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Lessons for Americans, From a Chines Classroom

Observing how Chinese 2- and 3-year-olds navigated a second language, I wondered whether I could have done this for my children.

SHANGHAI — We sat in toddler-size wooden chairs around an orderly circle of Chinese 2-year-olds, busy with circle time. As a parent of three children who collectively spent 15 years in American day care, I am very familiar with circle time.

But I was in this Shanghai classroom as a professor, with college students from many different countries in a class I’m teaching here on children and childhood.

We were observing in a private kindergarten, designed to provide young children — starting at age 2 — with a carefully structured, fully bilingual curriculum, especially important because English language skills are vital for educational success in China.

Visits to Chinese educational institutions allow the college students in my course to get a look at real children and the ways that they learn, while also thinking about Chinese society today. They get windows onto certain slices of this complex country: a high-end private bilingual program that starts with toddlers; a city high school for academically gifted students; a middle school created for the children of the rural migrants who have come by the millions from China’s poorer provinces to work in Shanghai, but whose rights to social benefits are severely limited in the city.

These visits offer the college students insights into many of the social issues facing China, and we spend time in class discussing questions like the huge role that the annual gaokao college entrance exam plays in determining a child’s educational destiny (English is one of the required subjects), the pressures on families that create a culture of cram schools, and the controversies over reserving spots in colleges for kids from rural areas.

But all of those questions have powerful resonances when you think about the issues of childhood education and child development, which have to be addressed in every country. As my college students discuss the different facets of childhood around the world, visiting the Chinese schools also helps them in remembering and thinking about what children look like at different ages, and how they play and interact and learn. 

Available in : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/, accessed on February 26th, 2020. Adapted