The Religion of Results: A Critical Examination of Result-Based Education

I. Introduction: The Grip of Results

My topic centers on the positive and negative impact of result-based education (RBE) on students, teachers, and parents, mainly focusing on middle schools and high schools in China. This form of education operates as a pervasive belief system, a Religion of Results. In this system, students are being instilled a rigid definition of success and failure that is solely based on test scores and rankings. Hallways in high schools are plastered with long lists of rankings for every exam, constantly reminding students of their current position. As Bryan Caplan stated in his book “The Case Against Education”, such systems often function primarily as signaling mechanisms. High scores become a badge for students, not necessarily of their knowledge, but of their ability to conform and persevere.

Take English classes, for example. In China, schools present students with formulas of grammar and lists of vocabulary to memorize. using this method of learning, students become adept at churning out formulaic sentences during classes and exams, which offers little practical use in real-world conversations with native speakers. This example proves that this system prioritizes results over genuine understanding of knowledge and stifles the development of independent thinking.

II. The Impact Inside the School Environment: Pressures and Benefits

The negative impact of RBE is undeniable, particularly for students. Schools encourage students to focus on the “correct” answer based on textbooks, which contained only a rough overview of knowledge from a specific field. Critical analysis of said knowledge is subtly discouraged, because it is seen as a distraction from the singular focus on achieving the “correct” answer. This, adding rewards and punishments, creates passive learners. Students’ physical and mental health suffers as well in this environment and are constantly neglected and deemed unimportant compared to their performance in class.

However, acknowledging the negative impact of RBE doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any potential benefits. Quite the contrary. After consulting a friend from a university in Shenzhen, I learned that RBE is a gateway to abundant knowledge and educational opportunities that is otherwise unavailable for students from remote areas who value their financial needs way above expressing any form of creativity. Standardized tests, while flawed, can offer a level playing field, a chance for every student to overcome socioeconomic barriers.

Teachers, another major stakeholder of any education system, is impacted by RBE as well. Unlike the students, they can see a bigger picture of the phenomenon. And while they must follow the rules of the system, they are doing their best to make change in their own way, structurally and emotionally.

Going back to my former high school, I joined a 15-min physics class for the senior grade 3 students (preparing for their College Entrance Exams) with my teacher’s consent. My former physics teacher, while clearly aware of the effects of RBE, employed a teaching method that minimized the time for passive learning, leaving abundant time for students to organize on their own. My teachers, although exhausted by the high pressure of classes, always tried their best to make their own small changes within the system. Their fatigue vanished when they were teaching in class, providing emotional as well as structural support to the students. Looking at this phenomenon no longer as a stakeholder but as a researcher was quite memorable to me. Another stakeholder in this system are the parents. They were once students of RBE as well. Whether they were considered successful or not, they would have an expectation for their children in education. Their emotional and psychological wellbeing are harmed because they care for the future of their children (therefore in this context, they care about the results). This system does put a pressure on them to prioritize their children’s academic performance over holistic development.

III.  The Impact Beyond the School Environment: The “Religion of Results”

Why do I call this phenomenon a Religion of Results? While the system does lack deities or supernatural elements, it does function similarly, shaping students’ minds and fostering a conditioned way of thinking. Result-based education fosters a secular religion in its stakeholders, especially the student group. According to the Bandwagon Effect, it’s easier to manipulate a crowd than an individual because of social pressures, so the larger the crowd of believers, the easier perceptions of success and societal expectations are changed.

In the grand scheme, breeding believers of this Religion of Results might appear beneficial. After all, it produces workers who strive to be “perfect”, and this “perfection” is defined by the creators of the system. According to Herbert Marcuse’s critique of societal repression, this comes at a devastating cost to believers of this religion: the stifling of creativity and innovation. Students become so accustomed to this results-oriented mindset that they project it onto every subsequent environment they enter.

IV. Beyond China: Comparing Different Cultural Backgrounds

The Religion of Results doesn’t just exist within China but is a global phenomenon. Comparatively, this belief is more popular in the East than in the West. The difference of labor between eastern and western cultures causes the difference of education. Western RBE centers on capitalism and Eastern RBE centers on several diverse backgrounds but has communism roots. That’s the core reason why the education system are so different in those areas.

With that research in mind, I started broadening my scope and searching for evidence beyond China. I consulted someone who had education experiences in both Thailand and New Zealand, the feedback I got was that New Zealand was much freer in education, but it was also more chaotic, and students had a lot of fights and the school couldn’t really control them. With this information in mind, I maintain that we need to form a balance between the freedom of individuals and the order of society within the area of education.

V. Conclusion: Seeking Balance beyond Standardized Tests

RBE provides stability and promotes national competitiveness that comes at a cost of stifling innovation and critical thinking. For financially challenged people, this is an amazing opportunity, but it remains a problem for potential creatives.

Students are not connecting the dots of why they have this belief of results. They can’t see the entire picture that I’m only beginning to see now, with the luxury of being in another educational environment where critical thinking and failing is encouraged. The change I want to see is for more people to witness this macroscopic view. I want students to deconstruct information, separate fact from fiction, and challenge what they’re taught. Students, as well as parents and teachers, should form a metaphorical shield in a result-based environment.

As artistic protests are scattered around different social media platforms right now, we need to create a movement or form an online platform where potential creatives could express their ideas freely. Adding a little chaos within the order of results is needed in this world.

Reference:

Caplan, B. (2019). The Case against Education. Princeton University Press.

admin (2020). ‘Secular religion’ in the Wikipedia. [online] Tamás Nyirkos. Available at: https://nyirkos.com/secular-religion-in-the-wikipedia/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2024].

Investopedia Team (2023). What Is the Bandwagon Effect? Why People Follow the Crowd. [online] Investopedia. Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bandwagon-effect.asp.

Farr, A. (2021). Herbert Marcuse. Summer 2021 ed. [online] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/#Rep.

Linking Project 4 to my Box of Uncertainties (and applying what I learned in Unit 2), I aimed my focus on result-based education which is common in middle and high schools in China.

The two pages shown below are my initial notes on the definition and background of result-based education. I am aware that I lack secondary research in this area, so these pages consists of mostly assumptions(that is slowly morphing into understanding) of why this phenomenon exists in the majority of schools in China.

QUESTION: How can individuality within creative students be preserved in a result-based education environment(using fictional storytelling)?

Project 4 is a major self-directed research project, which involves investigating and identifying a meaningful area of inquiry which has not yet been explored. My project centers on mythology, religion, belief and result-based education in China.

My assumption is that students in result-based education are taught to form a belief of being perfect and taught a linear way of defining good and bad, much like the definition between heaven and hell in many mythological tales. After researching the Third Wave Experiment in 1967, I realized several things: 1. Fiction has functional uses in education, and 2. people lose their minds in a crowd and forget to think individually, and therefore it is easier to teach a crowd a biased definition of good and bad than to teach an individual.

I admit that I am biased towards this phenomenon because result-based education really built the way I think as a student and I found myself almost incapable of having a meter of my own about things I see and I am anxious that my work wouldn’t be “perfect” by academic terms.(Because we are taught to rank our success based on other people’s failures). I used to read ancient mythology(Norse, Greek, Roman, Egyptian) and fictional tales as a way to escape and form a safe haven for my individual idiosyncrasies when I was taught to believe that those things are not a part of true academic learning in middle school.

After all that being said, result-based education is actually the best possible solution that we as a country has come up with after a pretty rocky part of history, because we are aiming to transform from an agricultural country to an industrial country(or a developing country to developed country) in the shortest possible time, and in order to achieve that, China as a whole will need an abundant number of workers who believes wholeheartedly in a collective sense of honor and a fixed definition of success and failure(which is defined by the leaders, who changes those definitions according to the direction that we as a country are going after.

If I look at this phenomenon from a macroscopic view, I would think that this is a clever and efficient tactic. (I have compared this to the novel 1984 but personally I think it was too negative of a comparison, this particular phenomenon has achieved really positive outcomes, if it hasn’t, it wouldn’t have survived this long). I emphasize that this phenomenon is invisible to most young individuals in school who are going through their primary and secondary years of education. I maintain that we show this to them in some way that they would understand what they would be going through before actually going through it, for that might change their entire perspective to what they are learning. This has already been done by multiple artists and content creators in China where they post their work on platform(Bilibili, Red and Weibo,etc) which attacks that linear mode of thinking by projecting the macroscopic view in a magnified dystopian way, and it overjoys me that they are receiving answers from the audience online saying that they hear them and agree with them. People, especially youngsters(or the younger generation, are waking up).

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There’s something emotionally uncomfortable in the process of this project. I think I’m trying to understand this phenomenon in Project 4 so I could use it as a basis and go a step further when I do my individual project, and focus more on telling fictional stories, mythology, religion, and belief, because I don’t plan on being caught by this narrative for too long (because if I do, I’ll simply be telling the same story over and over again). I understand that I can’t change this macroscopic phenomenon itself, but I could change the way people observe it, and therefore bring a change to the mindset of people inside this phenomenon, especially youngsters. (This is where fiction and belief comes in.)

The center of my Box of Uncertainties has always been fiction, mythology and belief, why people chose to create and believe in the definition of God. I think of it as a filter or a lens. People look through this filter/lens to see the world they want to see, and some have the ability to tinker on the lens of others, so their perspective of the world is changed, either for better or for worse.

I aim, in this project, and in my work as a whole, to be a tinkerer. I want to learn the craft of tinkering different lenses to either expose the more objective truth or to let people see a potentially better world.

(And definitely communicate with other tinkerers because defining a specific world as “potentially better” as an individual could be dangerous).