Steve
Stephen Philion Lecturer/PhD Candidate Department of Sociology 2424 Maile Way Social Sciences Bldg. # 247 Honolulu, HI 96822
On Tue, 23 May 2000, Chris Doss wrote:
>
>
>
> >From: LeoCasey at aol.com
> >Reply-To: dsanet at quantum.sdsu.edu
> >To: ARN-L at listsrva.cua.edu, ntpi-owner at list.teachnet.org,
> >dsanet at quantum.sdsu.edu
> >Subject: dsanet: Some Thoughts on Chinese Education
> >Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 11:24:25 EDT
> >
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> >The author of this message is LeoCasey at aol.com
> >
> >Some Thoughts On Chinese Education
> >
> >Leo Casey
> >
> >For two weeks at the end of April and the start of May, a group of 16 New
> >York area educators, of which I was one, participated in a two week study
> >tour of China. The tour was sponsored by the China Institute, a
> >nonpartisan,
> >educational organization founded by John Dewey 75 years ago with the aim of
> >improving American understanding of historical and contemporary China, and
> >I
> >joined with the support, moral and financial, of my union, the United
> >Federation of Teachers. Over the course of our trip, we visited three major
> >cities in different sections of China [Chengdu, Xi'an, Beijing] and spoke
> >with an interesting and wide array of intellectuals, academics and
> >students,
> >ranging from those who faithfully transmitted the party line on all matters
> >and reformers within the government to apolitical scholars and outspoken
> >critics of the government and its current economic and political policies.
> >As
> >the primary focus of our trip was educational, we met with teachers and
> >administrators at the universities in Chengdu and Xi'an, a rural elementary
> >school in Sichuan province and an elite high school in Beijing. We also
> >visited a rural farm, along with a number of historical and cultural sites.
> >
> >What follows are my thoughts on the current state of Chinese education,
> >with
> >some discussion of points of relevance to American education. A longer
> >essay
> >with my more general reflections on China, written with reference to the
> >ongoing debate over China's entry into the WTO and most favored nation
> >trading status, is available at [LeoCasey at AOL.COM].
> >
> >China currently has a system of free, compulsory public education for the
> >elementary and middle grades (grades 1 through 9). Upon completion of the
> >ninth grade, a student must pass nationwide examinations to proceed into
> >high
> >school. As well, after the ninth grade, education is no longer free:
> >tuition
> >– at a considerable cost – is required for higher education. This
> >follows a
> >pattern the Chinese government has established in all of its social
> >services:
> >health care, too, must now be purchased. As it is integrated itself into
> >the
> >global economy, China has increasingly adopted an economic policy which can
> >only be described as laissez-faire capitalism, and the Social Darwinist
> >ideology of such a system has led to slicing social services down to an
> >absolute minimum. All of this has taken place during a decade when the
> >Chinese economy was growing at a rate of 7% to 10% annually, and thus
> >producing greater and greater economic surpluses and resources.
> >
> >Much too little of those growing economic resources have been plowed back
> >into education. For the Chinese development model combines laissez-faire
> >capitalism with an authoritarian, repressive state, as part of an attempt
> >to
> >copy the economic successes of Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan that is
> >taken entirely from pages of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
> >play book. And this state, run by the Chinese Communist Party, is the
> >source
> >of a great deal of corruption and misuse of funds. Consider, for example,
> >that 70% of all food catering in China is for the government and the party,
> >and that the Chinese state spends 1.3 times as much on that catering as it
> >does on education. (One cannot help being reminded of the distinction
> >Plunkitt of Tammany Hall once made between "legal" and "illegal" graft.)
> >Yet
> >as few as 20% of those students who want to continue their education beyond
> >the compulsory, free stage have an opportunity to do so.
> >
> >Teachers are required to have completed at least three years of
> >post-secondary education, and as far as we could see, most have a B.A.; in
> >the urban centers, there is a move to have teachers with Masters Degrees.
> >In
> >the elementary school we visited in a rural section of the southwestern
> >Sichuan province, teachers were paid 80 Chinese yuan – approximately US$
> >65 -
> >a month. As a point of contrast, we also visited a combined middle and high
> >school the capital of Beijing, an elite public school not unlike a
> >Stuyvesant
> >or Bronx High School of Science in New York City which is affiliated with
> >the
> >prestigious Beijing Normal University (Teachers' College) and had the most
> >extravagant facilities, such as an Olympic size swimming pool. Teachers in
> >this school were paid up to 200 Chinese yuan – approximately US$ 160 –
> >a
> >month; the first 100 yuan came from the government, and the second 100 yuan
> >came from student tuition in the upper grades. (The cost of living is, of
> >course, higher in Beijing.) Further, there is a system of merit pay for
> >teachers, and their salaries may be reduced if their class(es) fail(s) to
> >reach school standards in areas such as student attendance, student
> >discipline and student exam grades. (The elementary school had a large
> >blackboard in their courtyard on which a running account of how the
> >different
> >teachers' classes met those standards was kept.) These low salaries for
> >educated professionals reflect the generally abysmal level of wages in
> >China;
> >one can imagine what the income of uneducated workers and peasants would
> >be,
> >and why Western corporations are so eager to "set up shop" under these
> >conditions in which no free, democratically controlled unions are allowed.
> >Yet the wealth which has flowed into the government and state bureaucracy
> >and
> >private entrepreneurial sector is so great that the gap between the richest
> >and the poorest classes in society is now greater in China than in the
> >United
> >States.
> >
> >Class size – in both the rural and urban setting – was capped at 50; it
> >was
> >hard to see how any more children than 50 could be squeezed into a single
> >classroom.
> >
> >Chinese educators to whom we spoke reported that pedagogy was still quite
> >didactic and entirely teacher directed and dominated. The few classes we
> >saw
> >(for most of our time in China, there was a week long national holiday)
> >seem
> >to confirm that judgment. (Since we did not understand the language, and
> >had
> >to rely either upon our China Institute guides or our contacts for
> >translations, there was a limit to what we could determine on our own.)
> >However, there was also a general recognition among these Chinese educators
> >that this was not ideal, and that pedagogical changes needed to be made.
> >One
> >young graduate student in the school of education at the university in
> >Xi'an
> >was extraordinarily well-read in Western educational literature [he was
> >completely conversant, for example, with Donald Schön's concept of teacher
> >as
> >reflective practitioner], and he was fascinated with the lively and
> >animated
> >discussion we had over dinner one night, as myself and another New York
> >City
> >educator took on a representative of the New York State Education
> >Department
> >on the subject of "high stakes exams." It is very hard to know how
> >prevalent
> >his views were, however, and his own comments seemed to suggest that he was
> >well in advance of most his colleagues in the educational profession in
> >China.
> >
> >Interestingly enough, the Chinese educators did note that there was a trend
> >away from the extraordinary emphasis the Chinese schools and government had
> >previously placed on 'high stakes exams,' as it was generally recognized
> >that
> >the amount of pressure they had placed on students was not conducive to
> >learning. But this trend is relative to what was: national examinations
> >continue to be the ‘gateways' to higher education.
> >
> >Although there is little of much quality written in English on Chinese
> >education, I found an interesting text by Howard Gardner
> >(To Open Minds) which recounts his own exchanges, on a series of trips and
> >collaborations which started during the 1980s, with Chinese educators. It
> >was
> >an interesting juxtaposition to read Gardner as we traveled through China.
> >Gardner confirms the judgment that Chinese education is heavily on the
> >prescriptive and conservative side of the educational spectrum, focusing on
> >direct instruction of well-established bodies of knowledge and skills. Not
> >too surprisingly, given his own theoretical work on "multiple
> >intelligences"
> >and his research focus on arts education, Gardner finds that this approach
> >stultifies individual creativity and discourages critical thinking. Without
> >accepting in its entirety Gardner's views of educational pedagogy, there is
> >little doubt that his general observations regarding Chinese education are
> >close to the mark.
> >
> >What is interesting in Gardner's analysis, however, is that he never
> >considers why Chinese education developed in the direction it did. There
> >are,
> >of course, many factors in the development of Chinese education. For
> >example,
> >China has never had the strong legacy of individualism that marks Western
> >cultures, and so individual creativity in education would not be deemed to
> >be
> >of the same value. And an authoritarian and repressive government, such as
> >that which has ruled China for the last half-century, is not about to
> >encourage 'critical thinking' of any sort. But, at best, the current
> >government inherited and reinforced a classical tradition of education, one
> >with deep roots in classical Chinese philosophy. What Gardner never
> >considers, but what seems to be a fascinating issue for me, is the role
> >literacy plays in shaping Chinese education and pedagogy.
> >
> >Since I am not a linguist by training, when I discuss Chinese literacy, I
> >am
> >venturing into a field where there are many extraordinary gaps in what I
> >know. But the major points seem fairly straightforward to me. Chinese
> >written
> >language differs dramatically from various European and Middle Eastern
> >written languages in that it is pictorially, rather than phonetically,
> >based:
> >Chinese characters were developed from illustrations. To be literate in
> >classical written Chinese, therefore, there was no choice but to memorize
> >the
> >several hundred basic characters. The total universe of characters ranges
> >in
> >50,000, but like German compound nouns, these involve combinations of
> >different characters. The net effect of all of this was that, until the
> >post-WWII period, literacy was limited to a very small elite of the Chinese
> >people – government bureaucrats and scholars. (Note that the official
> >Chinese
> >dialect, used nationally, is called Chinese Mandarin, after the Chinese
> >high
> >state officials and scholars known as mandarins.)
> >
> >When the Chinese government decided to embark on a program of national
> >literacy after the Revolution, they first developed a romanized form of the
> >written language, with the first version being produced by the Russians
> >(and
> >thus conforming closer to the demands of Russian language). In 1979, the
> >government officially adopted pinyin, based on the International Phonetic
> >Alphabet, for these purposes. [This was the point at which the spelling Mao
> >Tse-Tung was changed to Mao Zedong.] Today, in the mass instruction of
> >literacy in Chinese schools, students are first taught the pinyin version
> >of
> >written Chinese, and only when this form is successfully mastered, do they
> >move on to the written characters.
> >
> >It seems to me that this experience provides a most interesting
> >counterfactual for debates in American education over the appropriate place
> >of phoneme recognition in the teaching and learning of literacy. The
> >Chinese
> >experience seems to suggest, at least to me, that phonetic instruction must
> >play a larger role in literacy instruction than the more extreme variants
> >of
> >'whole language' instruction would provide, although by no means does it
> >accord it the exclusive place the 'phonics' purists would give it. The
> >comparative study of literacy acquisition seems, to me, to be a fruitful
> >area
> >for much more discussion among American educators.
> >
> >Leo Casey
> >United Federation of Teachers
> >260 Park Avenue South
> >New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
> >
> >Power concedes nothing without a demand.
> >It never has, and it never will.
> >If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
> >Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
> >want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
> >lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
> >-- Frederick Douglass --
>
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