China and India have hundred of millions of people that grew up watching American television programs and these people have a fever to have the same lifestyle that most Americans take for granted. American fast food outlets like McDonalds and Pizza Hut are considered gourmet restaurants in China. The Chinese are willing to wait to eat sometimes for an hour or more like Americans do at expensive steak houses and seafood restaurants.

To make this happen, there is a reverse brain drain taking place. China and India are growing at an amazing rate and offering incentives to bring back Chinese and Indians educated in America and Europe to support that growth with the skills that were acquired in the west. To entice these college educated citizens back to the homeland, there are housing developments being built in China and India that look like they were imported from America. Not only that, but China depends on outside sources for seventy percent of the oil that’s necessary to power some of that explosive growth. China also has half of the hydroelectric dams in the world to provide inexpensive electricity. This growth to achieve an American quality of life requires huge amounts of iron and concrete that is driving up the prices of those commodities and creating shortages in the world.

The work ethic that is the foundation of these two ancient cultures is driving this change at an incredible pace. Most of the leaders of China are engineers—not lawyers or actors.

I spent thirty years teaching in the American public schools and have lived in the belly (literally and figuratively) of a Chinese family for the last decade. It is obvious to me that the culture and parents that pass on that culture are the reason these two countries will succeed.

My wife is Chinese. She was born in Shanghai. She lived through Mao’s cultural Revolution and was cheated out of a proper education because of it. China was a capitalistic nation for five thousand years and a communist state for only fifty. Today, China has a roaring market economy. It is all about competition and ‘hard’ work in China. The socialism that is supposed to come with Communism is either dead or dying.

When my wife came to America in the 1980s, she worked hard to complete and earn a university degree and succeeded by sometimes working several jobs while attending classes and making it on only a few hours of sleep each day. When she didn’t have enough money to rent a safe place to sleep, she managed to sneak into empty classrooms at the university she attended. To keep warm in the cold classrooms, she covered herself with empty trash bags. How many American’s are willing to work that hard under those conditions?

The reason my wife succeeded was because she brought the Chinese work ethic with her—something that her parents and the culture she was born into instilled in her from birth. My wife eventually became an American citizen and is proud of it. She loves America. America gave her the opportunity to educate herself and succeed through hard work and determination. What she couldn’t do in China, she succeeded at here. Today she is a published author with books translated into more than thirty languages around the world.

The education of our daughter is extremely important to my wife. Our daughter is Chinese American and is growing up with the best of both worlds propelling her into the future. The reason for this is because the historical importance of education in Chinese culture comes from the teachings of Confucius more than two thousand years ago. Confucius taught that social harmony could be achieve only if humans were free from deprivation and given a proper education. That’s what the 1.3 billion people of China are striving for today. They are a patient people. It took hundreds of years to build the Great Wall. Do we have anything comparable in the West?

We have the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal built in the last two hundred years.

Wait, China has the Grand Canal. It was started almost five hundred years before the birth of Christ in 486 BCE. It runs from Beijing to south of Shanghai for a distance of more than eleven hundred miles. There are sixty bridges and twenty-four locks. The Grand Canal is still in use today after almost twenty-five hundred years.

However, there is a problem. In China’s schools creativity suffers. Students must memorize a lot of facts and are under great pressure to succeed. This can be both bad and good. The Chinese have recognized this but are unwilling to give up the educational methods in China. They don’t want their public school to turn out like America’s.

China became a test centered culture during the Han Dynasty under Emperor Wu-ti in 124 BCE. It was during the Han Dynasty that provincial schools were established and the Confucian tradition of education spread across China. A traditional Chinese education consisted primarily or rote learning and memorization of the Classics. This became standard by the seventh century AD. Compare that to the American educational system that didn’t really get going until after World War II.

The Chinese invented the examination process more than a thousand years before exams were used in the West. They also invented the printing press and gunpowder hundreds of years before anyone in the West did. There’s more that the Chinese invented first, but that is another topic.

In China, exams are used to decide who moves on and what university he will get into. Even while attending universities, students must take exams at the end of each year and score high to continue the following year. If a student fails to score high enough, she has to enter the work force. Although China is working hard to build and staff more universities, many students can’t make it. In a country with more than 1.3 billion people, there isn’t enough classrooms for everyone to attend a university so the competition to do well in the annual examinations is fierce. To win a seat in a university, a student must score in the top ten percent. The current goal in China is to move that up to the top fifteen percent. To achieve this, more universities and classrooms are being built. Only those students that score the highest in the exams move on. The Chinese consider the exam system the fairest way to allow those that ‘deserve’ a university education to have one. Confucius said, “Those who work with their heads will rule, while those who work with their hands will serve.”

While holding onto traditional methods of teaching, China is also attempting to include elements in their curriculum that will stimulate creativity. One way is to send as many students as possible to America to gain a higher education. Another strategy is to hire Western professors to fill a set quota for each university. China is also luring Western educated Chinese back so they can bring Western style teaching techniques and skills with them.

Today, more than two hundred and forty million young people are receiving an education in China’s schools. Sixty percent of each school day is spent studying math and the Chinese written language. There are more than two thousand universities built with more on the way. Compare that with the 1950s when there were two hundred institutions of higher learning. Fifty years ago 80% of the population was illiterate. Not so today.

In America, on the other hand, we have a different challenge. Our culture and our laws make it difficult to teach. Our children are encouraged to protest and speak out. Our children also get used to an easy life of having fun (games, Internet, music, television, telephone, hanging out with friends, etc.).

During the thirty years that I taught, there wasn’t one day that I didn’t have behavior problems and students that refused to work. Many did not bring the proper materials to class like text books or paper. If I offered to supply a pencil for a test when the student didn’t have one and the pencil wasn’t new, students complained. Far to many refused to read the assignments even when in class. Forget about homework.

In America, the burden is on the teacher to teach students that don’t have to do what they are told. If the student doesn’t learn, it is considered the teacher’s fault. If a student earns a failing grade when he wouldn’t do the homework or study for tests, it is the teacher’s fault. To make sure American teachers don’t forget, we are reminded in staff meetings. I heard that message many times.

While I was still teaching, one principal even put this message on a flip chart for the entire staff to see. He read it to us as he flipped the pages. “If a student fails your class, it is your fault,” he said. “If a student misbehaves in your class, don’t come to me. It is your fault because you do not have good behavior management skills.” There were a lot of ‘your faults’ in that meeting as he flipped one page after another.

It is the opposite in China. When a student fails, it is considered the student and his parent’s fault.

Recently, I read a news piece about a veteran America teacher in the Midwest. She had taught for seventeen years and was suspended from her job due to critizing one of her kindergartners in front of the class. It was on the evening news. The parents had slipped a tape recorder into the kid’s backpack to catch the teacher telling the truth.

American teachers are not protected against this kind of invasion. I heard what the teacher said on the tape. Not once did I hear that teacher use profanity but what she said hurt the child’s self-esteem. The laws in America protect the child so no one can find out what he did to earn this kind of treatment from a teacher. We don’t want to hurt the child’s self-esteem. In our culture, it seems that self-esteem is everything even if a child doesn’t graduate and stays illiterate.

In one of my classes several years ago, a few boys were throwing spark plugs at each other when I turned my back to write something on the board. This went on for days. If another student asked a question, and I took my eyes off of the class, the spark plugs would fly. I couldn’t turn my back to write on the board. I had to keep my eyes on the class. I had to walk backwards. I had to change my style of teaching in that one class.

When I went out and bought a surveillance camera to catch the students throwing the spark plugs, I was told by a district administrator (he was the assistant superintendent for the secondary schools) that I had no right to invade the privacy of my students and I was forbidden to use that surveillance system in my classroom.

Another time, a student spit on the door knob when he was sharpening his pencil. The door knob was covered with his yellow mucus. When there was a knock at the door, I opened the door and received a handful of his snot. I knew who the student was. He was the only one that used the pencil sharper during that class. Since all student work had to be written in black ink, I remember thinking it was strange that he was sharpening a pencil.

His mother called me a liar. She said her son would never do anything like that. When the kid admitted that he did it, the mother laughed and was proud that she was raising her son to be a Tom Sawyer. She never apologized for calling me a liar, and this was not an individual incident. I have a lot of stories like this to tell—thirty years worth. Visit my ‘Blog’ if you want to read more.

In China, it is not uncommon to hear a teacher berate a student in front of the class for poor behavior or academic progress. Chinese parents can also be brutal when their child is not performing to perfection. Many times, Chinese teachers have to step in to stop parents from severely beating a child that misbehaved or earned a poor grade. Meanwhile, in America, there is a movement on to make it illegal to spank your child.

In China the education of the child is important. When Chinese mothers get together, the topic is almost always about the education of their children. What do American mothers talk about when they get together? Fashion. Sex in the City.

In America, teachers are encouraged to make students feel good by lowering standards. That doesn’t mean all American teachers give in. I didn’t give in and kept the standards high in my classes. When students complained, the school counselor told them that a C in my class was equal to an A in another English teacher’s class. Some parents wanted their kids moved from my classroom. I know of many other teachers that also refused to bend to the self-esteem movement that almost wrecked America’s education system back during the twentieth century. However, many teachers did give in to the constant pressure to make kids feel good. Students were passed to the next level without keeping up. Those same students fell farther and farther behind each year.

That doesn’t happen in China.

In China, teachers and parents pressure students to work harder. Students in China are guaranteed nine years of education compared to thirteen in the Untied States. For a Chinese student, the school day usually begins at six or six thirty in the morning and runs for twelve hours with a short break for dinner. Afterwards, students returns to school until 10:00 PM. Students in China often take twelve academic classes a day compared to five or six classes in American schools. Students in China often go to school for half-a-day on Saturday to get ready for Monday. Chinese students do the homework. All of it. It is expected by everyone and there are no excuses like saying you don’t like the teacher. I heard that a lot during my years in the classroom.

Many American students do not do homework. That means they don’t read either.

Near the end of my thirty years in the classroom, five students out of more than thirty in a class usually turned in the homework that often would have taken only a half hour to complete. Due to this, the failure rate in my classrooms was often thirty percent. My students were seldom pressured or blamed when this happened. I was the one under the microscope and when challenged, which was often, I had to keep detailed records to prove why the student failed. The student didn’t have to prove anything. In China the teacher is seldom if ever challenged like this.

Our daughter is not allowed to blame the teacher if she earns a grade lower than an ‘A’, and in eleven years, she has never earned anything less. She has not earned even one ‘B’. There is a reason for this. After school, she spends several hours practicing a sport with her team before returning home to eat and complete homework. The television is not turned on. The Internet is only available for homework. She doesn’t have Internet access in her room.

As I pointed out earlier, many American public school students do not do homework. They don’t read outside of class either. Our daughter does. She has a Chinese mother and to earn anything less than an ‘A’ would bring on WW III. It doesn’t help our daughter that I was a teacher and that I know what is going on in the average American classroom and the average American home. As an American teacher, I seldom saw any of the parents of my failing students. In a Barbara Waters special on Education, Walters said that 80% of parents in America never meet any of their child’s teachers kindergarten through twelfth grade.

If our daughter earns less than an ‘A’ on any assignment, quiz or test, we are on our way as a family to see the teacher the next day. Our daughter knows this will happen. Our daughter also must be in bed between nine and ten. Her friends stay up until after midnight watching television or surfing the Internet. They feel sorry for her. She can either do homework or read, but she has to be in bed on time and that is non-negotiable.

While I was still teaching high school, I was often ‘pressured’ to pass more students. This pressure ended when ‘No Child Left Behind’ and the testing culture that came with it arrived to became part of the American educational system. Prior to NCLB, Administrators called me into the office at least twice a year to point out that I was failing too many students. My response was always, “I never fail any students. The student fails because he doesn’t do the work. She doesn’t study for the tests even when I hand out a study list.”

I mentioned in my first sentence that America and the West were losing the Education Wars with countries like China and India. A friend of mine that I’ve known most of my life disagrees with that. He feels America’s colleges and universities are the best in the world. At the same time, he says that our public schools are the worst. I don’t know if he’s made the connection yet. How can we have the best universities when the public schools that get our kids ready are failing? He thinks a voucher system for the public schools will solve everything and every child will succeed due to the magic of competition.

Wow, as if the Chinese didn’t already know about competition. In China, students have been competing for more than two thousand years. The competition is fierce in China’s public schools.

My ‘out-of-date’ friend is right while being wrong at the same time. America does have the best university system in the world, but we have some of the worst home grown students and our schools put too much focus on feeling good and having fun. Instead of doing homework or reading, many kids watch all the television they want (according to studies: seven hours a day) and these kids stay up until one or two in the morning to achieve this statistic.

The best students in our colleges and universities are coming from Asia to attend universities. After these students graduate, most of them are taking what they learned back to the homeland. During the thirty years I taught in the public schools as a middle school and then a high school teacher, most of my best and brightest students were from Asia.

If we look at graduation from high school and college ethnically, Asians win hands down. Even the Asian Americans born in America outperform every other ethnic group. Over the years, I attended many in-services as a teacher to become more ‘culturally aware’ and ‘sensitive’. I saw the statistics. There are no secrets except for the ignorant that don’t bother to look.

Asians have the highest graduation rate and the highest GPA. Asians have the highest college/university attendance. Asians tend to graduate from medical or engineering schools instead of liberal arts. Asians have the lowest incidence of drug use and teen pregnancy.

Need I say more. The war is being lost because of differences between cultures. The West puts the emphasis on feeling good and having fun. The East focuses on hard work and competition and only the best are allowed to move on. The rest work with their hands.