Ni Minjing, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission and director of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, expressed his views on domestic science textbooks in a speech in 2023, and the conclusions reached surprised the audience.
教材僵化，落后世界水平
Ni Minjing's original words in his speech are as follows: "Our education has encountered a bottleneck in the cultivation of scientific literacy, which is embodied in the science courses of physics, biology and chemistry.
There is a crux of the problem that has not changed to this day, that is, the teaching process focuses on solving problems, but neglects to solve them.
The content of the science curriculum is outdated, and a lot of the knowledge taught in it is 200 years old, which can be said to be 70 years behind the world level. There is also the problem that when it comes to teaching science courses, our educators use non-scientific methods.
For example, in chemical physics experiments, we tend to explain the reactions and processes of the experiments verbally, but the proportion of students who take them to do experiments is very small.
The cultivation of scientific and technological innovation ability should be grasped from an early age, which is a child's skill. If you pass high school, it will be difficult to make achievements in the field of scientific research.
科学家进校园
"The Yangtze River Delta region, as a city with a relatively developed level of teaching, economy and science and technology in the mainland, has not had enough exchanges between the three provinces and one city in terms of curriculum teaching, and they all use their own textbooks.
Including various scientific and technological innovation competitions and scientific research activities, they are also carried out independently, and there is not much real cooperation. Therefore, I think it is very necessary for the three provinces and one city in the Yangtze River Delta region to cooperate in cultivating students' scientific research literacy and scientific and technological innovation ability.
I suggest that all children in the Yangtze River Delta region enjoy the same city treatment, and children in the Yangtze River Delta region can enjoy the same science and technology resources as Shanghai children when they come to Shanghai.
We did a survey and asked children if they could get access to scientists in their daily lives, and only three percent of the data was obtained, and I hope that every child can be infected by the atmosphere of scientific research.
This requires relying on the associations of top scientists, forming a popular science alliance of top scientists, and going into the campuses of various primary and secondary schools to carry out scientific knowledge popularization activities, so that scientific knowledge is not suspended in books. ”
In the comment area, many netizens also came forward to say that they had personally experienced the gap between domestic textbooks and foreign textbooks, even if it was not as exaggerated as Ni Minjing said, it was indeed more than a little behind.
我手中就有中译本的统计学、离散数学和数理逻辑的美国教材，内容其实和国内教材大差不差。 But one thing is that the book is very thick, and the explanations in it are very detailed, for fear that readers will not understand and understand. There are many examples of life, and it is really suitable for students to learn.
初中物理开始就有问题了。 The so-called 6 major plates of acousto, light, thermodynamics, and electricity, what really allows you to do experiments is only mechanics, friction, density and electricity, most of which are brushing questions for the exam, and some students can't figure out the nature of the short circuit after the exam.
High school physics is more fun, instead of first talking about the principles of mechanics, come up and give you an acceleration, and then put out the VT image and displacement formula without the students have any concept of integration and differentiation, and the addition and subtraction of vectors are also ahead of mathematics. Then those centripetal accelerations directly let you memorize the formula, and even the reasoning process of how to come about is not written in the textbook