Why diplomas come before dreams in China

TAIPEI, Taiwan—At 9 p.m., a gaggle of middle-school boys spills out of a storefront in Taipei, still dressed in matching school uniforms. It’s finally time for them to go home after a long day of school and then buxiban, or after-school cram class, where they get extra help on subjects like English and math. Then it’s off to bed before another full day of studying.

In Taipei and other metropolises in Asia, collecting diplomas trumps actual holistic education, so many people receive college and graduate school degrees to please their parents, then go on to pursue their own dreams in a different field. One time at a coffee shop, I met a young man reciting English vocabulary words who said he wanted to move to America to become a pilot. When I asked what he had studied in college, he replied he had a degree in Chinese history because that was the subject in which he scored highest on his college entrance test, which allowed him to get into the best college. He’s now working in retail.

The education systems in China and Taiwan are often criticized for their focus on rote memorization that leaves students able to score high on tests but unable to innovate or think for themselves. And while there’s a growing acknowledgement here in Asia that the education system needs to change, reform is slow as parents who buck the system and take their kids out of crams schools find them falling behind.

As I’ve started learning to read and write Chinese, I’ve begun to better understand at least one aspect of Chinese schools—the focus on memorization. In kindergarden, I remember the alphabet lined up along the walls as we were handed lined paper to practice shaping our upper- and lowercase Rs. We’d write those 26 letters over until our lines were less squiggly and the proportions were right, and then we’d start mixing and matching. C-A-T combined to create a furry little animal that meowed, while T-A-B-L-(silent) E was sturdy enough to eat dinner on. We were on our way to joining the conversation.

But the Chinese language isn’t phonetic or created by rearranging letters, but rather based on unique pictorial characters, some having multiple meanings and sounds depending on the context. There’s some method to the madness; Chinese characters have some common building blocks, like 木 which means tree (and with a little imagination even looks like one). If you see that component in a more complex word, you know it has to do with trees or wood. For instance, 森林, which is made up of three and two “trees” respectively, means “forest” — a place where you’d expect to see many trees.

Often in a more complex character, the component on the left side hints the meaning of a word, while the right side component has a completely different meaning but a similar sound to the word at question. Sometimes, it’s possible to make up a story to help remember a word. For instance, the word 研, which means “to research” is made up of 石 which means “stone,” and 开 which means “open.” So research is essentially breaking open a stone to see what’s inside. As long as I get my stories straight, this helps the memorization process.

But then there are times where there seems to be no rhyme or reason to characters, and the only way to memorize the word is to write it over and over again until your hand hurts and your brain has hopefully caught on. It’s like my alphabet-learning experience, except that instead of 26 letters, I’m looking at 8,000 characters (the number most educated Chinese people know). Then I’m combining them with other characters to make words, then phrases, then finally communicable sentences.

So if the most basic building block in Chinese, its characters, requires so much time and memorization, is it any surprise that other subjects would be handled the same way? Clearly other factors such as Confucian ideals of authority figures and meritocracy play a big part in shaping the Chinese education system. But if from the time you step inside a classroom, you’re required to repeatedly write characters ad nauseam, wouldn’t that be the way you’d learn math and history and science as well?

There’s a beauty to Chinese characters, especially the art of Chinese calligraphy, which is unparalleled in written English. There’s pride in learning one of the oldest modern languages and marveling that 1.2 billion people in the world can speak some form of Chinese. There’s a grit that comes with learning so many different characters and keeping them straight from each other. But the current Chinese education system has much to learn from its Western counterparts as they endlessly rearrange those 26 letters to create new and boundless stories.