Three years ago, BBC made great efforts to shoot a documentary about Chinese school education named Are Our kids Tough Enough? Chinese School. "In a unique experiment, five teachers from China take over the education of fifty teenagers in a Hampshire school to see whether the high-ranking Chinese education system can teach us a lesson.", BBC said. They opened a so called experiment class in a top public middle school in Hampshire, the United kingdom. In this experiment class, not only the timetables were the same as their Chinese counterparts, but also all classes were taught by Chinese teachers. The experiment lasted for one month. As a result, Chinese teachers were extremely disappointed by the bad performances of British students, saying that they didn't have much initiative and were viewed as undisciplined and ineffectual. On the other hand, those British students couldn't adapt to the intensive teaching method and were reduced to tears due to being dressed down in public.
Many people criticized Chinese education system for its emphasis in discipline and memorization as opposed to creativity and critical thinking.
To tell the truth, Chinese themselves understand the shortcomings of their school education better than any other outsiders. However, China now has a population of over 1.4 billion. It's true that western education is more advanced and scientific. If China adopted, say, US school education, the growth of economy would decrease, graduates' quality and skills would drop dramatically. It becomes more and more difficult to screen talents. The process of screening talents would cost a lot of time and efforts. It is expensive to launch quality education.
The current education system is the best option left for China and Chinese people.