Chinese Education System: Not Great

[SheilaT]

4. It is my understanding that despite the many

shortcomings of our system, we do tend to produce people who think independently.

That's wonderful.

We also need to make sure we educate all, which is a difficult and complex problem.

I have a friend, a retired elementary school teacher who works as a reading tutor for grades 1-3 at a local (Santa Fe, NM) elementary school. She is very distressed by many of her students. Many of them come from families where the home language is not English. The worst thing is that they come to school with almost no preparation to learn to read. No matter what she does, they do not retain the basics of letters or sounds.

No one ever reads to them. No one seems to think that learning to read matters at all.

In the past, when my mother, who was born in 1916 in Long Island, NY to Irish immigrant parents in a community where most of her age mates were also children of immigrants, those children understood clearly that they needed to learn English, to learn to read and write and make a better life for themselves. It feels as if more recent immigrants have totally lost sight of the goal of improving themselves. And it's scary. The vast majority of us are descendants of immigrants who learned English, whose children and then grandchildren did better. It feels as if that sense of upward mobility is totally lost.