Ethical Education: China, USA Schooling

This week, a delegation of Chinese students came to my home town (Middlebury, Vermont).   And a China Daily article described USA foreign exchange students and their observations at a Chinese recycling plant.

The Vermont article was written by Andrew Stein of the Addison Independent.   "Vermont Awes Chinese Students" sounded potentially exaggerated.   But it turns out Andrew is a returned Fulbright Scholar who taught for a year in Chinese public schools.  I shared the article with Adam Minter at ShanghaiScrap blog (who's returning now, having turned in the final draft of his upcoming book).  Adam said "This is spot on. I've been around a lot of kids who study in the US, and they all come back saying these things. They can't believe it. "

The Vermont article basically says Chinese schools are pounding the kids in a pressure cooker of catch-up-ball education.   They attend class from 7AM to 10PM, often 7 days per week.  The entire education boils down to a single test, the gaokao or "high test" at the end of the senior year which, the kids are told, will define their whole lives.

For the past five years, the Chinese government mouthpiece China Daily has regularly reported that suicide is the number-one killer of Chinese teens.

And Chinese teens don’t have much time to sleep, as 16-year-old Lingyun Zhang, who is staying with Middlebury’s Sarah Kearns, pointed out.

“In America, high school students can sleep in late,” said Zhang. “But in China, since we’re high school students, we have a lot of homework and we go to bed very late and wake up very early every day.”

With little time to sleep, Chinese youth can also forget about extracurricular activities, said Qian.

“American students have a lot of time to play and do extracurricular activities,” she said. “Chinese students don’t play much. They spend most of their time studying chemistry and physics.”

The article observes interesting differences in dating, sex education, and pride.  The China Daily article is more of a puff piece about "American students make polite and inane comments on Chinese food and culture" (it's a VOA type of government paper, after all). 

FIFTH Film of E-Waste Samaritans This Week

Thanks to Waste and Recycling News for adding a 5th film to the list of "E-Waste Samaritans" this week.   The teaser video on Vimeo for the documentary "Zabaleen" rounds out a busy week for investigation of the crime of the decade - Recycling While Brown.  In Zabaleen, director Justin Kramer digs into the social, political and economic divide inside Egypt's own have-and-have-not society.

WRN Editor John Campanelli not only found this Fifth video of the week on Recycling Samaritans, but also by pens a very accessible Editorial, Film reveals the story of Egyptian trash collectors.  Campanelli interviews the director of the documentary, Justin Kramer, by telephone to make sure that his own "aha" moment he obviously experiences is clear to all readers.  (Disclosure:  WRN  also reprinted my modest proposal post on "A-Waste" this week, so far the highest hit count of the weekly publication.)


Campanelli keeps it simple and not political.  Appreciate garbage people and recyclers.  They could be heroes.  While the editorial maintains WRN as an apolitical, unbiased interviewer, Campanelli gets makes the Brown Recyclers' story to be an environmentalists story, an underdog's story, a refreshing change from the "primitive toxic" story.

""The general view is that these people are what they handle," said Kramer. "Most people, especially younger people, look at them as just disgusting. They don´t see the good that they are doing."

The good is an astonishing diversion rate. The Zabaleen are able to recycle or reuse 80% of what they collect. The organic waste becomes feed for their livestock. The paper, plastic and metal go to recyclers.

"The sustainability of these people is completely off the charts," said Kramer. "They don´t waste anything."

The citizens of Cairo didn´t realize the service these people provided until 2009, when, in the wake of a swine flu scare, the government ordered the slaughter of all the Zabaleen´s pigs – hundreds of thousands of animals.