This is an
article from NPR that I found extremely interesting. I have some thoughts on the article, but they won't make any sense unless one reads the article first, so here it is.
Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning
In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the
University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods
and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth grade math
class.
"The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw
three-dimensional cubes on paper," Stigler explains, "and one kid was
just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so
the teacher said to him, 'Why don't you go put yours on the board?' So
right there I thought, 'That's interesting! He took the one who can't do
it and told him to go and put it on the board.'"
Stigler knew
that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class
who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the
Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but
still couldn't complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would
ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the
class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as
the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he — Stigler — was getting
more and more anxious.
"I realized that I was sitting there
starting to perspire," he says, "because I was really empathizing with
this kid. I thought, 'This kid is going to break into tears!'"
But
the kid didn't break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to
draw his cube with equanimity. "And at the end of the class, he did make
his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, 'How does that
look, class?' And they all looked up and said, 'He did it!' And they
broke into applause." The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly
proud of himself.
Stigler
is now a professor of psychology at UCLA who studies teaching and
learning around the world, and he says it was this small experience that
first got him thinking about how differently east and west approach the
experience of intellectual struggle.
"I think that from very
early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you're just
not very smart," Stigler says. "It's a sign of low ability — people who
are smart don't struggle, they just naturally get it, that's our folk
theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an
opportunity."
In Eastern cultures, Stigler says, it's just
assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process.
Everyone is expected to struggle in the process of learning, and so
struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it
takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that
struggle.
"They've taught them that suffering can be a good
thing," Stigler says. "I mean it sounds bad, but I think that's what
they've taught them."
Granting that there is a lot of cultural
diversity within East and West and it's possible to point to
counter-examples in each, Stigler still sums up the difference this way:
For the most part in American culture, intellectual struggle in
schoolchildren is seen as an indicator of weakness, while in Eastern
cultures it is not only tolerated, it is often used to measure emotional
strength.
It's a small difference in approach that Stigler believes has some very big implications.
'Struggle'
Stigler
is not the first psychologist to notice the difference in how East and
West approach the experience of intellectual struggle.
Jin Li
is a professor at Brown University who, like Stigler, compares the
learning beliefs of Asian and U.S. children. She says that to understand
why these two cultures view struggle so differently, it's good to step
back and examine how they think about where academic excellence comes
from.
For the past decade or so, Li has been recording
conversations between American mothers and their children, and Taiwanese
mothers and their children. Li then analyzes those conversations to see
how the mothers talk to the children about school.
She shared with me one conversation that she had recorded between an American mother and her 8-year-old son.
The
mother and the son are discussing books. The son, though young, is a
great student who loves to learn. He tells his mother that he and his
friends talk about books even during recess and the American mother
responds with this:
Mother: Do you know that's what smart people do, smart grown ups?
Child: I know... talk about books.
Mother: Yeah. So that's a pretty smart thing to do to talk about a book.
Child: Hmmm mmmm.
It's a small exchange — a moment. But Li says, this drop of conversation contains a world of cultural assumptions and beliefs.
Essentially,
the American mother is communicating to her son that the cause of his
success in school is his intelligence. He's smart — which, Li says, is a
common American view.
"The idea of intelligence in believed in
the West as a cause," Li explains. "She is telling him that there is
something in him, in his mind, that enables him to do what he does."
But
in many Asian cultures, Li says, academic excellence isn't linked with
intelligence in the same way. "It resides in what they do, but not who
they are, what they're born with," she says.
She shares another
conversation, this time between a Taiwanese mother and her 9-year-old
son. They are talking about the piano — the boy won first place in a
competition, and the mother is explaining to him why.
"You practiced and practiced with lots of energy," she tells him. "It got really hard, but you made a great effort. You
insisted on practicing yourself."
"So
the focus is on the process of persisting through it despite the
challenges, not giving up, and that's what leads to success," Li says.
All
of this matters because the way you conceptualize the act of struggling
with something profoundly effects your actual behavior.
Obviously
if struggle indicates weakness — a lack of intelligence — it makes you
feel bad, and so you're less likely to put up with it. But if struggle
indicates strength — an ability to face down the challenges that
inevitably occur when you are trying to learn something — you're more
willing to accept it.
And Stigler feels in the real world it is easy to see the consequences of these different interpretations of struggle.
"We
did a study many years ago with first-grade students," he tells me. "We
decided to go out and give the students an impossible math problem to
work on, and then we would measure how long they worked on it before
they gave up."
The American students "worked on it less than 30
seconds on average and then they basically looked at us and said, 'We
haven't had this,'" he says.
But the Japanese students worked
for the entire hour on the impossible problem. "And finally we had to
stop the session because the hour was up. And then we had to debrief
them and say, 'Oh, that was not a possible problem, that was an
impossible problem!' and they looked at us like, 'What kind of animals
are we?'" Stigler recalls.
"Think about that [kind of behavior] spread over a lifetime," he says. "That's a big difference."
Not East Versus West
This
is not to imply that the Eastern way of interpreting struggle — or
anything else — is better than the Western way, or vice versa. Each have
their strengths and weaknesses, which both sides know. Westerns tend to
worry that their kids won't be able to compete against Asian kids who
excel in many areas but especially in math and science. Jin Li says that
educators from Asian countries have their own set of worries.
"'Our
children are not creative. Our children do not have individuality.
They're just robots. You hear the educators from Asian countries express
that concern, a lot,'" she notes.
So, is it possible for one culture to adopt the beliefs of another culture if they see that culture producing better results?
Both
Stigler and Li think that changing culture is hard, but that it's
possible to think differently in ways that can help. "Could we change
our views of learning and place more emphasis on struggle?" Stigler
asks. " Yeah."
For example, Stigler says, in the Japanese
classrooms that he's studied, teachers consciously design tasks that are
slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach, so the
students can actually experience struggling with something just outside
their reach. Then, once the task is mastered, the teachers actively
point out that the student was able to accomplish it through the
students hard work and struggle.
"And I just think that
especially in schools, we don't create enough of those experiences, and
then we don't point them out clearly enough."
But we can — Stigler says.
In
the meantime, he and the other psychologists doing this work say there
are more differences to map — differences that allow both cultures to
see who they are more clearly.
