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斯坦福学者谈中国教育：忽视了人的因素
中国的学校系统向来会引发最激烈的争论。对其持批评态度的人表示，它是一种执迷于考试的官僚体制，培养出的学生擅长死记硬背，但在其他方面却无过人之处。还有一些人则认为，它让孩子具备了格外扎实的技巧，尤其是在数学和科学方面。
NY Times: Weighing the Strengths and Shortcomings of China’s Education System
中国高等教育困局：大学生的批判性思维去哪儿了
香港——中国的中小学常常被人批评，认为它们是使学生精疲力尽、以考试为主的机器，培养出来的学生只会死记硬背基本事实，几乎没有深度推理的能力。
但是，一项新的研究暗示，中国在培养世界上一些批判性思维能力最强的学生。
关于中国的学校是否比美国的学校做得更好，这一意外发现也许会改写这一争论，为以前显示中国学生在阅读、数学和科学等科目上的表现优于全球同龄人的研究作补充。
但是，这项斯坦福大学研究人员做的新研究还发现，中国学生的批判性思维能力在大学期间失去优势。这表明，中国迅速扩张的高等教育系统中存在问题。随着经济增长的放缓，中国政府正把促进增长的希望寄托于高等教育。
这项将在明年发表的研究发现，中国计算机科学和工程专业的新生入学时，其批判性思维能力比美国和俄罗斯的同类新生的水平高两到三年。这些能力包括识别假定、验证假设，以及找到变量之间的关系。
NY Times: Study Finds Chinese Students Excel in Critical Thinking. Until College.
BEIJING — Chinese primary and secondary schools are often derided as grueling, test-driven institutions that churn out students who can recite basic facts but have little capacity for deep reasoning.
A new study, though, suggests that China is producing students with some of the strongest critical thinking skills in the world.
The Future Foundation of Rural Education
Recently, an academic consensus has emerged that China should focus its human capital development in rural areas. Rural residents receive only an average of 9.6 years of education, which leaves them ill-prepared for high-skilled work. Yet with the increased mechanization of factories, manufacturing jobs will likely move offshore, or revert back to the West. This is a great risk for an economy transitioning from low-income to high-income status, such as China.
China Abandoned its One-Child Policy - Now it must fix the gulf in education between city and country children
Around 8 per cent of rural children in China take college entrance exams, compared with 70 per cent of urban children. Reap officials believe this is due to a woeful lack of mental stimulation for rural youngsters between birth and the age of three. They say this is the crucial period for neurons to connect in the brain and set a path for a child’s mental ability later in life.
The Economist: The Class Ceiling
NO CAR may honk nor lorry rumble near secondary schools on the two days next week when students are taking their university entrance exams, known as gaokao. Teenagers have been cramming for years for these tests, which they believe (with justification) will determine their entire future. Yet it is at an earlier stage of education that an individual’s life chances in China are usually mapped out, often in ways that are deeply unfair.
Bloomberg: This is How China Prepares for the Big Test
Hu Huifeng, an 18-year-old high school senior from China’s Jiangxi province, is on a strict regimen. Seven days a week she rises by 6 a.m. for a day of classes in Chinese, English, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology, with the last one finishing at 9:50 p.m. “Once I get home, I study until midnight,” she says.
Wall Street Journal: In Rural China, One-Child Policy Enforcers Push a New Message
For 30 years, Yu Huajian visited villages in rural China to remind couples to have just one child, to abide by the law and help the economy. He also pursued violators of the much-hated policy and oversaw abortions.
Since the one-child policy was abandoned in October, Mr. Yu and some of the half a million other family-planning workers have knocked on rural doors with a different message: How to play with children, read to them and raise them with better skills.
The shift was abrupt, but Mr. Yu said he has always done what he and leaders thought was best for the country.
BBC News: Reinventing China's Abortion Police
Two-year-old Liu Siqi is curled up on her grandmother's lap, complaining of a tummy ache. A man tries to divert her with a squeaky plastic duck.
Caixin Media: China's Rural Youngsters Drop-Out of School at an Alarming Rate, Researchers Find
Chen is among the millions of students in rural areas who quit school each year without completing high school. Although there are no official statistics, studies by various research institutions say one in three students in villages – some 3 million teenagers on average – quit school every year before earning a high school diploma.
Fieldwork Fail: FSI Faculty Share Lessons Learned the Hard Way
"What do I do about the chickens?"
When assistant professor of medicine Eran Bendavid began a study on livestock in African households to determine impact on childhood health, he'd already anticipated common field problems like poorly captured or intentionally misreported data, difficulty getting to work sites, or problems with training local volunteers.
Wall Street Journal: An Update on Banking China's 'Three Nong'
After Mr. Hu retired in late 2012, and China deemphasized his push for a “harmonious society,” less happened with the foreign run rural banks.
Citigroup Inc. says its network of Citi Credit outlets remains at four – including two in Hubei province – the same it reported in 2011. Spokesmen for both Standard Chartered Plc and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. each say their push into village banking stopped at one outlet.
CCTV-13: Service for Birth - How will a Million Family Planning Workers Make the Transition?
On January 9th, China news station CCTV-13 aired a story about REAP's program to train family planning officials who previously enforced the one-child policy, to become early childhood education experts. The original segment was broadcast during News Hour at 10 pm, which has an audience of 1.2 billion viewers.
Caixin Media: Pilot Program Aims to Give Rural Youngsters an Early Helping Hand
Last June, a lively and well-equipped preschool opened in one of the poorest villages in Shaanxi province, as part of a pilot project seeking ways to improve childhood development called Nurturing the Future. The pilot is being run by the national health commission and the Rural Education Action Plan (REAP), a joint research program conducted by Shaanxi Normal University in the northwestern city of Xi'an, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Stanford University in the U.S. state of California.
Financial Times: China Migration - Children of a Revolution
In China, left behind kids battle a social stigma, even if their material conditions are sometimes better than that of children living in homes without migrant income. Conventional wisdon, even among grandparents, is that the grandparents of leff-behind children are not capable of raising children who succeed in school or in life.
Experts are divided on how much children being raised by grandparents are hurt, in terms of educational or even physical development — or even if there is a negative impact at all.
Stanford researchers partner with local government to bring vision care to rural China
Wall Street Journal: China Abandons One-Child Policy
Chinese leaders implemented the one-child policy in 1980 in an effort to rein in explosive population growth and help raise living standards. It was rooted in a Mao Zedong-era baby boom. China’s population rose by nearly half to about 807 million people in 1969 from when the Communist Party took over the country 20 years before. That led to fears among the leadership that China faced a population boom it couldn’t feed.
Huffington Post: How Glasses Can Help Solve Rural China's Schooling Problem
Simply giving nearsighted children glasses can dramatically boost their school performance. Convincing teachers and parents is harder.
News China Magazine: Left-behind children and helping hands
As millions of migrant workers flock to China's cities in search of factory jobs, they are leaving an estimated 60 million children at home in rural areas without one or both parents. In response, the government has invested heavily in boarding schools. However, these boarding schools often fail to meet students' basic needs—both physical and psychological.
The Guardian: Future perfect—investing in a child's wellbeing brings a big payoff
Huffington Post: Can China's One-Child Policy Enforcers Transform Rural Education?
“You can put off building a highway or an airport, but you can’t put off nurturing a child."
This article is the first in a What’s Working series that looks at innovative policy solutions pioneered by the Rural Education Action Program (REAP), an impact evaluation organization that brings together researchers from Stanford University and China to forge new solutions in rural poverty alleviation.
REAP’s Perfecting Parenting Project Shows Promise
Once every week for six months, a special team of family planning workers fanned out across the remote towns of Shaanxi Province or journeyed to isolated villages in the Qinling Mountains, the cradle of China’s civilization and habitat of the world’s remaining wild pandas. Determined to make a difference, the workers braved downpours in the dead of winter and long, treacherous roads to conduct weekly visits to families living in the region’s rural corners.
