Recent years have seen the media repeatedly comparing China’s basic education, especially some specific subjects such as mathematic, with that of the Western countries, and China has almost always emerged the winner. But actually such comparisons are pointless, because the education systems of China and Western countries are quite different.

The focus of basic education in Western countries is on cultivating students’ characters, interests and specialties. In the West, schools evaluate and admit students on the basis of multiple standards. Under such an education system, it is possible that Western students’ overall knowledge of a particular subject is lower than that of Chinese students, but then the West also produces individual students who leave Chinese students far behind in other fields.

Moreover, in Western countries many students specialize in multiple fields, whereas China’s unified evaluation system focuses only on high scorers, sacrificing students’ capabilities in other fields.

Whether or not students should delve deeper into subjects should depend on their capacities and interests, rather than unified requirements. In the United States, for example, only 5 to 10 percent of the students interested in math enroll for the International Mathematical Olympiad, while the others take normal math lessons.

The new national college entrance examination reform plan has taken note of this fact and has allowed students to choose subjects they are good at besides Chinese, math and foreign languages, which is a crucial step toward respecting students’ personal choice. But college entrance exams still depend on the overall scores — so do the high school entrance exams — making it difficult to ease students’ academic burden. The score-oriented evaluation system, in fact, exerts pressure on students, from the high school to the lower grade levels.

And to overcome these problems, the education authorities have to deepen reform, establish a multiple evaluation system, and introduce multi-choice syllabuses to suit students' capabilities.

The author is vice-president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute.