A look at China’s ‘Academic Army’
KIRK KENNY:
CBC News Viewpoint | February 10, 2005 | More from Kirk Kenny
Kirk grew up in small-town Saskatchewan and received a BA (Hon) from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. He has been living in Xuzhou, China, for over four years, and has been married for three of them to a woman from the city. He has been making his career there by teaching English and doing translation work, but is also looking for avenues to better exploit his language skills. Kirk says that he feels only slightly less out of place in Canada than as a "laowai," or foreigner in China.
It's Monday afternoon and I'm heading to my favorite bakery – XiaoTianTian. As I draw near, the road becomes particularly congested, even by Chinese standards. It suddenly dawns on me that there's a primary school opposite the bakery and the scores of middle-aged and elderly assembled at the locked gates are parents and grandparents waiting to greet the throngs of students marching out of their classrooms in perfect unison. I jump to safety just in time as the guard opens the floodgates.
Education is "compulsory" in China for a minimum of nine years, and the country can rightly boast of having one of the more thorough systems amongst developing countries, or anywhere for that matter. Kindergartens are becoming popular with young, working couples and alleviate some of the custodial duties borne by "super" grandparents. Primary schools run from Grades 1-6, followed by junior and high schools, each lasting three years.
Schools are severely striated, so getting into "key" ones is paramount. Good schools can afford better teachers and facilities and ultimately give students more favourable odds when they face the do-or-die final exams in their last year of high school that determine the calibre of university they can attend.
The facilities themselves are a strange hybrid of modern and minimalist. Classroom walls are bare except for slogans inculcating "diligence" and "discipline," and an eclectic collection of pictures of "role-models" ranging from Communist leaders to Charles Darwin to Albert Einstein.
One classroom may pack as many as 80 students into second-rate desks and be bitterly cold in winter, while another down the hall may see each student with a computer monitor and headphones interacting in the most sophisticated of environs.
Pressure to get into good schools is as much economic as academic. Most Westerners are surprised to find that education in a self-proclaimed socialist country is not free – nor close to it!
In addition to tuition, parents often pay ransom-like sums if their child's marks fall below often-arbitrary cut-off lines. For some, the money is negligible; for many, it can mean working more than one job and forgoing any unnecessary expenses.
The sacrifice of parents in the path of a child's education – so intense and pervasive here – is nothing short of a national sentiment, recalled in the most emphatic of terms.
With so much invested, as it were, parents entertain a host of worries and responsibilities regarding their child's education: inspecting homework and exams with hawk-like scrutiny, carefully planning meals that provide the best nutrition, and even encouraging teachers to be "extra-hard" on their child – a phenomenon unheard of in the West.
But the protagonists in this education drama are the students themselves. Classes usually begin at 8 a.m.; however, students generally arrive half an hour early. Classes end around 4:30 p.m., but students are again "encouraged" to stay longer and study.
Homework is a given for all ages and averages three to four hours a night for high school students. On weekends, parents enlist children in "Olympic Math" or "Crazy English" and a variety of other classes meant to "round out" their educative experience.
Not surprisingly, most students suffer from physical, in addition to mental, burnout. A majority of students wear glasses – due in no small part to excessive reading. Sore shoulders and backs are the result of bearing heavy backpacks, and hours spent toiling over desks.
As well, it's not uncommon to see grey hair in young teenagers, brought on by unimaginable workloads and a highly competitive learning arena. While there is no shortage of disgruntlement, parents, and by default students, dare not "fall behind."
Most schools require uniforms. This conformity of dress, combined with the prominent "buzz" cuts among boys, the orderly, attentive posture of students during class, and the deafening replies in unison to a teacher's questions, furthers the soldier-like comparisons a Westerner is likely to draw.
Teacher-student interaction, dictated by large class sizes and tradition, is generally one-way, with the teacher reading from a textbook and students listening. As has been observed by Chinese and Western educators alike, the words "I think that . . ." don't generally find their way into Chinese classrooms.
Studying involves the robotic tasks of memorizing and transcribing passages from books and doing stacks of questions over and over again. The goal of teaching is to let students (re)produce standardized answers to highly formalized questions so as to score well in exams and bring "honour" to the school.
While a host of voices are candidly critical of China's education system, its value as a commodity is at least understandable. Ancient philosophers extolled education as "the most noble pursuit" and emperors nearly 2,000 years ago implemented a rigorous exam system, which alone determined one's eligibility for government service. As China's population has been and still is largely rural, education has profound implications for improving one's quality of life.
While understandably spoken of in terms of envy here, Canadian education might do well to learn a few things from its Chinese counterpart. If nothing else, respect for educators, a strong work ethic among students and an acute sense of individual as well as national self-betterment seem to be some of the more outstanding attributes of Chinese education.
As the proverb says: "He who fails to study hard in his youth will regret it later" – words as true as ever in the Middle Kingdom.
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