South China Morning Post: Three major universities quit international rankings – a move that will make the rankings less globally representative as Chinese universities pursue a different path. Renmin, Nanjing, and Lanzhou have withdrawn from “all international university rankings,” suggesting a focus on “educational autonomy” and “education with Chinese characteristics”.
RIA Novosti: Russia's Ministry of Science and Higher Education will withdraw from the Bologna process and create its own education system. The Bologna system involves a two-level education system: undergraduate and graduate. The Russian education system, in addition to these levels, includes training at the specialist level with a standard term for mastering educational programs for five to six years.
Putin and Xi, being PhDs, have touched the limits and discovered the limitations of their education systems.
Xi's Steering Committee colleague, Wang Huning will probably head the meetings with the Russians. He is the world’s pre-eminent expert on cross-cultural, Sino-Western-Communist-Semi-socialist matters, whos books have sold millions. He was a TV star. He’s Xi's favorite traveling companion because not only is he smart, but he’s very funny. That’s why he's also China's Chief Censor, a two-thousand-year-old office traditionally headed/blessed by the country's leading intellectual. He publishes his list of things to avoid doing and explains his decisions if enough people complain. That’s why 80% of Chinese trust their media. They know there are limits, they know why they exist, and they’re pretty happy with where the boundaries are. Young folk less happy. Old folk very happy.
Profiting from the Education Gap
The OECD has quantified the Sino-Western education gap in its world wide PISA tests of fifteen-year-olds.
The world’s supersmart people have 160+ IQs. They invent new technologies and get us to Mars through wormholes. The West has 30,000 of this rare breed. China has 330,000.
So thousands of Chinese labs must have spark plugs like them and some have been given exascale computers, 1000x faster than the current generation.
Beijing will want exchange the US$1 trillion currently in its reserves for labs and education while they and the Russians are overhauling the basic conception of a university.
Bologna’s 15th. century model was fine but its obsolete, as every graduate knows. It’s dying a natural death.
On with our tale
It was the summer of 2000. I was 15, and I had just finished my high school entrance exam. I had made considerable improvements from where I started in first grade, when I had the second-worst grades in the class and had to sit at a desk perpendicular to the blackboard so that the teacher could keep a close eye on me. I had managed to become an average student in an average school.
My parents, by then, had concluded that I was not going anywhere promising in China and were ready to send me abroad for high school. Contrary to all expectations, however, I got the best mark in my class and my school, ranking me among the top ten of more than 100,000 students in the whole city. Though my teacher and I both assumed the score was wrong when we first heard it, I got into the best class in the best school in my city and thus began the most painful year of my life.
My newfound confidence was quickly crushed when I saw how talented my new classmates were. In the first class, our math teacher announced that she would start from chapter four of the textbook as she assumed, correctly, that most of us were familiar with the first three chapters and would find it boring to repeat. Most of the class had been participating in various competitions in middle school and had become familiar with a large part of the high school syllabus already and had grown to know each other from those years of competitions together. And here I was, someone who didn’t know anything or anyone, surrounded by people who knew more to begin with, who were much smarter, and who worked just as hard as I did. What chance did I have?
During that year, I tried very hard to catch up: I gave up everything else and even moved close to the school to save time on the commute, but to no avail. Over time, going to school and competing while knowing I was sure to lose became torture. Yet I had to do it every day. At the end-of-year exam, I scored second from the Bottom of the class—the same place I began in first grade. But this time, it was much harder to accept, after the glory I had enjoyed just one year earlier and the enormous amount of effort I had put into studying this year. Finally, I threw in the towel and asked my parents to send me abroad. Anywhere on this earth would surely be better.
So I came to the UK in 2001, when I was 16 years old. Much to my surprise, I found the UK’s exam-focused educational system very similar to China’s. What is more, in both countries, going to the ‘right schools' and getting the ‘right job’ are seen as very important by a large group of eager parents. As a result, scoring well on exams and doing well in school interviews—or even the play session for the nursery or pre-prep school—becomes the most important thing in the World. Even at university, the undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge depends solely on an exam at the end of the final year.
On the other hand, although the UK’s university system is considered superior to China’s, with a population that is only one-twentieth the size of my native country, competition, while tough, is less intimidating. For example, about one in ten applicants gets into Oxbridge in the UK, and Stanford and Harvard accept about one in twenty-five applicants. But in Hebei, my Province in China, only one in fifteen hundred applicants gets into Peking or Tsinghua University.
Still, I found it hard to believe how much easier everything became. I scored first nationwide in the GCSE (high school) math exam, and my photo was printed in a national newspaper. I was admitted into Trinity College, University of Cambridge, once the home of Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Prince Charles, where I studied economics, a field that has become increasingly mathematical since the 1970s. My British classmates' behavior demonstrated an even greater herd mentality than what is often mocked in American MBAs. For example, out of the thirteen economists in my year at Trinity, twelve would join investment banks, and five of us went to work for Goldman Sachs.
Excerpted from ‘The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective’ by Puzhong Yao American Affairs. Winter 2017 / Vol I, No 4.