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Research on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Cramming
Education
Ming Yuan1,a,*
1Shanghai Qibaodwight High School, Shanghai, 201101, China
a. myuan_julie@qibaodwight.org
*corresponding author
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
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
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Educational Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7048/12/20230813
© 2023 The Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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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
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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
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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.
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