It isn’t that the western education system fosters creativity, they are just less effective in beating it out. In china, you have to compete very hard, you can’t slack off, you must get a good score on the gaokao to assure your future, and don’t fall asleep too much in your patriotic indoctrination classes. In the west, meh, it’s a fact that there is less pressure, and you can even refuse to stand for the pledge of allegiance if you want (in the usa, I still find the whole pledge during school thing wrong).
China still has a lot of creative people, but the structural differences of the Chinese education system can’t be ignored, and I cringe whenever politicians say we should have schools more like theirs.
China is not just single block. Chinese education is evolving and experimenting with new things.
Example: Shanghai (25 million people) decided to do something new. They learned from other countries with good PISA results and adopted it to their system. Less tests and more long term projects. Little more autonomy for theaters and better rewards. Their experiment was a success and they reached the same level in PISA studies as Finland and Singapore.
Given China's backwards residency system, you have to exclude people in Shanghai who don't hold Shanghai hukou, so you get around 13 million rather than 25 million. But ya, Shanghai students do really well on the PISA exam, which is one of the things that is promoted a lot.
But I don't see how performance on an exam relates to creativity at all.
I think this has been much relaxed recently. You just need to prove that you live in Shanghai for more than 6 months (rental is okay) and either pay social security taxes or are registered as seeking employment. Thanks to the one child policy, if they don't relax enrollment policy the schools are going to run out of students.
No, not just that, there are now specific rules to place those without hukou ahead of those who have.
e.g. in my area, say kid's dad has hukou in the local area and kid's mum has hukou from another area in Shanghai, then the kid will get lower priority for applying schools in the area comparing to those with one of the parents with hukou in the area and another one without hukou in Shanghai at all. The logic is that the first couple has the option to send their child to a different area in Shanghai while the second one doesn't have such option available to them.
I think that only applies to middle class chinese with formal resident permits. Migrant workers from the villages, which make up much of that 12 million, still have to leave their kids at home. Anyways, shanghai is a bad example of equitable education.
School enrollment is permitted for those with temporary resident registration (which most everyone should qualify) but requires three year continuous registration, so is still a high bar to cross. Hope to see continued relaxation. They will need the younger generation to fill the schools as fertility rate stays low.
China still has a lot of creative people, but the structural differences of the Chinese education system can’t be ignored, and I cringe whenever politicians say we should have schools more like theirs.