Of course, Western teaching strategies are, to my mind at least, superior, but to try to blanket impose them on the Chinese education system is just too big an ask at one go.

As we pretty much all know, Chinese students aren't taught to have original thought. This goes back centuries; principally via the Mandarin administrators educational programme. Students are taught to remember facts and regurgitate them at exam time, them empty their "cache" memory in order to make way for a new set of facts which need to be regurgitated at the next exam. It's an extremely vicious circle in every sense. I have actually cried for overloaded teenage students, who often work 3-4 hours more per day than their parents. This is clearly a damaging way of educating your children, which produces cloned little remembering machines, ill equipped for the rigours of the real world once they leave University.

However, given the paucity of teachers who are any different from their students in their basic outlook (due to their indoctrination through the same system), the lack of inclination or bravery of any provincial or national education specialist to change things and, unfortunately, the students themselves, who when presented with choice or asked opinions simply go into meltdown, the waters become muddied. Do we, as guest foreign teachers have a right to even attempt to impose our mandate? The Confucian philosophy of "don't rock the boat" comes very much to mind.

We have to bear in mind that Western education grew organically to match the needs of our societies as new discoveries, technologies and industries evolved. This still ongoing process started along with the industrial revolution and continues to this day, with technical and specialised schools evolving alongside industry. This process has been going on over 200 years in the West. In China, the whole process of modernisation and industrialisation has more or less only occurred over the last 15-20 years. Therefore, is it even possible that they could have molded their education system so radically in such a short space, particularly given the uncertainty of the first few years of modernisation? I'm pretty sure none of them could have envisaged the state of modern China when Deng Xiao Ping made the first steps towards modernisation. It's just all happened at such a pace that we Westerners would have been hard pushed to adapt too.

Agreed, things need to change. We can make a small difference, but is there the political will and do the Chinese have enough good teachers to make it happen? This one's set to run and run.......