我是煞笔# Joke - 肚皮舞运动
l*2
1 楼
听过她( LIN LI) 本人的WORKSHOP那对中国的传统文化在教育上的优势是很自豪的。没
时间翻译了，大家凑着看吧。她有个感想我是比较赞同的，就是人容易把政治和文化混
在一起，失去真正的分辨力。
她有个PAPER 对比文化对早期教育的影响： 到高中的时候西方教育所谓的兴趣不再
WORK了，学生辍学率开始上升，中式教育开始有优势，学生把学习当成挑战坚持下来了
升学率高。有时间给大家翻出来。
不知道我儿子以后会怎样的怪胎： 在学校老师强调激发兴趣，在家不学习几个汉字不
能睡觉不讲故事。
Why Do Eastern and Western Kids Learn Differently?
By Jana Burns
February 4, 2013— Picture this: In a cozy U.S. classroom, preschoolers
listen attentively as their teacher tells a story about a young bear
struggling to catch fish. “How do you imagine this story might end?” the
teacher asks.
Credit: Frank Mullin/Brown University
Raised in Maoist China, Jin Li says culture has as strong an effect on
learning as schools do.
“I think the bear should go to school and learn to catch fish there,” one
boy replies.
“He should wear floaties and practice swimming in a pool first,” a girl
suggests.
On the other side of the globe, in a classroom in China, a teacher presents
the same tale, but the children’s response is very different. “The bear is
too young” is a typical answer. “His claws are too small to catch any
fish.” “He should go back and try harder.” “He lost his focus.”
In her book Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West, Associate
Professor of Education Jin Li offers these two discussions to demonstrate
that, by the time they are four years old, children have already developed
distinctive learning styles shaped by their cultures. “As learners we are
products of our culture,” she says, “which has been passed down by
generations of grandparents and parents.” That, she says, influences
learning far more than any particular school curriculum.
For her research, Li studied thousands of children in both the East and West
to discern how culture dictates educational values and beliefs. In the West
, she says, curiosity, interest, enjoyment, and intrinsic motivation are
paramount. But there’s a trade-off. Many Western students lack persistence,
she says, and have low expectations along with an overinflated sense of
self. In contrast, Asian students are taught to value perseverance,
commitment, and humility, and with them the trade-off is a neglect of
creativity.
Li’s personal experience gives a clue to her research focus. Growing up in
Communist China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, she was in third grade
when the Communists closed the country’s schools, proclaiming that
intellectual work was a bourgeois evil, and that children should learn to
plow fields and recite Maoist doctrine instead.
Ten years later, when the government began allowing schools to reopen, Li
was one of a few hundred students to pass the difficult high school
admission exam. But two years later the political wind shifted again, and
she was sent to be “re-educated” far from her family in the Chinese
countryside, where she planted rice and vegetables, administered acupuncture
and herbal treatments to villagers, and taught children of all ages with
scarce or no supplies.
When Chinese students were readmitted to universities following Mao’s death
in 1976, Li was placed in the German studies program at the Guangzhou
Institute of Foreign Languages, where she went on to teach. There she met an
American academic she would later marry and with whom she moved to Vermont
in 1985.
How she differed culturally from her fellow Americans became clear, she says
, after she became a substitute high school teacher. “That was a startling
experience,” she says. “It was such a beautiful learning environment, and
yet the children did not want to learn. I realized then that my attitudes
towards learning were very different, and I wanted to get to the bottom of
that.”
After receiving a master’s in foreign-language education from the
University of Pittsburgh, Li enrolled at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Education, where she earned a second master’s, this one in administrative
planning and social policy, and a doctorate in human development and
psychology. In Cambridge, she studied her own cultural heritage.
“I knew a lot about Western culture,” she says, “but I had not spent any
time studying China’s. Before Harvard, I was too angry with the Communists,
and I could not distinguish culture from politics.”
It was while she lived with farmers in the Chinese countryside that she
first observed the deep roots of cultural tradition. “These people
struggled,” she recalls. “They were poor and under the thumb of the
Communist Party. But they held on to their values, held their families
together. Elders looked after their children, children respected their
parents, and everyone followed traditional kinship relations. Communism didn
’t change that.”
Asked whether she has combined Eastern and Western learning cultures in her
family, Li laughs and refers to her son’s recent history exam. “He had a
ninety-four and was very proud,” she says. “The Chinese mother in me
wanted to ask him: what happened to the other six points? But I stopped
myself.”
Li has been trying to embrace U.S. learning culture, but so far, she says,
the transformation has been relatively superficial. “The beliefs that you
don’t have to stretch to understand are the most powerful,” she says. “
Things can change, but it takes time.”
时间翻译了，大家凑着看吧。她有个感想我是比较赞同的，就是人容易把政治和文化混
在一起，失去真正的分辨力。
她有个PAPER 对比文化对早期教育的影响： 到高中的时候西方教育所谓的兴趣不再
WORK了，学生辍学率开始上升，中式教育开始有优势，学生把学习当成挑战坚持下来了
升学率高。有时间给大家翻出来。
不知道我儿子以后会怎样的怪胎： 在学校老师强调激发兴趣，在家不学习几个汉字不
能睡觉不讲故事。
Why Do Eastern and Western Kids Learn Differently?
By Jana Burns
February 4, 2013— Picture this: In a cozy U.S. classroom, preschoolers
listen attentively as their teacher tells a story about a young bear
struggling to catch fish. “How do you imagine this story might end?” the
teacher asks.
Credit: Frank Mullin/Brown University
Raised in Maoist China, Jin Li says culture has as strong an effect on
learning as schools do.
“I think the bear should go to school and learn to catch fish there,” one
boy replies.
“He should wear floaties and practice swimming in a pool first,” a girl
suggests.
On the other side of the globe, in a classroom in China, a teacher presents
the same tale, but the children’s response is very different. “The bear is
too young” is a typical answer. “His claws are too small to catch any
fish.” “He should go back and try harder.” “He lost his focus.”
In her book Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West, Associate
Professor of Education Jin Li offers these two discussions to demonstrate
that, by the time they are four years old, children have already developed
distinctive learning styles shaped by their cultures. “As learners we are
products of our culture,” she says, “which has been passed down by
generations of grandparents and parents.” That, she says, influences
learning far more than any particular school curriculum.
For her research, Li studied thousands of children in both the East and West
to discern how culture dictates educational values and beliefs. In the West
, she says, curiosity, interest, enjoyment, and intrinsic motivation are
paramount. But there’s a trade-off. Many Western students lack persistence,
she says, and have low expectations along with an overinflated sense of
self. In contrast, Asian students are taught to value perseverance,
commitment, and humility, and with them the trade-off is a neglect of
creativity.
Li’s personal experience gives a clue to her research focus. Growing up in
Communist China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, she was in third grade
when the Communists closed the country’s schools, proclaiming that
intellectual work was a bourgeois evil, and that children should learn to
plow fields and recite Maoist doctrine instead.
Ten years later, when the government began allowing schools to reopen, Li
was one of a few hundred students to pass the difficult high school
admission exam. But two years later the political wind shifted again, and
she was sent to be “re-educated” far from her family in the Chinese
countryside, where she planted rice and vegetables, administered acupuncture
and herbal treatments to villagers, and taught children of all ages with
scarce or no supplies.
When Chinese students were readmitted to universities following Mao’s death
in 1976, Li was placed in the German studies program at the Guangzhou
Institute of Foreign Languages, where she went on to teach. There she met an
American academic she would later marry and with whom she moved to Vermont
in 1985.
How she differed culturally from her fellow Americans became clear, she says
, after she became a substitute high school teacher. “That was a startling
experience,” she says. “It was such a beautiful learning environment, and
yet the children did not want to learn. I realized then that my attitudes
towards learning were very different, and I wanted to get to the bottom of
that.”
After receiving a master’s in foreign-language education from the
University of Pittsburgh, Li enrolled at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Education, where she earned a second master’s, this one in administrative
planning and social policy, and a doctorate in human development and
psychology. In Cambridge, she studied her own cultural heritage.
“I knew a lot about Western culture,” she says, “but I had not spent any
time studying China’s. Before Harvard, I was too angry with the Communists,
and I could not distinguish culture from politics.”
It was while she lived with farmers in the Chinese countryside that she
first observed the deep roots of cultural tradition. “These people
struggled,” she recalls. “They were poor and under the thumb of the
Communist Party. But they held on to their values, held their families
together. Elders looked after their children, children respected their
parents, and everyone followed traditional kinship relations. Communism didn
’t change that.”
Asked whether she has combined Eastern and Western learning cultures in her
family, Li laughs and refers to her son’s recent history exam. “He had a
ninety-four and was very proud,” she says. “The Chinese mother in me
wanted to ask him: what happened to the other six points? But I stopped
myself.”
Li has been trying to embrace U.S. learning culture, but so far, she says,
the transformation has been relatively superficial. “The beliefs that you
don’t have to stretch to understand are the most powerful,” she says. “
Things can change, but it takes time.”
