Education Across the Globe

Written By: Andrea Thanos

Thinking back to your previous schooling, going all the way back to elementary school even, what do you remember enjoying the most about the teachers you had or the lessons you learned? If someone asked me this question, my mind would go right to my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Bautista. Mrs. B was my favorite teacher for a few reasons; she harbored mine and my peers sense of creativity by making boring lessons into games, by making Rocket Math a fun competition, and by asking us students for our input. This made me feel motivated and excited about learning every day at a pivotal age. If I were to have had a strict teacher who made every history or literature lesson seem so black and white, I don’t believe I would have been able to respond to learning in such a positive way through high school. My love of learning was created in that fifth grade classroom because of my invested, caring teacher.

Do you ever wonder what it would be like going through the education system in another country? Your experiences in school would have been completely altered. Chinese parents feel that education in China is the best in the world. This forces the question of what are the main differences between the Chinese and American approach to education to be asked.



The American education system is focused around being helpful for the cultivation of students’ creativity and also focuses on improving student assuredness, self-determination, and independence, which aids in comprehensive thinking. While the education system in China focuses on strictness and precision, which improves retention. One woman's son was in the Chinese education system until the age of nine when the family moved to America and he was enrolled in a school here, in the United States. She observed several differences in just the first few days of her son’s educational experiences in America. While her son’s backpack, from the first grade and ever since, had been filled with large, heavy textbooks in China he now didn’t have a need for such a large backpack in his fourth grade class. She found him working on a history project with a smile on his face and she thought back to her own experience working on memorizing fact after fact in her history class. The idea of pounding facts into the heads of students so they’ll memorize a whole time period is oftentimes not the right approach with children. Teaching students through class activities or colorful projects may change how a child feels coming out of the lesson. Making new discoveries, and realizing there isn’t always just one right answer raises the self esteem level of young, impressionable children.

“In comparing Chinese vs. American school approaches, one can easily understand why Chinese students get gold medals in Math Olympics Competitions, but Nobel Prize winners are often Americans.” says International Newsroom. So the question is, what really is more important? Cultivating students’ creativity, or focusing solely on precision?