will admire a lot.
I clearly remember what my teacher told me when I had a prob-
lem that was not included in our test material. When learning conservation of energy, I wondered why the earth could rotate around the sun without energy input from external sources. I brought this question to my physics teacher who simply told me, “Don’t worry about it. It will not be covered in the exam. Jiatu, don’t waste your time thinking about such problems. Think about how to master exam materials.” There was not even a little explanation to my question. Teachers just deemed students’ enthusiasm in researching such problems as a “waste of time.” As a result, many students don’t know how to choose their major when attending college because their interest in what they learned in high school has already been suffocated. Most of them are subject to their parents’ selection. It is hard to imagine how a person can do the work which he/she is not passionate about in the rest of his/her life. Unfortunately, this is something that truly happens.
Thus it is not hard to find out the affinity between my school and
the “middle-class school” described by Anyon. Her statement “One must follow the directions in order to get the right answer…” (193) and a child’s words “(what we do is) store facts up in your head like cold storage…” (195) generalize what we were always doing in high school. We were machines doing repetitive work every day and the only advancement was that we could solve new problems whereas machines could not. Nevertheless, my school is not as good as Anyon’s middle-class school in the aspect of creativity. Anyon says that in the school observed, “Creativity is not often requested…” (194). The case is even worse in my school because creativity is never addressed in my school. Though our government is always emphasizing the significance of elevating creativity of the whole nation, I didn’t see any effort from my teachers to sharpen our innovation.
In fact, most Chinese high schools are in the same pattern as my
school. This education system determines China’s standing in the world: it is 80 Excellence in First-Year Writing 2012