QA讨论:结合自身学习经历讨论中外教育体制的差异

Anonymous
I did 1st grade in Japan, 2-3rd grade in Canada, 4-12th grade (or high school senior year) in China, and college & grad school in USA.
It's probably unfair to compare since I spent time in different countries at different ages. But here's what I know:

我在日本读了一年级，在加拿大读了二年级和三年级，四到十二年级（或高中毕业班）是在中国读的，然后在美国读的大学和研究生。
由于我是于不同年龄阶段在不同国家学习的，比较可能不太公平。但这是我所知道的：

The classroom setting in Canada was very different from China and Japan. The chairs were scattered more spaciously, the rooms had a little more color, there were maps and drawings and writings and other stuff on the walls. There was a computer room. The playground had more equipment to play with. China and Japan were similar in style, both very simple. They both had the absolute necessaries, desks and chairs and blackboard, and not much more. And that was pretty much it. The primary school in Japan that I went to had an indoor swimming pool, and we were taught swimming. Education spanned through the typical subjects as well as planting and growing flowers and how to save yourself in an earthquake.

加拿大的教室设置与中国和日本的教室设置极为不同。椅子摆放得更宽敞，房间里有一些颜色，墙上贴有地图、图画、文字和其他东西，还有一个计算机室。操场上有更多的器材可以玩耍。中国和日本的风格相似，都非常简单。它们都有最基本的设施：桌子、椅子和黑板，再没有更多的东西了，基本上就是这样。我在日本上小学时，学校有一个室内游泳池，我们还学习了游泳。教育内容不仅包括常规科目，还包括种植和培育花卉以及如何在地震中自救。

When I first went to Japan, I couldn't speak Japanese. I think my teacher and my peers thought I was literally a retard at first, since I couldn't communicate, but they never disrespected me, and tried to work with me as much as possible, and upon finding out that I was an international, they hired a translator to sit with me during class so she could translate to me what the teacher said. My classmates immediately warmed up to me after learning the truth and tried to make friends with me, however hard it was since I was just learning Japanese.

当我刚去日本时，我不会说日语。我认为我的老师和同学一开始可能因为我不能交流，就会认为我是个傻瓜，但他们从没有不尊重我过，而是尽可能地与我合作。在得知我是国际学生后，他们雇了一位翻译，在上课时坐在我旁边，为我翻译老师说的话。同学们在了解真相后立刻对我热情起来，尽管我刚开始学习日语，他们还是尽力与我交朋友。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

When I first went to Canada, they knew I was an international who knew nothing. I was placed in an ESL class, and I learned everything quickly. Nobody ever bullied me either. They made friends with me and helped me despite the fact that I knew close to zero English and was complete new to the Canadian culture.

当我刚去加拿大时，他们知道我是一个什么都不会的国际学生。我被安排在非母语英语课程（ESL）班，很快学到了一切，也没有人欺负我。他们与我交朋友并帮助我——尽管我几乎不会英语，对加拿大文化也完全陌生。

When I went back to China, my Chinese was very poor since I haven't used it for a couple of years. I understood some of it since my parents spoke it at home, but I never used it in the public or even much at home. Not only did my classmates alienate me and bully me, but my teachers as well.

当我回到中国时，我的中文很差，因为我已经好几年没用过了。由于父母在家说中文，我还能理解一些，但我从不在公共场合使用，甚至在家里也很少用。不仅我的同学排斥我、欺负我，老师也一样。

To this day I still remember my first day of English class in China. The teacher noticed that a new kid came, so I guess she was trying to figure out how good I was. She walked up to me and told me "you stand up piss" (with a strong accent). I stared at her, not knowing what to do. I was completely out of words. And she repeated it again and I got even more confused. She couldn't be serious could she? And then after a few seconds she thought I was a retard and started to talk loudly to the class about how a retard came here. The class laughed. I knew enough Chinese to understand her insults. So I cried. And she seemed even more proud. (I spent a minute thinking of the right word to describe her reaction. I'm pretty sure "proud" is the most accurate word here.) Later that day, long after that class has finished, I realized that she was telling me "you stand up please". But anyway, she continued to think of me as a retard throughout the semester that she taught. There was another time when she asked me to answer a question and I answered it in a full English sentence. I don't think she understood me, and then she accused me of talking like a mosquito, made the class laugh again, and complained that I cried too much too easily, which also indicated that I was a loser destined for failure.

直到今天，我仍然记得我在中国上英语课的第一天。老师注意到来了一个新同学，所以我想她是在试图了解我的水平。她走到我跟前对我说：“请站起来”（带着很重的口音，变成了“站起来撒尿”）。我盯着她，不知道该怎么办。她又重复了一遍，我更加困惑了。她不会是认真的吧？过了几秒钟，她以为我是个智障，开始大声对全班说“怎么来了一个智障”，全班都笑了。我懂的中文足以理解她的侮辱举动。所以我哭了，她却似乎更加得意。（我花了一分钟思考用哪个词来形容她的反应。我相当确定“得意”是最准确的词。）那天晚些时候，那节课结束后很久，我才意识到她是在说“请站起来”。但不管怎样，她整个学期都把我当作傻瓜。还有一次，她让我回答一个问题，我用完整的英语句子回答了。我认为她没听懂，然后她指责我说话像蚊子，又让全班笑了一次，并抱怨我太容易哭，这也表明我是一个注定要失败的失败者。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

The next English teacher was a bit better. She was a little more competent, as she was actually able to tell that I was good at English. Life became a little better, and then there was this day when she wrote the word "chees" on the blackboard, and asked the class if they knew what it meant. Nobody knew, and she asked me. I was confused. So I took a guess that she wanted to write "chess", and then she said it's "cheese" in a tone of triumph, and organized the class to laugh at my mistake.

后面的英语老师稍微好一些。她稍微厉害一点，因为她确实能分辨出这一点：我的英语很好。学习生活变得稍微好了一些，然后有一天，她在黑板上写下了“chees”这个词，问全班是否知道它的意思。没人知道，她问我。我很困惑。所以我猜测她想写的是“chess”，然后她以一种胜利的语调说“cheese”，并组织全班嘲笑我的错误.

I'm not telling these stories as jokes or anecdotes. I'm not writing these things to laugh at my incompetent teachers. The thing that frightens me the most about primary education in China is not even how unnecessarily hard it is, but how abusive it is. Teachers had little respect for students. We as children were taught to respect teachers, but in return the teachers often seemed to think that the gesture meant they were superiors. I've seen teachers yelling at students, sometimes even using foul language or borderline physical violence. And they think they're entitled to do that just because they are the teachers who should be respected and obeyed by students. I can't draw to big conclusions here, but I was only alienated and bullied regularly by my classmates in China, even though that was the only place where I wasn't a foreigner and I knew enough language to make a conversation. I think I've read somewhere that abuse is usually taught inadvertently.

我讲这些故事不是为了开玩笑或作为轶事。我写这些不是为了嘲笑我老师的无能。我对中国小学教育最害怕的事情甚至不是它多么不必要地艰难，而是它多么具有虐待性。老师几乎不会尊重学生。我们作为孩子被教导要尊重老师，但反过来，老师似乎常常认为这意味着他们是高人一等的。我见过老师对学大声喊叫，有时甚至使用粗俗语言或近乎身体暴力。他们认为自己有权这么做，只是因为他们是应该被学生尊重和服从的老师。我不能在这里得出有影响力的结论，但我在中国时，只有在中国我才被同学排斥和欺负，尽管那是唯一一个我不是外国人且懂得足够多语言进行交流的地方。我想我在某处读到过，虐待通常是无意中被教授的.

Secondary education in China was better in terms of respect and culture, but I'm not sure if that's simply because I went to arguably the best high school in China so I got the best-trained teachers in the country. There were also a lot of extracurricular activities offered at my school, but school was so unnecessarily hard that most students didn't have the leisure to participate in them. Actually, the unnecessary hardness probably started in primary school - only the top Math Olympiad students and a handful of student athletes and musicians were admitted to good middle schools. And then 3 years later students were admitted into high schools based on their score on the entrance exam, which is hard but nothing compared to the college entrance exam. But anyway, everything was made extremely hard due to the pressure of competition for the best schools.

中国的中学教育在尊重和文化方面要好一些，但我不确定这是否仅仅是因为我上的是中国最好的高中之一，所以我遇到了全国最好的老师。我的学校也安排了很多课外活动，但学校太不必要地严厉，以至于大多数学生没有闲暇去参加课外活动。实际上，这种不必要地严厉可能从小学就开始了——只有顶尖的数学奥林匹克学生和少数学生运动员及音乐家才能被录取到好的中学。三年后，学生根据入学考试的成绩被录取到高中，这个考试很难，但与高考相比就不算什么了。但不管怎样，由于就读最好学校的竞争压力，一切都变得极其严厉。

Now, many people are talking about the high grades that Chinese students achieve in math and science subjects, but those high grades doesn't translate into anything meaningful. For most students, the physic/chemistry/biology entrance exam they take is the last time they ever care about those subjects. I went to a great school so most of my classmates were geniuses that studied extremely hard and got very high grades, and immediately after they got that top mark in the exam they were done with all sciences. Gee they could have learned some programming or economics for the 3 years and actually had some meaningful intellectual years. So this is the problem I have with the secondary education in China. The subjects are way too hard for completely no purpose but to separate students in the college entrance exam, and most of the stuff we learn in high school do not follow us anymore beyond the big exam. I'm actually an engineer now and I think most of the sciences I learned in high school were useless and sometimes false.

现在，许多人谈论中国学生在数学和科学科目中取得的高分，但这些高分并没有转化为任何有意义的东西。对于大多数学生来说，他们参加的物理、化学、生物入学考试是他们最后一次关心这些科目的时候。我上了一所很好的学校，所以我的大多数同学都是学习非常努力、成绩非常高的天才，他们在考试中取得最高分后就再也不关心所有的科学了。天哪，他们本可以在三年内学习一些编程或经济学，真正度过一些有意义的智力发展时光，这就是我认为的中国中学教育的问题所在。这些科目的难度远远超出了实际需要，只是为了在高考中区分学生，而我们在高中学到的大部分东西在大考之后就再也没有用过。我现在是一名工程师，我认为我在高中学到的大部分科学知识都是无用的，有时甚至是错误的。

Moreover, the pressure of getting into a good college in China is so high that it often makes the student very unbalanced. I recall in my senior year in high school that almost nobody had a stable body weight. Everybody either gained at least 10 pounds or lost at least 10 pounds. Here's why: The intense studying drains a lot of energy. Those who ignore the fatigue lose weight. Those who eat more due to feeling tired and hungry gain weight. And I'm not telling this as a joke either. I don't think anybody in my entire class was in the same shape at the beginning of the year and at the end of it. I did go to the school where people studied the hardest, so maybe not everybody suffered from this, but still, the imbalance is scary, and sad.

此外，进入中国好大学的压力非常之高，以至于常常使学生变得非常不平衡。我回忆起高中毕业那年，几乎没有人的体重是稳定的。每个人要么至少增重10磅，要么至少减重10磅。原因如下：紧张的学习消耗了大量能量。那些忽视疲劳的人会减重。那些因为感到疲倦和饥饿而吃得更多的人会增重，我可不是在开玩笑。我认为我们班上没有一个人在年初和年末时的体重是相同的。我确实上了一所人们学习最努力的学校，所以也许不是每个人都遭受了这种情况，但无论如何，这种不平衡是可怕的，也是令人悲哀的.

I did go to summer school at a very famous high school in America for one summer. Summer school is very different from regular school, so I'm not going to compare the life, but the facilities were so far apart. The library of my high school was the size of two classrooms and (almost) nobody ever visited. The library here was a 4/5-story building. My high school had one track & field / soccer court and one swimming pool. Here they had courts for almost every sport possible. The science labs of my high school were located in a very old and outdated building that we used to tell ghost stories about. The science labs here were new and fully equipped with all facilities.

我曾在夏天去美国一所非常著名的高中上过一个暑假的课。暑期学校与普通学校非常不同，所以我不会去比较学习生活，但设施的差距太大了。我高中的图书馆只有两个教室那么大，而且（几乎）没有人去参观。这里的图书馆是一座四到五层的建筑。我高中有一个田径/足球场和一个游泳池。这里几乎有每种运动的场地。我高中的科学实验室位于一座非常陈旧和过时的建筑中，我们以前常在那里讲鬼故事。这里的科学实验室是新的，并且配备了所有设施。

There were classes like genetic engineering and the art of debate here. Nobody was stuck to learning a subject that they hated as hard as they can just to pass an exam they wanted nothing more than to be done with.Maybe we have higher grades in China, but it just seems completely meaningless to me. And we sacrificed so many things on the way to getting that score we want to enter a good college, even fitness and health. I don't think people should judge how successful an education system is just by how high the exam score of the graduates were.

这里还有遗传工程和辩论艺术等课程。没有人被迫学习他们讨厌的科目——只是为了通过他们只想尽快完成的考试。也许我们在中国的成绩更高，但对我来说似乎完全没有意义。为了获得进入好大学所需的分数，我们在学习过程中牺牲了很多东西，甚至包括健康和体能。我认为人们不应该仅仅通过毕业生的考试成绩来判断一个教育系统有多成功。

I can't directly compare college and grad school either, as I have only been exposed to the American version. I do notice that the level of pressure and urgency of studying in the higher education section has completely reversed. College in America is tough. There's so much to learn, so much to do. There are deadlines every few days, sometimes even everyday. Assignments are hard and lab is demanding.

我不能直接比较大学和研究生教育，因为我只接触过美国的版本。我注意到，在高等教育阶段，学习的压力和紧迫感完全颠倒了。美国的大学很难，有太多东西要学，有太多事情要做。每隔几天就有截止日期，有时甚至是每天遇到。作业很难，实验室要求很高。

I've heard the complete opposite from my friends in China. There's almost no pressure of anything. Many students slack, and don't learn much over 4 years in the bubble. In their defenses, high school juiced away all the energy in them and they are literally incapable of working hard anymore. I heard this explanation multiple times from many people, and it just sounds very sad to me. The high school education is pretty much useless because none of the subjects that we learned offered any directly translatable skills in the real world. And students lose the drive when it actually mattered. It seems like a very unsuccessful education system to me. You exhausted the students, yet failed to turn them into useful intellectual forces. That seems like really low efficiency.

我从在中国的朋友那里听到的情况则完全相反，中国的大学和研究生教育几乎没有压力。许多学生在四年的大学生活中松懈，没有学到多少东西。他们辩解说，高中耗尽了他们所有的精力，以至于他们真的无法再努力学习了。我多次从许多人那里听到这种解释，在我看来，这听起来非常悲哀。中学教育基本上是无用的，因为我们学的任何科目都没有提供任何可以直接转化为现实世界技能的东西。当真正需要的时候，学生却又失去了学习的动力。在我看来，这似乎是一个非常不成功的教育体系。你耗尽了学生，却没有将他们转化为有用的智力力量。这效率似乎非常低.

And I've heard that nowadays a bachelors degree is useless in China. I don't know if that's really due to the absolute necessity of a graduate degree to do certain jobs, or if people just don't learn much in college. I really don't know.
So anyway, here's what I think about the Chinese education system. We probably produce the highest scoring individuals. But in general, I think our system has some really big flaws and is very inefficient.

我还听说现在在中国，学士学位似乎没什么用处了。我不知道这是否是因为某些工作确实需要研究生学位，还是因为人们在大学里没有学到多少东西，我是真的不清楚。
总之，这就是我对中国教育体系的看法。我们可能培养出分数最高的个体，但总体而言，我认为我们的体系存在一些非常大的缺陷，效率非常低。

Xuzheng Wang

Due to lessons taken by history, Chinese educational system is all about fostering engineers(especially second tier cities third tier cities and small towns, natural science理科 seems to be the only way out)which is a short cut to industrialize a country within a short time. That's why we got so many low level engineers. IMO, the Chinese Ministry of Education doesn't care about personality development of students. All they care about is to enhance the industrial level and technological leve by utilizing the current educational system, in order to catch up with the US, Europe and Japan.
由于历史的教训，中国的教育体系主要致力于培养工程师（特别是在二、三线城市和小城镇，理科似乎成了唯一的出路），这是一种在短时间内实现国家工业化的捷径。这就是为什么我们有这么多低水平工程师的原因。在我看来，中国教育部并不关心学生的个性发展。他们所关心的是利用当前的教育体系提高工业水平和技术水平，以便赶上美国、欧洲和日本。