I absolutely agree with this. The disconnects between educational needs of students and the test driven disaster that American education has become are truly frightening. Asian education may have some benefits, but the issue of compliance and forced diligence are driving some students to self-harm. This puts the old 'phonics or whole language' arguments of the 80's and 90's into the shade. In my 40 years of professional life across education, business and corporate sector, politics and community I believe we are in a much worse position because of the belief that Australia needs to look elsewhere. We need to look to excellent practice locally and stop the 'grass is always greener' arguments. And thank you, Nicola, for stating your lack of affiliations. The number of educational consultants who have been 'bought' by self-interested companies is truly frightening.

The last paragraph of this article clinches it. Would it be cynical to suggest that such unquestioning acceptance of authority is precisely what some people are looking for in our education system?

Apparently Australians students are falling behind not just in areas of rote learning but in terms of problem solving and analyse abilities see relevant ABC link below: -

"BEN JENSEN: We are comparing children's problem solving abilities. If it was all about rote learning they would be further behind on the league tables."

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2012/s3432871.htm

There are a number of important assumptions that underlay education:
1. Education and learning are not the same thing
2. Teaching and learning are not the same thing
3. Assessment and testing are not the same thing
4. Feedback and testing are not the same thing
5. Performance on tests and demonstration of learning are not the same thing
6. Ranking or Grading and Assessment of Learning are not the same thing
7. Curriculum and Learning Outcomes are not (necessarily) the same thing
8. Content is not the same thing as learning outcomes or learning
9. "Teacher quality" and "teaching quality" are not the same thing and are not necessarily connected
10. "Teaching quality" is much more important than "teacher quality"
11. Education is one area where application the research on teaching and learning screams out for attention

“what do you think?” And they reply “tell us what you think and we will think the same”. Is that really the mark of a gold star education system?
This rhetorical question is not so much an indictment of an educational system as an indication of a cultural politeness.
I suspect that the students will agree with the thoughts in that class but are smart enough to also much the thoughts of teachers in other classes.
My children have learned which thoughts are allowed to be expressed in their classes in Australia.
If they are outside the spectrum of Labor to Green political thought they are wrong.Any facts that do not meet this orthodoxy are wrong. Gough Whitlam apparently made no mistakes. There is always only one correct answer. The teacher is always correct. An Inconvenient Truth is science. The Rabbit Proof Fence is a documentary.
The demonisation of rote learning means that students can't spell and don't know their tables. That journalists confuse sure and shore. That a Prime Minister can't pronounce hyperbole and confuses tenet with tenant.

I've only got one issue with this article - "rote-learning" should read "rote-memorisation".

Being able to recall facts memorised by rote is NOT learning!

I find myself disappointed by your shallow treatment of far more profound and enduring cultural trajectories, Nicola, especially in your simplistic and somewhat negative contrasting of selective East Asian with Western education.

You neither expand on your idea of 'creativity', little more than a current fashion in Australia, whatever it's supposed to mean anyway, but more on that later.

First, the idea that the general education of children is an end in itself needs to be challenged. It is not. It is preparation for other things. In China that is well understood, while here in Australia the endless herding of children into schools as a form of social control in amorphous suburban mass-industrial society is the norm.

The idea in this country that in schools children can be creative, have fun, enjoy learning, develop social skills, is only a very, very recent development following resound criticism of the harsh disciplinary institutions they were not very long ago, only the past generation or so, where boys especially would be routinely caned and the expected outcome for most was to enter a trade, or housekeeping, and become a servant.

That's the benchmark of progress in this country, nothing else. Everyone over the age of 40 today still carries bitter memories of the way they were being treated, and you can see the outcome for yourself in the chronic underachievement of the older generations, a national tragedy of unthinkable proportions.

In China there is no such hypocrisy. If you are a peasant you are a peasant, though not disparaged as in the West and still provided with education for their bright children capable of advancing in life. The culture itself is not at all an amporphous mass but is predicated upon complex kinship obligations (who needs to learn to 'collaborate') and enormous respect for scholarship and learning.

Hong Kong is a difficult, hybrid case because education there was set up by the British, not the Chinese, where as you point out students complain that it failed 'to prepare them for life', again as if it were an end in itself. I know Hong Kong, and I know numbers of academics and teachers working in Hong Kong, as I am familiar with education standards throughout South China. Hong Kong like Western Australia is still VERY British, and worse, very, very English.

Travel west a few hours, take the ferry up the Pearl or West River to any of those major cities and visit instead one of the #1 Middle Schools with a long history of graduating their students in the top 5% in Guangdong, into South China Techical University, Guangzhou Medical University, or Zhong Shan University. There students are immeasurably high achievers who treat their teachers with utmost consideration and respect. My own nephew came out to complete a bridging course and 1st Year at Sydney University before being promptly head-hunted by Toronto to study theoretical physics.

Singapore again is well known for its strict discipline and cleanliness. Lee Kwan Yew remains notorious even today, Singaporean students studying here are always complaining about it. How soon we forget.

How soon we forget remains the most telling criticism of Australian education. The focus on 'creativity', on 'free thinking', I dismiss as little more than political brainwashing, propaganda, worse than anything encountered in China, especially as distinct from the old British colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong. Did someone mention Shanghai? Shanghai is historically likewise a European enclave on the Chinese coast.

Even the teachers of teachers appear to have no History, even Modern History, but less concern for how we came to be where we are right now, what are the long term trajectories, and and what is possible given the ongoing parlous state of general public education in this country. It's simply a waste of time trying to engage even an ostensibly well-educated Australian in intelligent, well-informed conversation, unlike China on the one hand, or even Aboriginal Australia on the other.

Allow me to proceed. Apart from years of anthropology, aside from my papers I am a published author with 4 novels and a non-fiction to my credit, none of which emerged from my 'being creative' but from years of very hard work, extended research, that sadly I find few Australians prepared to emulate or even respect, quite unlike the Chinese students with whom I have studied over the many years.

I know many, many artists, poets, actors, painters, sculptors, glass-blowers, furniture makers, the whole spectrum of creative arts, who spent years of their lives in grinding poverty to refine their technique, master their art, before becoming anywhere near creative with it.

The stuff being produced by kids still in school is a joke. Sadly it displaces the creative work of master artists in the public imagination, and distorts what it means to be creative in fact, lending no inspiration to young people merely more of the same. Where are our Patrick Whites these days, our Robert Helpmanns, our Russell Drysdales, William Dobells and Norman Lindsays? Robert Juniper is still alive, but who has heard of his daughter Bec, quite the artist of her father and again spent years at very hard grind to refine her work.

More telling is the anxiety in Australian 'education' to instill 'collaboration' in children who simply don't know the meaning of competitiveness . . . it's brainwashing . . . socialist propagandising . . . .

Back to China, I've written before and often enough that Chinese students coming to Australia revolutionised education in this country. It is to our credit that to a large extent our students came to the party, especially those from the top private schools where high scholarship is the norm, as in China, rather than the exception.

In the meantime, far too many Australians enrol in Arts thinking they can get a cheap degree by being 'creative'. Far too many think they can come across from Zoology or Medicine thinking they can do a cheap elective in Creative Writing, whose faces go ashen within weeks, once they realise how much very hard work they are going to have to do, in competition with very talented and hard-working young writers.

I do agree to some extent that simple ability to pass tests is not necessarily the measure of successful education, yet it does have to be pointed out that tertiary entry examinations are merely the start of non-general education and students in order to proceed do need substantial content. We grant they can all read and write by then, and do their sums, but any student having completed their Freshman Year will tell you that's nothing to what they are then expected to be able to do at University, with no teacher to hold their hand.

Lacking substantial content, discipline, scholarship, research skills, and a willingness to work hard, in which Chinese and many Westerners excel BTW, it won't make much difference whether a child or young adult attends school in Asia, or Australia, or the US or anywhere on the planet.

In Australia those students will inevitably go on to complete their Honours year, which is to me the very mininum standard of completion, while the rest proceed with a Dip. Ed. and secure a job for themselves in the education industry, or become bureaucrats, or as commonly these days join a union and end up on the Labor back benches, or in many cases join the party itself and become an organiser, all because what they have learned to do effectively is deliver flowery speeches.

Far better to mark the contrasts and mutual influences bearing on Asian and Australian education alike, once you get past secondary preparation, at the highest levels not the medicre, the 'Golden mean', the suburban mass industrial 'norm', to monitor those areas where they strengthen each other, and more to the point track the life progress of their graduates.

That's where it really matters.

Unfortunately, the Asian system does not allow students the "Freedom" to think outside the box, therfore, stiffling creaitivity. Teaching by rote is primative. Maybe one day when the political and cultural system is changed in Asia, students will feel at ease to "think outside the box". At the moment it is not encouraged. One wonders whether this is a cultural problem or a systematic phenonemon crated by Asia's ruling class, so as to maintain control for their own selfish means.