Xueqin Jiang speaks about the Chinese experience

Thanks, Vikas. So, from many perspectives, China moving to education technology has been a success story, and there are three major reasons why China has been so successful so far. One is that there's cohesion in society. Parents, teachers, society are all focused on educating a child, so that when kids are going, studying online, parents are very supportive, right? So, that's reason one. Reason two is that the Chinese school system is focused mostly on information delivery, and that's pretty easy to translate online. A third reason is that China's education for the past 10 years has been very focused on building up its education technology capacity. This is what's called a future school project, and the vision is, if you can imagine a high -speed railway system, which China is very proud of, and which has been very successful, imagine that for Chinese education, right? So, if you can imagine a high -speed railway system, which China is very proud of, and which has been very successful, imagine that for Chinese education, right?

So, if you can imagine a high -speed railway system, which China is very proud of, and which has been very successful, imagine that for Chinese education, right? So, if you can imagine a high -speed railway system, which China is very proud of, and which has been very successful, imagine that for Chinese education, right? So, if you can imagine a high -speed railway system, which China is very proud of, and which has been very successful, imagine that for Chinese education, right? So, if you can imagine a high -speed railway system, which China is very proud of, and which has been very successful, imagine that for Chinese education, right? So, if you can imagine a high -speed railway system, which China is very proud of, and which has been very successful, imagine that for Chinese education, right? is that Chinese schools are built entirely around extrinsic motivation.

You put 50 kids in a classroom and you have them compete against each other for a test score. And your test score determines praise from your teacher, it determines rewards from your parents, and it determines your sense of self -worth. So let me give an example to illustrate the power of extrinsic motivation in Chinese schooling. So the biggest news coming out of Chinese education during coronavirus is that they've announced that the Gaokao, the National College Interest Examination, will be postponed by a month. And that hasn't happened in Chinese education for the past 30 years. The Gaokao is the biggest thing in Chinese education, and moving it is a tremendous signal no confidence in your coronavirus response. So I was very surprised by the government's reaction. I was also surprised because I thought, you know, test preparation, it's all about sitting at home, memorizing texts, and doing test questions. Why do you need to go to school to do test preparation?

My wife, who did go for the Chinese school system, she explains there are two good reasons. The first reason is that what matters in Chinese education is not how well you do on tests, what matters is how you do relative to your peers. So being in a classroom and knowing how your peers are doing allows you to self -assess and developing learning strategies to overcome them. And the other big thing is just purely motivational, right? So the best thing about Chinese education, the thing that everyone has to witness for herself are these pep rallies for tests. So during those two days in June and July, when they take the test, they do a lot of pep rallies before. And you know, you can imagine, you know, these football pep rallies in the United States, you know, who get really riled up. But to imagine the ferocity and intensity of these pep rallies, imagine this.

Aliens have invaded China, and they're about to kill everyone. And the only way to save the nation, the only way to save your family is by doing well in the Gaokao. And you know, these pep rallies, they'll try slogans like one point means, one more point means 3,000 defeated enemies, okay? So these pep rallies are crazy. So what they're discovering is that in a system that's built entirely on exercise and motivation, if you move everything online, students don't have the motivation to learn, okay? So, you know, we're going to have to teach them how to do it, which leads to the second big issue, maintaining the student -teacher dynamic. Now, in China, teachers are extremely well -respected. They're like gods. And that gives them complete control over the classroom. But once they move online, that may change because students are much more adept and clever than teachers at navigating the online world, right?

So from a personal perspective, online just means, teachers, teachers delivering information. But there are so many ways for students to disrupt learning online. And so I'll give some examples. The first example is that teachers assign apps to do homework. And what students have figured out very quickly is that if they downvote the apps on the App Store, the App Store, the algorithm removes the app from the store, which means that kids don't have to do homework anymore. What kids have also discovered is that they can figure out which, where, and how to do the homework. The second point is that the software is pirated by the teachers. And then they report the pirated software to the companies. companies launch a formal complaint against teachers, the teachers can't teach anymore. And the third example is, so it's very funny. So in the Chinese language, there are a lot of homonyms, okay, words that sound exactly the same.

So the word, the word for petabond is the same for eunuchs, and the words for methyl molecule sounds exactly the same as phallus, okay. So a high school chemistry teacher, she was saying online, she was lecturing online to her kids when we attach a methyl molecule onto a peptide bond. Very simple chemistry information. And then what the kids heard was, hey kids, let's see what happens when we attach a phallus onto a eunuch. So two things happened, right? First thing that happened is that the kids laughed. The second thing that happened is that the kids reported the teacher right away to authorities for using lewd language online. So there are so many ways for students to disrupt learning online, and they do it because the power dynamic, teachers have complete control over everything, which makes kids resentful. And so they resort to these tactics. So yeah, so that's the situation in China right now.