Scary

"I want to go to Hong Kong," my nephew Ethan says firmly. "There is so much fun."

Why the high praise? In the eyes of a seven-year-old second grader brought up in the United States, everything here unleashes his creative process. New things sparkle. Synapses sizzle. That alone is enough to let his creative juices run like spilled ink; Ethan wrote a funny article for his school newspaper after visiting Hong Kong. (https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/echow/www/newspaper2009.pdf)

No matter how many times I read it, I always chuckle when I read the wonderful piece about how eerie our elementary school sounds.

"They have no play structure and grass on their playground, imagine… isn’t it scary?! They don't have snack time and "show and tell", imagine… Isn't it scary?! We can wear anything to school but they have to wear uniforms, too bad."

Among the details Ethan chose to capture was this gem describing the stifling education bureaucracy here. Which is a pretty exact description of the educational system among Asian countries in general.

We dare not tell Ethan, for instance, that the Japanese education ministry had strict requirement to stipulate the exact height of school desks, which has been adjusted upward four times since World War II as students' average height has increased. The detail is specific – it's amazing, actually.

Ahem, sure enough, the way we teach our students matter-of-factly is even more amazing. Our first lesson in strict format came the hard way. Think about the arithmetic lesson at elementary school. The very first thing we learned was the sacred rite to draw a vertical line at seven spaces from the right side. This area, seven spaces in width, is meant to be the box for students to think and work out the arithmetic answer. Boys and girls have been taught to toe the line. Seven spaces, no more and no less. Period.

When it dawns on me that this rule of seven burned indelibly into my mind after so many years, I can't help but shudder.