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Education in East Asia: Promoting Modern Values while Preserving Traditional Ideals in East

Asian Cultures

Word Count: 2195

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East Asian cultures are notorious for their rigorous education systems and high

expectations of children. From 10-hour school days to parents actively forcing their children to

perform well in school, East Asian children are being put under constant stress (Cheng et al.;

Jhang et al.). However, East Asia has also produced some of the smartest kids in terms of

academic achievement. According to data collected by Steven Singer at the National Education

Policy Center on average SAT scores of Asians raised in Asia, Asian Americans, White

Americans, Black Americans, and Latin Americans, Asian students score almost 100 points

higher in math than white students (Singer). This dichotomy of being put under constant stress

and high levels of academic achievement has created a dilemma between trying to preserve

traditional values of education while also evolving into more modern education standards. On

one hand, East Asian governments want to maintain the rigorous system of standardized testing

and rote memorization as it has proved that it can produce good results. On the other hand, there

are families and children who want a more modern approach to education such as having kids

focus on specific subjects that they want to pursue and promote a more competency-based

system where kids get to learn at their own pace in their area of choice. This poses the question,

to what extent should East Asian education cultures preserve traditional values while

incorporating more modern values?

In traditional East Asian education cultures, a lot of emphasis is placed on community

support, teacher professionalism, attention to quality, and high expectations, as outlined by

Kai-ming Cheng and Kam-cheung Wong at the University of Hong Kong in their case study on

schools in Zhejiang (Cheng et al.). Dorris Lessing and her short story “Through the Tunnel” is a

demonstration of how social pressures can impact what people, especially kids, will do. In the

story, Jerry is a young boy who goes into a tunnel near the beach and almost drowns because the
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people around him pushed him to do it, showing the power that peer pressure can have (Lessing).

This ties into the first point that Cheng and Wong have found in their study. If the community

around the kids are constantly pushing kids to go to school as well as offering them the proper

utilities, it can boost overall student performance. As stated in the study by Cheng and Wong,

“school attendance has become a social norm in communities.” (Cheng et al.). When put in

comparison to schools in the Western world who have a much more modern education system,

schools in the US have significantly more absentees in school and attendance isn’t as stressed.

This has led to problems such as chronic absenteeism, when a student misses 15 or more days of

school in one academic year, and is happening to one in six American student as stated by the

Department of Education of the United States of America (“CHRONIC ABSENTEEISM IN

NATION'S SCHOOLS”). By engraving attendance at schools into society, it indirectly forces

kids to go to school as these kids will have a sense of pressure from the community to go to

school, and as shown by Lessing’s short story, pressure from a community is a force to be

reckoned with. Moreover, attending school is also portrayed as something profitable. Cheng

mentions that “There is never a shortage of demand for basic education. Even among the

illiterate parents, schooling is seen as the sole means towards future achievements of their

children.” (Cheng et al.). For kids in Zhejiang and East Asia, going to school is the way for kids

to succeed and, for less wealthy families, a means of improving their living conditions. Not only

does the community help with students, but teachers also play a pivotal role in assisting the

children as they learn. According to Cheng, “a class teacher plays the multiple roles of an

organizer, a leader, a counselor, a social worker, a remedial teacher, often a nurse, and sometimes

a voluntary private tutor for the academically weak.” (Cheng et al.). The multifaceted role of a

teacher within an East Asian education system is crucial in promoting education for kids and
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ensuring that kids are able to receive proper education. Additionally, teachers and faculty also

pay attention to a lot of details, from the content covered in each class to the materials that the

students are exposed to. Classroom observations and professional development sessions for

teachers are very common in schools in Zhejiang. This can help ensure that the students are

receiving the highest quality of education and that teachers are prepared and qualified to bestow

knowledge upon the students. Lastly, the expectations set by these education systems can help

propel students to perform well and push students to their limits. According to Cheng, “The

whole idea is that students will achieve when they work hard, and their genetic abilities are

secondary” (Cheng et al.). This way of thinking can help promote and encourage students that

working hard in school can help students succeed, fostering the idea of diligence and effort

within students. Through these four main ideas, kids in East Asia are bestowed with traits such as

being responsible, well-rounded, and knowledgeable.

A big part of an East Asian child’s education is the role their parents play. The role of an

East Asian parent is directly correlated with the amount of success a child achieves, as shown in

a cross-sectional study on the relationship between Chinese parents and their kids done by

Eunice Pui-Yu Yim at the Hong Kong Metropolitan University. In the study, Yim found that “For

local Chinese parents, authoritative parenting style had negative correlation with achievement

whereas had the weakest correlation with humility. Authoritarian parenting style had positive

correlations with achievement and collectivism” (Yim). In Diana Baumrind’s, a developmental

psychologist at UC Berkeley, famous study on styles of parenting, authoritarian parenting is

when a parent is trying to force a kid to become, in the parent’s eyes, the ideal child and is

willing to use forceful measures. Authoritative parenting is when a parent is able to maintain a

deep connection with their child by giving the kid their own freedom to develop in their own
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unique way while also enforcing certain rules for the child but explaining why he/she enforces

these rules (Baumrind). Based on Baumrind’s research, the ideal way to raise a child is through

the authoritative parenting style. However, Yim’s research contradicts this notion by showing

that kids who are raised through an authoritarian style actually perform better academically than

kids who are raised through an authoritative style. This highlights the effectiveness that

traditional East Asian parents - who, according to Rebecca P. Ang and Dion H. Goh at the

Nanyang Technological University, mostly adopt the authoritarian parenting style - can offer

(Ang and Goh). Yim’s study is another example of how the community, as stated by Cheng and

Wong’s research, is pushing kids towards success. However, the norm of authoritarian parenting

also comes with its repercussions. According to Deborah Fry, Amalee McCoy, and Diane Swales

at the University of Edinburgh, the authoritarian parenting style in East Asia can lead to “mental

health consequences which include depression, anxiety, suicide ideation, etc., physical health

outcomes, sexual health which includes risky sexual behaviors, IPV outcomes which include

victimization and perpetration, and other behaviors which include both other violence outcomes

but also other risky behaviors such as substance misuse and eating disorders.” (Fry et al.). Of

these consequences, the increased suicide rate has been the most concerning and the most

prevelant issue. This has prompted a lot of government agencies in East Asia to advocate for a

change in the education system and culture but there are also a large group that want to continue

to produce kids that can achieve exceptional results.

In order to ensure that kids are producing optimal results but also protecting kids from

physical and mental harm, two aspects of modern education can be implemented: courage and

competency based education. Firstly, by implementing the idea of courage into East Asian

cultures, kids are not only able to reduce stress, but can also improve their living conditions. This
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can be supported by a study done by Giuseppe Santisi at the University of Catania, who found

that courage can help mediate the stresses and hardships produced by life (Santisi et al.).

Moreover, according to Ted Thomas, Director of the Department of Command and Leadership in

the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Ira

Chaleff, president of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates in Washington, DC, state

that moral courage is “an ability to work within the system to maintain standards and uphold

moral values” and that “organizational culture and operational pressures can sometimes cause the

values of people to become blurred when the mission becomes more important than virtues”

(Thomas et al.). If East Asian kids are able to have the courage that Santisi proposes to help

improve their life and the moral courage that Thomas proposes to accept not meeting the high

standards set by East Asian cultures, these kids can not only accept their position in life but also

face the challenges of an East Asian education system head on. This idea of instilling courage in

East Asian kids has been seen in East Asian kids who are in challenging family environments. In

a study done by Wei‑Jun Jean Yeung at the National University of Singapore and Haibin Li at the

South China University of Technology, they found that “educational institutions, in collaboration

with families and communities, can be a form of intervention by buffering some of the stressors

from family to improve children’s resilience” (Yeung et al.). If the East Asian ideal of obedience

and compliance, as stated by Yim, can be mended, it can help instill the idea of courage into kids,

as seen by research from Yeung, to help kids improve their quality of life, as proven by Santisi.

However, values that were identified by Cheng and Wong can still be protected to continue to

ensure the quality of education for children in East Asia.

The idea behind competence based learning is to “allow schools and teachers professional

autonomy in school-based curriculum development in order to build students’ fundamental

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competencies in various categories for modern society in the 21st century,” as defined by

Hsiao-Lan Sharon Chen and Hsuan-Yi Huang at the National Taiwan Normal University (Chen

et al.). The research done by Chen and Huang have found that the new competency based

education is “moving from knowledge to competency orientation, integrating subject matters and

prominent issues into learning areas, changing from standards to guidelines, adding new courses

in response to localization and internationalization, and modifying the senior high school

entrance examination” (Chen et al.). Through competency based education, kids are able to

change the way they perceive education: as a medium to gain knowledge and information they

can use in life and not for a test. The results and benefits of competency based education can be

seen through a case study of Taiwanese high schools by Chin-Wen Liao at the National

Changhua University of Education. They have found that when comparing the learning

effectiveness of students who receive a traditional Taiwanese education and those who receive

the new competency based education, “[t]he test results show that the average score of the

experimental group students was 6.08 higher than that of the control group, and the t value was

−2.928, p = 0.005 < 0.05, which reaches the level of significance.” (Liao et al.). Moreover,

students who received the competency based education also performed better in terms of

knowledge, skill, and attitude (Liao et al.). Liao’s research is definitive evidence that the ideas of

Chen can be implemented in East Asian countries and the benefits are multitudinous.

All in all, the evolution of education in East Asia begs for a delicate balance between

tradition and modernism, academic rigor and student well-being. Some limitations that might

stem from implementing new values into East Asian education systems are the procedure for

implementing new sets of ideas into an education system and the pre-programmed idea within

parents, students, and teachers who want to stay firm with their original ideas. Trying to
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implement two new ideas into a system that has been used for hundreds of years can be difficult

as some students and teachers might not be used to the new program or teachers might not be

qualified to instill these ideas upon students. This correlates to the second limitation as students,

teachers, and parents might resent implementing new ideas into their already successful system.

Although traditional education systems in East Asia have proven to produce students who are

academically successful and supreme scholars, by utilizing courage and competency-based

education, East Asian societies can maintain the benefits of their traditional values such as

community support, teacher professionalism, attention to quality, and high expectations while

adapting to the ways of the modern world. Ultimately, the goal of education is to cultivate

individuals who are not only academically intelligent and hard working, but also resilient,

creative, and prepared to deal with the sophistication and marvel that is life.
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