Research on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Cramming Education

Research Article
Open access

Research on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Cramming Education

Ming Yuan 1*
  • 1 Shanghai Qibaodwight High School    
  • *corresponding author myuan_julie@qibaodwight.org
Published on 26 October 2023 | https://doi.org/10.54254/2753-7048/12/20230813
LNEP Vol.12
ISSN (Print): 2753-7056
ISSN (Online): 2753-7048
ISBN (Print): 978-1-83558-049-3
ISBN (Online): 978-1-83558-050-9

Abstract

With the rapid development of China's economy and technology, China's educational goals have also changed. Similarly, teaching methods should also change with the change of educational objectives. This paper mainly studies the advantages and disadvantages of cramming. Through the analysis of existing literature and data, it can be found that the disadvantages of cramming education include killing students' interest and curiosity, leading to their resistance to learning, and harming students' health; The advantage of cramming education lies in its help for exam-oriented education, thus it is very suitable for our national conditions now as well as its effective help for knowledge accumulation. In view of this, it may be concluded that cramming does more harm than good and is not suitable to achieve our future educational goals.

Keywords:

duck-filling education, education in China, education pattern

Yuan,M. (2023). Research on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Cramming Education. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,12,215-218.
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1. Introduction

Cramming is also known as “duck-filling” learning, which refers to instilling knowledge into students whether or not they master or understand it. This method of education has been widely used in China for a long time. But this paper finds that the current society can not achieve the goal of education by cramming it. The contradiction between expected results and widely used methods caught my attention. Therefore, this paper will analyze whether this teaching method can achieve this goal in light of the advantages and disadvantages of cramming education and propose methods that can achieve this goal.

2. The Drawbacks of Cramming Education

Duck-filling education stifles students' curiosity and imagination. This method of education is a constant cramming of knowledge into students' minds but never tells them why and how to get that knowledge. With this approach to education, students only memorize and remember knowledge mechanically, never understanding it. This leads to the fact that the student often forgets this knowledge after the exam and can only do the same types of questions because they do not understand the principle behind the knowledge, so it is difficult to integrate it [1]. In addition, this one-way teaching method makes students lose the spirit of inquiry. Whenever new knowledge appears, they do not take the initiative to think and find information to solve the problem but memorize the same type of content through repeated training like a machine. This type of education will also lead the student to "high scores but with low ability," which means they can only achieve high scores on exams but cannot match them with their daily lives. Learning is a lifelong process in which there is not always someone at every stage to organize all your knowledge and check your learning at all times. In middle school and high school, students will not only learn the knowledge that is needed to pass exams but also the ability to learn. This ability will ensure that students continue to improve themselves for the rest of their lives. Cramming can even cause students to lose their ability to learn because students don't need to plan and think about how they will learn, but just acquire it passively. So they will have a very difficult time in their future academic careers. Students' interest in learning will also decrease with the constant pattern of learning day in and day out, and it will be difficult for students to actively have the mindset of wanting to learn when they begin to plan their lives later in life. This is very inappropriate for children in today's fast-moving society, and without the ability to learn independently, it is very difficult to adapt to today's society. In short, fill-in-the-blank education can make students lack the drive to learn actively, which is not conducive to the development of their long-term learning.

Secondly, the cramming system may cause problems with students' health and learning status. The main goal of a fill-in-the-blank education is to get good grades, and the way to achieve this goal is to create muscle memory by constantly letting students practice. Muscle memory requires a long time and a lot of practice, and in China, the number of subjects students need to study for Gao Kao in their high school is six. The teachers of each class assign a lot of homework and compete for each other's time for their students to achieve higher grades because students have limited time to study. After a long day of study, students need to spend more than an hour on homework for each class, which makes them not have enough time to rest and indirectly reduces the quality of classroom learning the next day [2]. In addition to the vicious cycle that students are trapped in, these assignments can also lead to anxiety on the part of the teacher. The teacher will worry that they are giving their students too much homework, causing them physical problems, and that they are also worried that if they don't give enough homework, the students won't be able to create muscle memory. Students, in turn, can become infected by the teacher's anxiety and begin to worry that they will not be able to meet the teacher's or parent's requirements. Some teachers may even use suggestive words to force students to do extra practice to get good grades. These situations are the inevitable pitfalls of the fill-in-the-blank approach to education because it is overly result-oriented, so there is a high probability that the process of achieving that result and the students' thoughts will be ignored.

3. The Advantages of Cramming Education

Although cramming has many disadvantages, there is no denying that it is probably the most effective way to get good grades. Emile Durkheim, a famous French sociologist and educationalist, insisted on "indoctrination education". "In his opinion, indoctrination is not necessarily a bad thing. Forcing students to accept moral facts, values and behaviors is bad, but we have no choice. Because the kind of person we want to be is the kind of person required by the future society, and the distance between the kind of person needed by the society and the potential we are born with is so great that we cannot form a social personality or even become a real person without limiting and regulating our behaviors and desires according to the requirements of the society. So this process, though painful, is necessary [3]. China's population is huge, and the current government-mandated nine-year compulsory education has made it possible for more people to have access to education. With such a large number of people, there are two exams, Zhong Kao and Gao Kao, which determine whether you have the opportunity to enter high school or college, respectively. Usually, the papers for both exams are standardized. Due to the large population, schools are not able to make a special selection, so they use this exam to select the students who can enter their schools. But with nine years of compulsory education, everyone learns similar things, so the only thing that separates everyone's abilities is the time and effort spent on studying. Therefore, the fill-in-the-blank method of education, which constantly makes students learn and remember, is the more effective method at this stage. It is not realistic to expect students to spend very little time studying while maintaining good grades. Also, the sheer number of students makes it impossible for teachers to give each student a detailed education. Typically in Chinese high schools, there are 40-50 students in a class and the teacher has to teach more than one class. In this case, it is impossible for the teacher to have time to answer each student's question in detail, and just correcting the class's homework may take up a lot of their time. Therefore, for the teacher and the students, mechanical memorization is probably the most effortless method.

A fill-in-the-blank education might assist pupils in acquiring more knowledge in order to achieve academic success because all knowledge must be accumulated. Acquiring knowledge requires accumulation, and we can only know what to explore, have room for sublimation, and have the opportunity to query when we have gathered a particular quantity of knowledge [4]. But forcing students to memorize a lot is itself a form of fill-in-the-blank education. The task that teachers have to accomplish in the stage of students' accumulation of knowledge is to choose well-made materials, that is, duck feed for duck-fill education, and then to talk about comprehension and about heuristic education. Otherwise, the emphasis is on student comprehension, on putting on a fancy show and focusing only on student comprehension without caring about what students have memorized and accumulated. Not only will students spend more time on the comprehension process later, but they will also find themselves unable to express their accumulated knowledge when they want to write. Without accumulation, students lack the material to internalize and reshape. Without these materials, what can one explore and question? Learning not only in the arts but also in the sciences requires a lot of accumulation and practice. The basis of problem-solving is ensuring that the basics are secure and that no mistakes are made, and those basics generally need to be memorized and practiced in order to be remembered. Everything needs to be practiced to make it work, and those difficult problems, even after knowing how to do them, still need to be practiced to make sure you don't make mistakes. That's why fill-in-the-blank education has to be used to some extent.

4. Other Education System

It can be found that the fill-in-the-blank education system has both advantages and disadvantages. It may help students learn a subject quickly, but in terms of long-term development, fill-in-the-blank education is not good enough to achieve the current educational goals. Worldwide, education has now improved from indoctrination to gardening and then to comprehensive. Since the most widely used education in China is still indoctrination education, it can be argued that we can try to reform indoctrination education into gardener education. An image serves as the foundation for gardener education [5].

But although a gardener's education is more focused on the development of children's abilities than a duck-filling education which only focuses on children's grades, it is more appropriate for modern society. However, it usually goes to the extreme of giving students too much freedom without knowing enough about the world, and it is so idealistic that most teachers do not have time to explore children's strengths and hobbies in detail, and young children do not know enough about the world to determine their hobbies or careers at an early age. Therefore, inclusive education may be more suitable for our country's development goals. This model of education contains three main meanings [6]. They are the integration of subjects, the integration of national and foreign languages in teaching, and the integration of professional learning with live content. First of all, for the first interpretation, the students are seen as a whole. The content that students learn is no longer a fragmented subject, but an interrelated one. This method of teaching will require the teacher to have a good understanding of each subject, which makes it more demanding for the teacher. But it is also more suitable for students so that they can easily integrate it into the learning process. It is very important to learn and master a foreign language because society nowadays is a gradually integrated society and all countries are going through globalization. It also enhances the student's intellect as he or she continues to change languages. The third interpretation is a very important skill for students today, who are often unable to apply what they have learned in their daily lives. Therefore, developing this ability will help students socialize, so that they will encounter fewer problems when they enter society and will be more adaptable to it. And this ability to fully translate what they have learned into everyday life will grow students' self-confidence and make them feel confident in their abilities and choices. This approach to education produces students who are fully capable of achieving the standard of all-around development of the intellect, body, and mind [2].

5. Conclusion

So in general, this essay analyzes the good and bad of “duck-filling” education and finds that this method of education is not good enough to achieve the present educational goals. Gradually changing the mainstream education method from cramming to inclusive education is the way to achieve China's educational goals. This paper mainly discusses the problems existing in domestic education methods, and the conclusions drawn are not universal. It is undeniable that each educational method has its shortcomings, so the solutions given at this stage are not necessarily the best ones. Moreover, as the national situation changes, the educational goals of our country will continue to change with social development. Therefore, future research directions can continue to focus on whether our educational goals and their educational methods are appropriate and whether our educational goals are in line with the current developing national conditions.


References

[1]. Ding Lijie. The impact of "indoctrination" education on the recipients' acceptance of "discovery" education[J]. Literature and Education,2017,(15):166-167.

[2]. Teng Shouyao. Aesthetic education - the key to modernization of education[J]. Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Science Edition), 1995,(02):63-69+128.

[3]. Fan Daming, Wu Xiulan, Li Shanyong. The development of "indoctrination education" in Western pedagogy and its reflection[J]. Journal of Qinzhou College,2013,28(09):40-45.

[4]. Wang Yimiao. The impact of discovery education[J]. Examination and evaluation,2014,(07):128.

[5]. Wang Yanjuan. The inevitability of the withdrawal of "duck-fill" education from the stage[J]. Modern Education,2012,(Z3):96.

[6]. Deng Jianjun, Qu Wenwen. Indoctrination education: the current education is not yet out of the box[J]. Educational Theory and Practice, 1996,(02):46-48.


Cite this article

Yuan,M. (2023). Research on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Cramming Education. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,12,215-218.

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About volume

Volume title: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Educational Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries

ISBN:978-1-83558-049-3(Print) / 978-1-83558-050-9(Online)
Editor:Javier Cifuentes-Faura, Enrique Mallen
Conference website: https://www.iceipi.org/
Conference date: 7 August 2023
Series: Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media
Volume number: Vol.12
ISSN:2753-7048(Print) / 2753-7056(Online)

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References

[1]. Ding Lijie. The impact of "indoctrination" education on the recipients' acceptance of "discovery" education[J]. Literature and Education,2017,(15):166-167.

[2]. Teng Shouyao. Aesthetic education - the key to modernization of education[J]. Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Science Edition), 1995,(02):63-69+128.

[3]. Fan Daming, Wu Xiulan, Li Shanyong. The development of "indoctrination education" in Western pedagogy and its reflection[J]. Journal of Qinzhou College,2013,28(09):40-45.

[4]. Wang Yimiao. The impact of discovery education[J]. Examination and evaluation,2014,(07):128.

[5]. Wang Yanjuan. The inevitability of the withdrawal of "duck-fill" education from the stage[J]. Modern Education,2012,(Z3):96.

[6]. Deng Jianjun, Qu Wenwen. Indoctrination education: the current education is not yet out of the box[J]. Educational Theory and Practice, 1996,(02):46-48.