitting upon noxious practices foraged from abroad. And for what purpose are we now making so many childhoods utterly miserable? To make Britain look good abroad on ‘the rankings’ that few others seem to care so deeply about? To grow the economy through vague appeals to ‘skills’?

Ultimately, it is best considered a classic example of sham pragmatism that cleaves entirely to existing norms while giving the external appearance of ‘toughness’ and ‘seriousness’ to the general public. Of course, there are many policymaking areas where the outgoing Conservative Government’s performance was undeniably far worse than this. But when education is held up as a lone success story, yet this is all we can find? That is surely a complete indictment on an entire generation of British politicians.

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This article was written by Nigel Forrester, our editor-in-chief. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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