“Weapons of math instruction.” That is what Beijing’s English-language mouthpiece, Global Times – not normally much given to such wit – calls a Sino-British plan to export Chinese maths instructors to the UK and to send British teachers to Shanghai to learn why China is so good at numbers.
A scouting party of British teachers has been in Shanghai for the past week learning how to deploy those weapons in the gross domestic product wars. The logic is simple, not to mention simplistic: Shanghai tops the global league table in tests by the OECD, the Paris-based think-tank, of 15-year-olds’ maths skills. Now the UK wants to get its hands on some of that Shanghai magic for its own maths-free masses so they can end up as rich as the Chinese.
Earlier this year Elizabeth Truss, then UK education minister, visited the Chinese financial centre and waxed lyrical about the advantages of giving the UK a maths education system with more Chinese characteristics. But quite apart from the rather breathless quality of her accolade, the logic is faulty. If Chinese schools are so fabulous, why are a staggering 85 per cent of Chinese parents thinking about sending their children overseas to study, according to a recent HSBC report? And why are more and more mainland parents eager to expatriate their children in time to finish their final years of secondary school overseas when they could just as easily stay at home and win accolades from the OECD?