Letters | 1 January 2011

An education

Sir: Quite apart from the pressure the Gaokao exam puts on students (Letters, 18/25 December), the Chinese education system is unsatisfactory in other ways. I taught English to undergraduates in Beijing for two years and it could be a dispiriting experience. Chinese students are taught very intensively, there is a lot of learning by repetition, and they are also drilled so that they do not ever offend against the party line. You could say they are taught not to think, although that would be a bit unfair. Anyway, they are going to rule the world so it’s all academic.

Rebecca Jed, London SW4

Sir: Oliver Lewis made some valid comparisons between the level of difficulty of certain British and Chinese exams (‘The Gaokao challenge’, 11 December). But his astonishment must be put in the light of own unfamiliarity with mathematical knowledge. His first maths question is to do with set theory and not group theory (and the answer is, after a moment’s thought, trivial). Secondly, dividing one-and-three-quarters by a half is not an equation, merely an expression to be evaluated. Once upon a time, Oxford undergraduates were required to sit the Joint Colleges examination in which questions much harder than these were asked of undergraduates — even to read Modern History!

Andrew Corrie, Cambridge

Sir: When I was a student in the 1960s, universities were run by university teachers — people who love ideas and learning. Sixth-form teachers knew that if they wanted pupils to succeed, they had to try to foster that love in them. Today, university teachers have little influence over anything. University managers tell them that their job is to keep their institutions solvent by pleasing students and government. Students tell them that their fees buy the right to predictable, unchallenging assessment. Government tells them to rejig things so that students from adverse backgrounds do as well as others.