China’s education system also suppresses innovation while rewarding imitation. Although some Chinese schools conduct innovative experimental education, they remain few and have little impact.From childhood to adulthood, Chinese students are subjected to rote learning—memorizing and obeying rather than questioning or thinking independently. Thus, while Chinese students and researchers excel at replication and refinement of existing work, they are poor at true creativity.
Couldn’t this be said of most education systems in the world? Teaching students to think independently is difficult, hard to scale, and typically creates friction with whoever is in charge (even if they’re communists). I definitely remember having this criticism of my American schools
to some degree yes, but my experience of northern/western european schools vs east asian schools is that in the west, students often do projects, do research, do presentations, and need to answer exam questions with multiple sentences, where as in EA it’s more focused on memorizing, reciting, and picking an answer from multiple choices without always needing to explain why that is the correct answer (apparently this is also the norm in the US?)
Multiple choice is, last I had awareness of it, which was admittedly several years ago now, still important to many of the most important standardized tests. They’ll have like two or three essay questions, like 10 - 20 short answer questions, and maybe 50 multiple choice questions. At least, that’s how I remember it. Of course, the open-ended ones have greater weight, I’m not saying multiple choice is rendered 25 times more important than the essay questions because it definitely is not.
This could be a scale problem. Memorization doesn’t ask much from the teachers; you could probably have non-experts deliver adequate results. It’s hard to find and train a lot of teachers skilled enough to lead more open-ended stufy.
In Puerto Rico (so mix of US education and latam) we had both, usually with more dedicated teachers doing open ended questions and those who were too overworked or didn’t care just used multiple choice and memorization.