PISA from Shanghai, part 2

Standardization

How many people can make a tastier hamburger than McDonalds? How about making a million of them and guarantee every single of them Ok, not good, just Ok?

The good thing about McDonalds is whenever you walk into a McDonald restaurant in Berlin, Delhi or Beijing, and buy a big Mac, it tastes the same. The bad thing about McDonalds is whenever you walk into a McDonald restaurant in Berlin, Delhi or Beijing and buy a big Mac, well, it tastes the same. The secret of scalability in management is standardization. You can be the best hamburger maker in the world or you never put your finger on a hamburger in your life. McDonalds don't care. If you are making hamburgers for McDonalds, you have to do is to follow their standardized recipe. This is probably not the best way to make state of art hamburgers, but it’s the only way to make a large amount of hamburgers of stable quality.

Most Chinese students are using standard textbooks, studying standard curriculum and taking standard examinations. There are many advantages of this. Standard textbooks make teachers' work easier. When people do something again and again, they tend to do it better and better. Do does teaching. The whole point of specialization is that when people are specialized on something they will do a lot better than when they have to deal with a lot of things at the same time. It makes evaluations of teachers, students and principles' performances easier. It arguably makes students' competition fairer. How well you do in the examination are more important than how well you are connected or how how much those who give you scores like you. In China, the combination of standardized education, large population and limited higher education opportunities created immense pressures on schools and students to improve their performances in examinations.

In America schools, standardization seems to be something everybody wants to avoid. Education researchers don't want it, because it will leave them no space for researches. Teachers don't like it, because it means their performance will be compared with other teachers. Students don't like it because it means more homework. I'm afraind it's probably a necessary evil that nobody likes. For example, the charter schools are often considered new hopes by many. In a recent research, CMO leaders complained attaining scale with consistent quality and without standardization, a challenge(Section 5, I'd rather call it an impossibility).

There are of course many disadvantages, the most important of which, it kills innovation. What is innovation really? For individuals, innovation is all about talent, but for societies, innovation is all about diversity. Think of a thought experiment. There are two groups of people searching for something in an unknown territory. Both of them have 10 people. One group demands everybody must stay together no matter what happened. The other encourage everybody out there to do their own search. Which group is more likely to find their target? It actually depends. If no special obstacle exists, I'd bet it's the group gives its member more freedom. America is a much more diversified society than China. That's why America is a great source of all kinds of innovations from pop music to physics.

But the purpose of education, at least basic education, is not for innovation. Every now and then an American high school student will do some works that can put mose graduate students to shame, but the average standard of secondary education is something deplorable for a developed country. Kant believed education was for the mediocre. The geniuses can find their own ways. The idiots are hopeless. The target of education should be to give the horde in the middle enough knowledge for a job in the modern society. Besides, anybody really believes when given total freedom most high school students will spend their time on finding new ways of doing math? Some of them will, probably only 2-3% according to some research. For these students a standard education is a total waste of time. They have a natural desire for knowledge. It's better to leave them alone. They will turn out something amazing in time. Dragging them through a standard education only put out their natural desire for knowledge. The point is education and innovation are two different games. If you have ten researchers, one of them made breaking through contributions, it’s a great success. If you have ten grade school students, only one of them can do long divide, it’s a disaster.