When do you eat breakfast?’ Number 3, go!” Before I even finish saying their number, two students jump up and charge the whiteboard. Both of them slide and hit the wall with a thud, unable to stop for sheer speed. Without missing a beat, they’re scribbling furiously in a chaotic blur of erasers and markers.

“Do! When do eat breakfast! No does,” three students are screaming on team one. “When do —” their teammate’s creative spelling of the word “berkfest.” Jack is standing on his chair barking out the correct spelling, “B-R-E-A-K-F-A-S-T!” expelling each letter with all of the air he can fit in his tiny, little lungs.

I feel my ears are starting to bleed, as the fever pitch of a dozen ten- and 11-year-olds is grows to one incomprehensible, 200-decibel roar.

“Quiiieet!” I turn away from the board. All mouths immediately go shut. It’s as though some near disaster has been averted, and a momentary calm settles over us. My heart starts beating normally, and I feel myself inhaling and exhaling at normal intervals. “Sit —“

“Down” they finish, quite used to the routine of a heated grammar competition.

“Tony, big w,” I say, and he hectically erases “when,” putting “When” in its place.

With the question completed, both teams hand the marker to the next person whose charge it is to give this problem an answer. As usual, one simple unheeded correction — forgotten words, badly chosen prepositions, etc. — spirals out of control, and team members are jumping up and down, running in circles, screaming red-faced, begging so-and-so to please change “going” to “go” or “in” to “at” or “to.”

“Joanne, you so suhtoopid!” Jack yells with his hands squeezing his head in feigned frustration, or psychosis, as though he’s trying to crush his own head.

My Taiwanese co-teacher is laughing in the corner, looking over at Jack as she grades the class’s homework.

“She’s not stupid, Jack,” I tell him, “Anyway, you’re crazy.”

to touch his nose with his bottom teeth, twirls twice with his hands bouncing in the air, then plops down in his chair, only to stand right back up as Joanne runs back to her seat, having finished her answer.

“When do you eat breakfast?” team two yells — led by Jack, who is dancing to the rhythm of the words he’s saying — “I eat breakfast after I go to school.” They pronounce eat like “ee-tah” and breakfast “boo-rek-oo-fessah.” In Chinese, there are almost no words that end in consonant sounds — only n and m — and none have two consecutive consonant sounds in a row — like the st in stop, which is pronounced
“suh-topah.”

“No, team two. Not right,” I say, tapping the board with my marker. “Do you eat breakfast after you go to school?” They look at me without responding. I explain to them again that this is not like Chinese.

(Before-after phrases pose big problems for Chinese students,
because the structure of the phrases is quite different. Thusly, the sentence “I eat breakfast after I wake up” is read as “I eat breakfast. After that, I wake up.”)

They’re still staring at me blankly.

“Jessie,” I ask, “when do you eat breakfast?”

She frowns at me sarcastically and mumbles, “I eat breakfast after I go to school.”

“No!” I growl, “Are you listening?”

I turn to Jack. He and his sister Sherry are the two brightest and liveliest students in the class, displaying a truly advanced ability to learn languages. Jack also provides most of the entertainment in class.

I pose the same question to him, hoping he will rectify our grammatical misunderstanding. But Jack just shrugs and says, “Teacher, I eat breakfast after I
go to school.”

“Teacher, may I speak Chinese?” asks Sherry.

I nod.

After Sherry’s complaint has been registered, my co-teacher looks to me. “Yeah, Robert,” she says, as calm and soft-spoken as always, “You do know that in Taiwan
most students eat breakfast at school, right?”

“Nope.”

She lets a big smile cross her face, “They do.”

I turn to the class. “Really?”

“Yessah!” they blurt out in unison.

“What time do you go to school?” I ask.

I get several different answers, all of them between 7 and 7:30 in the morning.

I sit down in an empty desk, utterly dumbfounded by this. I inquire as to when they finish school in the afternoon. All answers were between four and five.

When they were telling me this, we were 30 minutes into a two-hour course. It was 7:30p.m., and the sun had set over two hours ago.

At that moment, after four months of teaching here in Taiwan, I realized the sheer pressure on these kids. In the months that have followed, I’ve become progressively more perceptive regarding what Asian education is and isn’t.

One of the driving forces of the Asian economies’ unrelenting ascent of the last several decades has been driven by a culture where education is paramount. Though throughout history in many other parts of the world education at times has been seen as a threat to power or an act of apostasy, scholarship has been a crucial, near-constant part of East Asian culture for more than 2,000 years.

Being the privilege of only noblemen and royalty from Ancient Egypt to modern Europe, the acquisition of knowledge was, in contrast, one of the only means of social mobility in China. This is evident in China’s famous imperial exams which, for 13 centuries were famous for two things: the sheer arduousness of the material — an ever growing body of Chinese literature — and the fact that these exams were open to all men from all social and monetary backgrounds, thusly giving poor families a mechanism with which to pull themselves up. Women were also allowed to participate in the mid-19th century. This sort of social mobility would certainly have been unheard of in the sixth century in most any other part of the world, and, unfortunately, it’s still inconceivable in many places.

Two millennia of tradition don’t die easily. It’s almost impossible to turn on the television or open a newspaper without learning that American children live in a “flat” world. You had better be sharp enough to split atoms, or you’re doomed. Students in the United States are performing miserably in math and science, and just the other day I was stumped when a group of my 12-year-old students put a math problem on the board. With three years of calculus under my belt — granted, growing more and more fuzzy as the years go by — I was sure that the problem my preteen students posed was more complex than anything I had seen until I was a junior or senior [at a private, Catholic] high school.

This, we are told, is why American education must shape up, or we’ll, at the very least, have to start shipping in thousands of talented Asian engineers and scientists to maintain any hold on the world economy — or simply to sustain our infrastructure.

Though I won’t contest that much of this is true — the American education system
must be revolutionized to keep pumping out the brightest students in the world, I’m not sure we need to look at Asia as our paradigm.

Every night, six days a week, I teach students who are forced to perform at nearly superhuman levels. They go to school from roughly seven in the morning to after four in the afternoon five days a week. In addition, they come to English “cram schools,” like the one at which I teach, twice a week late at night, or on Saturdays. It would be bad enough if this were it, but most of students go to math, science and music schools on other nights. During vacation time — summer vacation included — these schools hold special sessions so that students don’t become dim-witted in their indolence.

Yesterday, I gave an oral test to a six year old, and he got a 98. He grinned at me big, satisfied with his accomplishment, and left the testing room. As he passed his mother waiting in the hall, I heard him say in Chinese, “I got a ninety-eight point five!” and I was disturbed by a system that leads a six year old to embellish a near perfect score.

Taiwan inherited the long tradition of Chinese scholarship when the Nationalist Party of China fled the mainland, led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, in 1949. The imperial exams even persisted here until far into the 20th century, while China plunged into poverty and Mao led all of the country’s intellectuals on a decade-long hayride. Now, Taiwan’s suicide rate among students is second in the world only to Japan.

This system of education, impressive as it is for its longevity and accomplishment, is far from perfect. In the 11th century, Cai Xiang — a famous Chinese scholar, poet, and artist who was himself a product of the imperial examination establishment — lamented a system based on rote memorization, observing that the highest officials and the chief commanders of the border defense were just “literary men,” as opposed to being military scholars or philosophers.

This is still very true in many Asian countries being lauded by the West for their ostensible devotion to education. Students are forced to memorize facts to answer questions correctly, though they may not even know why the answer is correct. Grades are more important than actual knowledge and ability (I have had instances where parents actually do their children’s homework for them!).

So, next time you see Chinese students on Oprah reciting all of the American presidents in order, take it with a grain of salt. When you see that Taiwanese scientists just developed a way to recycle old computers into sturdy building
materials, rest assured most of them were educated at American universities.

While my generation and all those who follow will face much stiffer competition from our peers abroad — which I welcome with open arms — I believe there’s time before we are rendered obsolete. Just don’t let your kids know that. Let them be scared.