Lili Gu (ENG’13) says he worked harder at BU than his counterparts at Chinese universities do. Photo by Vernon Doucette
Lili Gu recalls his initial trepidation at the flood of white faces in his Massachusetts high school when he came to America for 10th grade. There was the hulking football player who noticed that Gu was lost one day and said—here, Gu speaks in a guttural half-grunt—“‘Hey, you want to go to the gym?’ And I’m like, dude, is this guy going to rob me?” He struggled with English, too. The writing skills he arrived with, he says, would be at home in the fourth grade. But an English-as-second-language program made him comfortable after a semester. Then his formidable Chinese secondary education kicked in.
Gu (ENG’13) says he breezed through high school, especially math, sprinting through the curriculum and into Harvard night school for advanced calculus. The easy ride ended at BU, however. If Chinese high schools are more rigorous than those in the United States, the reverse is true for universities, Gu says. Back home, “as soon as you step in the front door of a great university, it’s almost like your motivation ends, because in China, GPA is not a big deal. Whether I’m a C student or D student, as long as I have that diploma, I’m awesome. If I wanted to graduate from BU with Cs, I’d probably have had a very good time.”
The differences between Chinese and U.S. education matter in both countries, as students from the People’s Republic surge onto American campuses. That includes BU, where Chinese students are the largest foreign contingent (about 2, 000 undergraduates and grad students, 6 percent of the total) in an increasingly international student body.
A new book by Jin Li, Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West, argues that the two systems fundamentally diverge: our Western education aims to convey knowledge to comprehend the world, while Chinese schools stress learning as a means to develop inner virtue. New York Times columnist David Brooks celebrates this supposed Chinese approach, crediting it with “awesome motivation explosions.”
Instead, the students interviewed by BU Today characterize the differences like this: Chinese high schoolers bust butt compared with their American counterparts in pursuit of the Holy Grail of university admission. “Failing the college entrance exam means the end of the world, ” says Lu, whose high school forbade dating because it was a distraction from studying. Once at a university, however, many students in China goof off, either from burnout in high school or simply because they can. “Some of my friends who study in Chinese colleges tell me that they play the video game Dota day and night, ” says Lu.
