Chinese Schools ~ “education and ideology” series, Part 2/3
Chinese educational ideology and practices: conducive to critical thinking?
In the West, one of the major principles informing the character of a ‘modern’ education is the (potentially contradictory) notion of guided educational self-regulation. The individual is responsible for cultivating his/ her own skills and abilities, whilst the role of the State is to equip citizens to the point where they can autonomously pursue their full intellectual potential. The State must therefore ensure that basic schooling is equally available to all; that an egalitarian system of education is a civil right - efficiently implemented. Education is emphasised as the means by which an individual can acheive their own ends whilst adequately contributing to the economy.
Any mass civil project requires standardisation, however.
The collective benefit of this system for the State is the variety in human capital that is produced. In classical Chinese education, too, there was an emphasis on self-cultivation. But the role of the self is significant more in terms of developing a personal harmony that fits into the socio-political hierarchy. The principle that the ‘needs of themany outweight the needs of the one’ was already a prevalent aspect of Chinese educational policy long before the rise of Communism.
The conversion of such a pervasive social ideology into one that purports the necessity for mass education and prioritizes the good of the Collective was not a difficult one. Chinese Communism borrows both heavily and selectively from Confucian educational principles, often using them as historical qualifiers for contemporary policy decisions.
Since the 1978 (and on-going) reforms there has been a facsinating shift away from the cultivation of a congenial edaucational equality between citizens and a move towards the encouragement of competitive meritocracy in the classroom. It is a social and political attitude that helps propogate (and is derived from) the growing Capitalist mentality in China. I stress the word mentality, here, as Capitalism is of course more than a set of policy reforms and economic and production processes: it is a way of thinking that, like any regime (no matter how economically liberating or ‘free-market’ orientated it claims to be), pervades and determines the media that people consume, what they aspire towards and how they interact.
In the wake of growing disposable income per capita, and an increasingly competitive climate in the race to secure top corporate jobs, China’s collectivist ideology has been transposed to come in line with this new strain of meritocratic competition. Meritocracy is not a new concept in China, of course: the idea that whosoever does a thing best ought to derive the most recognition and benefit from doing it is pretty universally intuitive (I do, of course, concede that I really need to qualify this claim, but simply dont have the space in which to do it!). Rather, in the case of China, it is perhaps better to view the present meritocracy in the light of its present manifestation: the establishment of a consumer-driven social hierarchy. As Vanessa Fong articulates the issue, China currently exhibits a ‘…cultural model of upward mobility through Academic Acheivement’ which she sees as continuous with a tradition of bureaucratic social distinction starting with the Han Dynasty.
The significance this bears in relation to the possible emergence of ‘sceptical questioners’ from the Chinese schooling is in terms of Chinese educational aims consisting in a legacy of inherent utilitarianism. The notion of education for education’s sake is somewhat ecplipsed by the drive to ‘… get the kind of education that could qualify one for a “good job”’.
Fong demonstrates that this manner of competition, even when investigated under conditions ‘…designed to to sever the link between education and elite status’, still resulted in education correlating ‘…directly with occupations and consumption patterns’. This is interpretable as an inevitable reaction to old Communist destratification policies, the motivations of which appear thouroughly modern yet in fact bear much relevance to the old imperial civil service examination system. Further exacerbated by the one-child policy brought to bear in 1979, one of the major upshots of the way acheivement is regulated in China is an educational climate of institutionalized anxiety over occupational prospects – reinforced by a school system with heavy emphasis on the virtues of vicious academic competition.
Students are predominantly concerned with acheiving top grades for the purposes of winning a top job. Little time, apparently, is given over to the more philosophical purposes of gaining an education. The immediate usefulness of a skill such as analytical scepticism towards the content of what is taught in class is not evident in the primary pursuit of high exam grades. Being taught how to engage with such issues as identity politcs is not a top priority in Chinese schools, where the majority of what is learned (particularly below the age of 12 and in rural/ less affluent regions) is system that tranfers knowledge ‘by rote’. This format of schooling by its very nature places emphasis upon the homogenous assimilation of information by the group, as opposed to the individual appropriation of knowledge by each student.
The role of an education in China, aside from the primary goal of competing for the top jobs, has also been to instill a sense of Chinese national identity. Particularly in the aftermath of the Cold War, difficult bilateral relations with the USA helped to propogate the drive to ‘…reinforce internal social cohesion’ through ‘old-fashioned appeals to ethno-nationalist sentiments…. without having to confront the nuanced moral ambiguities of historical events’. I can heartily reccommend Charles Stafford’s insightful work in this area.
(to be continued…)
