Neoliberals on one side, technocratic oligarchs on the other, and Evangelical anti-intellectualism on the flanks. It's an actual fucking conspiracy.
Neoliberals on one side, technocratic oligarchs on the other, and Evangelical anti-intellectualism on the flanks. It's an actual fucking conspiracy.
I remember when one of the first big rankings came out, and Denmark also apparently scored lower than we would have liked. In particular, there was a lot of focus on China, and the chinese system. My mom was a teacher at the time and flat out said that the reason why China was scoring was better, was because the schools that were sampled were private schools, who could just kick students out if they underperformed, or didn't have the ressources to get their grades "back" up. In general there was a lot of anxiety at the time about China taking over, which died down for almost a decade before roaring back to life in the mid 2010's.
I don't remember much China focus during the years after the PISA debacle, when I was old enough to really remember. There was a lot of talk about Finland and South Korea, and there have been since some attempts to copy some elements of the Finnish system, a little.
Apparently South Koreans were primed with the national hymn and speeches telling them to be patriotic brain athletes for the fatherland before taking the test. And Finns are in their system trained to take apparently ungraded tests very seriously. And both of them fell and rose in subsequent PISA rankings, because uh PISA sucks
At least in Denmark there was a documentary made about how the Chinese school system worked. I'm not entirely sure about the reach of it, but it was released over a couple of weeks, and supposedly pitted the students at an ordinary school in Shanghai up against the students of an ordinary danish school in a series of tests. Danish kids obviously failed quite badly in most areas, except for "world news" since that was mostly based around western history, which is already taught here, and english language tests, since we are taught english from like 3rd grade, and english is significantly closer to danish than to Mandarin.
I really don't know enough about the Chinese school system. I half remember some articles that were mostly "China different(bad)" or "Authoritarian factory-like education actually good!"(...that's what I get for reading the haute-burgeois reactionary/neolib newspaper FAZ sometimes). I would presume Chinese schools are good, but that's because I'm a socialist.
I imagine it's a very differentiated picture overall.
I don't know a whole lot about the chinese educational system either, and after watching the danish documentary, you'd also not be terribly clever either. Supposedly after the documentary aired, it was revealed that the school in Shanghai was in fact an elite private school, and that somehow none of the documentary makers had been informed about this. Anyway, it was a really dumb time in Danish media, and thankfully they stopped talking about china for the next 5 years, which was a blissful time of quiet.