Eastern Culture and Western Culture in Learning

Jim Stigler, a professor of psychology at UCLA, sums up the difference in learning approach between the East and the West in this way:

“For the most part in American culture, intellectual struggle in schoolchildren is seen as an indicator of weakness, while in Eastern cultures it is not only tolerated but is often used to measure emotional strength.”

He witnessed how Japanese classroom was conducted, whereby the teacher called upon a weaker student to draw three-dimensional cubes on the board. The kid struggled in making it look right and in the end, he succeeded and received applause from his classmates. This is the opposite of the American classrooms whereby the best kid is usually given the opportunity to share in front of the whole class.

On the other hand, Jin Li, a professor at Brown University, had in the past decade studied the learning beliefs of Taiwanese and Americans. Here is what she has found:

Americans: “The idea of intelligence is believed in the West as a cause. She (the mother) is telling him (the son) that there is something in him, in his mind, that enables him to do what he does.”

Asians: “It resides in what they do, but not who they are, what they’re born with.”

Li shared a conversation between a mother and her son who had won first place in a piano competition, that it was his effort and the persistence he put into practicing the piano that led him to the achievement.

The West looks at struggle as a weakness while the East looks at it as a strength. By viewing it as a strength, we are more willing to put in effort and accept that it is a part of the challenges that we need to face in learning.

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