Why Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning Differently




On a holiday Monday, it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.


In this encore presentation, NPR's Alix Spiegel compares learning in the United States with learning in Japan and China.


JIM STIGLER: The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three dimensional cubes on paper. And one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed. So the teacher said to him: You know, why don't you go put yours on the board? Right there, I thought, that's interesting. He took the one who can't do it and told him to go put it on the board.

SPIEGEL: In America, it's usually the best kid in the class who's invited to the board. So the kid came up very dutifully, started drawing, but couldn't make the cube work. Every couple minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right and the class would shake their heads no. And as this went on, Stigler noticed that he, Stigler - who, by the way, is now a professor at UCLA - anyway, he, Stigler, was getting more and more and more anxious.


SPIEGEL: Then the class broke into applause, and the kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself. Which, Stigler says, got him thinking about a lot of things, but in particular about how these two cultures - East and West - approach the experience of intellectual struggle.

STIGLER: From very early ages, we see struggle as an indicator that you're just not very smart. It's a sign of low ability. People who are smart don't struggle, they just naturally get it. It's our folk theory, whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.


STIGLER: They've taught them that suffering can be a good thing.

SPIEGEL: Now, granting that there is plenty of diversity in these two cultures and it's possible to point to counterexamples within each, the question still remains: Why, in general, do these two cultures see the experience of intellectual struggle so very differently?

Jin Li is a professor at Brown University who, like Stigler, compares East and West. And for the last 10 years, she's been recording conversations between American mothers and their children and Taiwanese mothers and their children, and then analyzing those conversations to understand how the mothers talk to their kids about learning.







UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Do you know that that's what smart people do - smart grown-ups?


UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: They just keep...

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: Talk about books.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Yeah. So that's a pretty smart thing to do, to talk about a book.


SPIEGEL: It is a small exchange, a moment. But in this drop of conversation, there is a whole world of cultural assumptions and beliefs. Essentially, the American mother, Li says, is communicating to her son that the cause of her son's success in school is his intelligence - he is smart - which, Li says, is a very common American view.

JIN LI: The idea of intelligence is believed, in the West as a cause. She is telling him there's something in him, in his mind that enables him to do what he does.

SPIEGEL: But most people in Asian cultures, she says, don't think this way. Academic success is not as much about whether a student is smart. Academic success is about whether a student is willing to work and to struggle.



UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: (Foreign language spoken)

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Foreign language spoken)



UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Foreign language spoken)



SPIEGEL: So all this is important because the way that you conceptualize the act of struggling with something profoundly affects your actual behavior. Obviously, if struggle indicates weakness to you - for example, a lack of intelligence - it makes you feel bad. So you're less likely to put up with it. But if struggle indicates strength - the ability to face down challenge - you are much more willing to accept it. And Stigler says in the real world it is easy to see the consequences of these different interpretations.


SPIEGEL: So the American first graders that Stigler studied...

STIGLER: Worked on it less than 30 seconds on average and then they basically looked at us and said, we haven't had this.

SPIEGEL: But the Japanese students?


SPIEGEL: Now, I don't mean to imply with any of this that the Eastern way of interpreting struggle - or anything else - is better than the Western way, or vice versa. Each have their strengths and their weaknesses, which both sides know. Westerners tend to worry that their kids won't be able to compete against Asian kids who excel in many areas but especially in math and science, and Eastern cultures, Jin Li says, have their own set of worries.

LI: Well, our children are not creative, our children do not have individuality. They're just robots. You hear the educators from Asian countries express that concern a lot.


LI: Yes, I think it's possible but it requires very big effort.


SPIEGEL: For example, Stigler says, in the Japanese classrooms that he's studied teachers consciously design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students that they teach so that the students can actually have the experience of struggling with something that is just outside their reach. And then once the task is mastered the teachers actively point out to the student that they were able to accomplish it through the student's hard work and struggle.

STIGLER: And I just think that especially in schools, we don't create enough of those experiences and we don't point them out clearly enough.


Alix Spiegel, NPR News, Washington.


INSKEEP: And that's Your Health for this Monday morning.








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