A detailed history of China’s educational testing system illuminates the nation’s values in a competitive world.
Testing, testing…
China’s gaokao is the nation’s “highest exam,” administered to everyone who wishes to attend college. A legacy of the ancient imperial exam structure, the gaokao provides the opportunity for anyone, irrespective of background, to shine academically. Doing well on the exam ensures admission to a leading university and, afterward, to membership in the elite economic, social, and political strata of modern China. This book by three scholars presents a history of the exam, told through their personal experiences and framed as a socioeconomic study of Chinese ambition in the 21st century. The gaokao serves as an example of the highly centralized structure of Chinese life. Just as central planning governs much of urban and rural life, so too does the system of learning come from the top. The exam structure reflects not only the highly technocratic foci of Chinese advancement, but also its long-standing values. Hard work remains the most important thing. China, however, is no straightforward meritocracy. “It’s not that China’s people are idealists who only believe in the power of an exam to predict intelligence,” the authors write. “Rather, China is a society known for connections and petty corruption—hence, the weakness of its institutions.” Children spend their lives taking exams, and family connections help with tutors and retesting. Teachers are not just paid; they are often personally compensated for a child’s education. The “murky waters of corruption in China” wash over this highly centralized system of advancement. And while success is quantified by score, and while that score stays with the student throughout life, failure is equally branding. This book paints a landscape of vast inequality passing itself off as meritocracy—an exposé of an increasingly powerful global nation and a warning to any society, east or west, that still believes in teaching to the test.
A detailed history of China’s educational testing system illuminates the nation’s values in a competitive world.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780674295391
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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