The Chinese Way?

China seems to be in the news an awful lot at the moment. It was with great interest that I recently watched the BBC documentary 'Are our kids tough enough? Chinese school'. A group of Chinese teachers came to teach our British children over a period of a month to see if their approach was better. Testing them at the end of the 'experiment' seemed to show that the Chinese Way gave better results. However, all through the 3 part series, all I saw was children exhausted by the long hours and utterly bored. The teaching style was based on rote learning. I wondered how much lesson preparation these teachers did. It seemed very little at all. Work was not really differentiated. Pupils were given no opportunities to inquire in their learning. There was no opportunities for creativity either. Basically, a very bland diet of learning was offered. So why the apparent success? Simple: pupils were required to put in more learning hours. Independent learning was expected. Pupils committed to memory what they had learnt. Pedagogy aside, this is one thing we can learn from our Chinese counterparts.