In The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education (1992), Professors Harold Stevenson and James Stigler reflect on an observation of how children overcome obstacles in a Japanese mathematics classroom. Students in the class were learning to draw cubes in three dimensions, but one boy was having trouble:
His cube looked crooked, no matter how carefully he tried to copy the lines from the teacher’s model. Seeing the child’s difficulties, the teacher asked him to go to the blackboard and draw his cube. After working for five or ten minutes, he asked the teacher to look at his work. Rather than judging the child’s efforts herself, she turned to the class and asked whether the drawing was correct. The child’s classmates shook their heads no. The teacher directed the boy to try again. He struggled until the end of the forty-minute class. As time passed, we began to feel more and more uncomfortable about and anxious about the child at the board…would he burst into tears? Yet he appeared to be undisturbed by his public exposure and gave no indication of crying. By the end the class he had drawn a passable cube, and the class applauded. (p. 16)
Noting this scenario would not be likely to happen in an American classroom in the 1990’s, the professors posit that Americans tend to perceive of errors as ‘possible precursors of ultimate failure’ and should, therefore, be corrected by the teacher or other authority figure rather than giving children the time and space to self-correct on their own. After 10 years of close observation, the authors concluded that there is a profound difference in the way that Chinese and Japanese teachers approach error correction American teachers do. This example and others demonstrate that Japanese educators tend to view children’ mistakes as opportunities for them to build resilience, concentration and problem-solving, which today are considered high priority skills for life and work in the 21st century.
Some thirty years after publication of second edition of The Learning Gap, we face an even deeper and more complex, global learning crisis that has mutated in different ways within and across countries and cultures, exacerbated by a global pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 128 million people. Prior to the onset of the pandemic and abrupt school closures beginning in early 2022, alarm bells had already been ringing loudly over declining levels of performance in reading and mathematics in wealthy countries, while in poor countries, children were failing to achieve fundamental literacy and numeracy skills after six years of schooling. In both sets of circumstances, the sudden shutdown of in-person learning exposed the lack of preparedness for systems around the world to cope with emergencies.
Despite the sudden shutdowns and uneven access to tools for remote learning, heroic actions by teachers, families, administrators and school staff in many instances were able to keep students on track academically as well as help to mitigate their feelings of fear, loneliness and despair. As the pandemic wore on, many of these actions resulted in innovative programs that not only dealt with the immediate situations educators found themselves in, but also boosted the capacity of teachers and students to make optimal use of locally available tools, notably laptops, tablets, radio and smart phones. Where possible, parents and older siblings were suddenly engaged in facilitating younger children’s learning processes, often with guided assistance from teachers via telephone or video conferencing platforms. Reflections on the lessons learned from these grassroots experiences in countries in six of the world’s regions (Germany, Dominican Republic, China, Egypt, Namibia and India) are featured in UNESCO-IBE’s new publication, Strengthening Social and Emotional Learning in Hybrid Modes of Education: Building Support for Students, Teachers, Schools and Families.
Returning to the question of how to address the many faces of the global learning gap as it manifests itself in the post-pandemic era, much attention has been paid to ‘learning loss’, while precious little has focused on innovations that gained traction during the period of school closures to foster children’s wellbeing and build more caring communities, such as India’s ‘Happiness Curriculum’ and the Dominican Republic’s ‘Return to Joy’. Nor have systems taken advantage of the opportunities for increased family participation, inclusion of marginalized learners and curriculum reform that came into clear view. Like the Japanese student who was having difficulty drawing the three-dimensional cube, systems worldwide are facing unprecedented challenges to which there are no easy or quick solutions. As a global education community seeking to fulfill the promise of quality learning for all, we have to try again, and again. We need to acknowledge and learn from our mistakes and missteps, adapt models of good practices that are working in cultures very different from our own, and apply the lessons learned from the pandemic to build the competencies students need for life and work in the 21st century.
Reference:
Stevenson, H.W. and J.W. Stigler (1992). The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education. New York: Simon and Schuster.
