Source Number/Letter: C

MLA/APA/AMA Citation:
Ferrara, Mark S. Palace of Ashes: China and the Decline of American Higher
Education

. N.p.: John Hopkins UP, 2015. Print.

Source Validation: Mark S. Ferrara is a professor of English at t he State University of
New York.
How did you find this source?: I found this source in one of my articles in their work
cited.
Intended audience: Individuals who are interested in education.
What arguments/topics does this source discuss?: T
his book discusses the
similarities and differences between the U.S education system and the East Asian
education system. They specifically highlight how the Chinese education is surpassing
the American education system in terms of higher education. Both China and the United
States are trying to reform their education system leading them to essentially copy
each others. The author explains how even though there may be pros and cons of each
system, modeling a single system will not produce the ultimate education system. The
author also explains how the United States does not provide enough funding for higher
education compared to China. The book also talks about the growing student debt as
another issue that limits the growth of the U.S education. Ultimately, the author highlights
how China is slowly reforming their education system to accommodate their nation
globally while the U.S is moving backwards.
Minimum 3 quotes, paraphrases, summaries of source text that seem likely to be
helpful in future writing:
China seeks to move away from the traditional emphasis on rote learn and vocational
training; its fledgling knowledge economy needs workers who can create and innovate
(and not simply reverse engineer).
Colleges and universities in the United States are embracing, science technology,
engineering, and math(STEM) in place of a long-standing tradition of broad humanistic
learning - and they are increasingly adopting centralized, hierarchical, and authoritarian
policies with no meaningful historical antecedents.
As we saw earlier, state funding for public higher education has been eviscerated. It is
shameful that comprehensive colleges in the State University of New York system, for
example, receive a meager 13 percent of their funding from the state of New York

After reading this book, it gave me a new perspective on the Chinese education system
reform. I did my second timed writing on Chinese education reform but I mainly focused on what
China should do and how they should act upon their actions. In many of the articles I read, they
talked about how Chinas education system was very one sided in the sense that it limited
creativity. Those articles also explained how the U.S higher education was far superior to
Chinas higher education. But in this book, it countered all the viewpoints in the other articles.
This book explained the many faults within higher education in the U.S such as growing student
debt and changing curriculum. Since the tuition for college is so expensive in the U.S compared

to other countries, many students are finding themselves unable to pay for their education. They
also explained how the U.S was actually modeling Chinas traditional education system. Back in
2009, Barack Obama praised the Chinese education system by saying how well the children did
on standardized testing. That comment actually caused a chain reaction within our own
education to focus more on STEM rather than creativity. Meanwhile, China started to reform
their education system to accommodate more creativity in their curriculum while still keeping
parts of their traditional values in place. Ultimately, this book was really eye opening because
the author argued a different viewpoint from the many writers.
This book was around 216 pages and I spent around 8 hours reading it. This book took
about 8 hours to read because as the author made claims about how great the Chinese
education or how the U.S education system was faltering, i researched counter arguments
online. It was really interesting to see how two different viewpoints could be so similar but so
different at the same time. This book also gave me an idea to research the counter arguments
to everything Ive presented. Overall, this book presented a second viewpoint to my research to
eliminate bias.