Valuable lessons I learned from going to my statistics professor’s office hours: 1. All the answers to the problem set are provided on the PowerPoint. 2. Don’t try to calculate anything by hand; you’ll just get it wrong. Let the program do the work. 3. Don’t worry about actually understanding the material (see points one and two). "I don’t understand why you’re confused," she told me.
I wanted to throw something at her. (I didn’t, don’t worry). I tried politely to explain to her that actually teaching was not the same as giving us all the answers, but she looked at me dumbfounded. This wasn’t a problem any of the local students were having. Actually learn? Why would I want to do that?
Even though I am rubbing elbows with Hong Kong’s best and brightest—only the top 20 percent of students in Hong Kong may go on to university—spoon-feeding is a major problem in classrooms. Like at Georgetown, students fill out professor evaluations every semester, but unlike at Georgetown, these student evaluations hold a lot of sway: I’ve heard unconfirmed rumors about a professor who made students write papers without telling them how to interpret the reading materials. His ratings were so poor he was fired at the end of the semester. Most students are not interested in learning for the sake of learning; they just want to be handed the answers they need to get good grades. I can’t blame them either. They spend all of primary and secondary school being drilled, with little emphasis on creative thinking. Everything is geared towards the public examination at the end of secondary seven, which determines who goes on to university and who doesn’t. It’s the most difficult educational hurdle these students will ever face, and once they clear it, they are disinclined to work that hard again.
I don’t know why I found this all so surprising; it’s long been acknowledged that students in places like Hong Kong, mainland China, and South Korea are taught to pass tests but not much else. Yet despite this obvious deficiency in education, the Hong Kong education system has its advantages to the American one. Americans are falling farther and farther behind. While top American universities are generally regarded to be the best in the world, the national high school graduation rate is only 75 percent, and in the District of Colombia it’s a dismal 57 percent. In Hong Kong, dropping out is practically unheard of. And while only 20 percent of students go to university, job prospects for the other 80 percent are fairly good. According to my English professor, people who don’t go on to university can still get jobs in the public sector that pay roughly equal to what university students in the humanities makes after graduation. Students want to go to university because it’s prestigious, not because they need a bachelor’s degree to make more than minimum wage.
Schools in Hong Kong vary greatly in terms of education—the best-educated (and wealthiest) students are those who go international schools, and they almost always opt to leave Hong Kong for university—but all students graduate literate and employable. In state-run Christian and Taoist schools, religion and education rarely clash, and the theory of evolution is taught alongside theology without protest. Schools are a safe place, too. There are no fist fights at recess or code blue shooter drills like there were at my high school. In Hong Kong, there has never been a Newtown, or a Columbine, or a Virginia Tech.
Coming from a university as competitive and prestigious as Georgetown, it’s easy to be frustrated by the quality of higher education in Hong Kong. But it’s also easy to forget that my education at an elite university is highly atypical from the American educational narrative. The Hong Kong educational system is far from perfect, but with the United States falling farther and farther in international rankings while Hong Kong nears the top of the charts, perhaps it’s time for us to study up.