From: "John Derbyshire" To: Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 08:49:07 -0800 Following Steven Tripp's very illuminating email on Japanese testing: Researchers who want to study adolescents under really extreme educational pressure could do worse than visit China. My wife is mainland-Chinese (born 1962) and in regular correspondence with classmates from her school and college days, all of whom now have kids at school, teen and subteen. Exam pressures for middle-class Chinese are tremendous. The universal plaint is: "Our kids have no childhood!" Five or six hours homework is quite normal, and vacations are filled with cramming. Competition for the best universities is ferocious, alleviated only a little by corruption (hey, this is CHINA). These pressures even overflow into the world of adult work. One of our correspondents is a trained nurse at a large hospital in interior China. Entitlement to free medical care via one's work unit is rapidly being scrapped. Other forms of insurance are not easily available. So nowadays in China, if you're sick, you pay-- big time. Since hardly anybody can afford a long hospital stay, the hospitals are emptying out. They therefore need less staff. Our friend's hospital has come up with the following solution: make all staff pass an exam every year to keep their jobs. Fail the exam, you lose your job. Scoring is calibrated to get rid of the required number of people. So not only do our friend's kids spend all their free time studying, she does too! China may be rough on dissidents, but for people who make a living compiling tests it must be paradise. John Derbyshire 15 Chestnut Street Huntington, NY 11743-7104 Phone: (516) 427-6481 Fax: (516) 351-4006 (but call first) Email: olimu@li.net Web site: http://olimu.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ How to contribute to H-Bd: 1. To reply privately to just the sender of this message, click the "Reply" button on your email package. 2. To reply publicly to the entire H-Bd list, click the "Reply All" (or equivalent) button on your email package. 3. To start a thread, email your message to h-bd@egroups.com -- eGroup Home: http://www.egroups.com/group/h-bd/?m=1 -- Free email groups at eGroups.com .