Tiger mums the key to Chinese results

WHY have Australian educational standards - at least as assessed by testing - slipped in the past decade?

The Gonski report, out this week, urges increased spending and a push for equity. The Grattan report last week said it's all about improving teachers and focusing on the classroom.

But what about the social setting? Might it be that parents and the values in which children live are important elements in their education?

What else might explain that two-thirds of the students who win places at Melbourne High, a top selective state school, now come from Asian backgrounds?

Amy Chua, the Yale law professor whose book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother about tough parenting provoked an incendiary response across the world last year, was born in Champaign, Illinois, but grew up in a culturally Chinese household.

I live in Northcote, the Melbourne suburb where The Slap, the startlingly successful novel and television series, was set. It famously opens with a child being slapped by a non-relative for serial misbehaviour.

In Asia, the scandal would have been perceived not as the slapping but the failure of the parents to intervene and discipline their son.

Wherever wrong or right might be viewed, there's a difference here.

At a school in our neighbourhood, parents recently joined forces to hire a lawyer to press the head to rearrange the classroom allocation so their children would be able to remain in the same set, all friends together, as a right. Naturally, the lawyer prevailed over the teacher.

In Australia, parents sometimes complain to teachers that their children are burdened with too much homework. By contrast, Asian parents moving to Australia often express horror at how little homework is given.

Competition and class rankings are sometimes viewed with distaste here, including by teacher unions, as damaging to students' self-esteem.

Now compare this with the attitudes and priorities of parents in Asia -- including China, where in the cities the one-child policy continues to be applied, pressing down a massive expectation of achievement on those little emperors and empresses.

I lived in Beijing until three years ago, next to one of the city's best performing high schools, No 55.

In exam week the streets around the school were closed off by police roadblocks to reduce noise, wealthy parents booked their children into rooms in nearby hotels to relax between papers, and students entering the campus passed through hi-tech electronic scanners to minimise the risk of cheating.

Parents would wave away taxis taking their children to school until they found one with auspicious numberplates. And large groups of parents would sit on the pavements for days on end, with favourite home-cooked food for their children to eat during the breaks between exams.

Asian parents are not universally enamoured of the rote learning and testing fixation. While most remain conservative and want their children educated as they were, some have been noticing the way the world is changing, how creativity is prized and increasingly rewarded by employers as much as obedience and regimented competence.

So new ways of teaching are being tried out, and some Western-style liberal arts and social studies programs are being added to long-established curriculums with their focus on drills.

Hong Kong, one of the five top global performers in education according to OECD testing -- with South Korea, Singapore, Shanghai and Finland -- in recent years has sought to foster greater creativity in this way.

Clive Chan, who founded e-smart, which runs after-school learning centres in Hong Kong, says parents expect children to engage fully in both the old and new curriculums, with the new effectively grafted on top of the traditional requirements.

His 16-year-old son was up until 4am completing a research paper on "helicopter parents" (those who hover). Many parents, he said, sit beside their children while they do homework -- at primary level for up to three hours a night, and longer at high school.

The answer that has emerged from the re-engineered system there is not so much to lessen the workload as to ensure students understand what they're going through in their painful school years and why.

Zhang Ning, an expert on Chinese education at the University of Adelaide and a mother herself, says social and parental attitudes are important.

"In China, it's very hard to get where you want without high education passes," she says, "and children are told this from kindergarten on."

Zhang describes an advertisement on Chinese television that features mothers discussing the cost of sending their children to English-speaking kindergartens. The mothers stress concern about their children lagging behind and hitting career-path hurdles, and praise a cheaper alternative: a multimedia kit.

Zhang can't readily imagine such products being marketed the same way in Australia.

"There's been a change in teaching styles in China," she said. "But children still have to obey parents and teachers, unlike in Australia where individualism and rights are stressed. Both paths have their good points and their disadvantages."

Former Treasury chief Ken Henry should be weighing these pros and cons as he drafts the government's white paper on Australia in the Asian century.

Without an awareness of the cultural elements at play, we won't be able to benefit fully from Asia's economic rise -- nor from its educational prowess, should we choose to take that route.

Education always involves trade-offs, and the perfect system remains a long way off. What fits in Asian settings may not be easily grafted on here. Parents in Australia may choose other priorities.

Adequate funding and best teacher practice are core requirements. But it's important to recognise that even if those vital steps are achieved, we can't have it all.

For most students and their parents, something has to give -- world-beating test results or the modern Aussie lifestyle.

This is not a zero-sum game, it's not a case of either-or.

But we do need to decide where the balance should fall and accept the consequences -- for our children's sake.