(Me, third from left, with my best friends in elementary school, Spring 2010)
Before coming to the U.S. as a college student, I received all of my prior education back in China as a bolt in the state education system. Born to a traditional Chinese family who migrated from Northeast China in the 80s to a first-tier city on the southern coast known as the Silicon Valley of China, I was lucky to get quality education from the get-go. From kindergarten to middle school, my life was laden with education practices deeply rooted in Confucian teachings, which dictated the everyday student-teacher relationship.
Unconditional silence was recognized as a sign of respect both to your teachers and peers because students were encouraged to be s
elf-effacing listeners so that the benefit of passive learning could be maximized. Questions were not encouraged in this test-centered education where teachers simply did not have enough time to get to every question besides cramming as much information into students as possible. Even if, by any chance, questions were allowed, they’d better not be “stupid questions.” Teachers were regarded as the absolute authority whose legitimacy in the transfer of knowledge was beyond question. I grew up hearing countless Chinese sayings on the importance of deferring to your teachers and respecting them in the same way you respect your parents.
Granted, in a society where scores on high-stake exams have the final say on one’s destiny, cultural values put a premium on a tilted classroom dynamic that favors the superiority of teachers, which has been central to Chinese education philosophy since over 2,000 year ago. I was raised and educated in highly teacher-centered classrooms where ‘silence’ was not only common occurrence but an expected norm. More often than not, silence is a preferred phenomenon than a sign of incompetence, which has been likely to be the interpretation by teachers and domestic students in the U.S. when they experienced the silence of me and other Chinese international students in the classroom. In the following blog posts, I will share my and some of my friends’ experience of reconciling ourselves with the dissonance between Chinese and American education philosophy at college.
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