Notes

Chinese Education: Students, Teachers, and Methodology
With my interest and background in education, my teaching in China placed me in a unique position to do firsthand observation of Chinese education at all levels, which was among the primary purposes of my original sabbatical request and my subsequent trips there. We visited many elementary, middle, and high schools, and also several community colleges; furthermore, I had the opportunity of teaching at all university grade levels. I found learn that education has completely different, much more deterministic consequences for Chinese students than it does for American students.

Look at it in this manner. With a population of over 1.3 billion people, China has one-fifth of the world's population: one atlanta divorce attorneys five people on Earth is Chinese. Further complicating the issues of that massive populace is the distribution of individuals. China has roughly the same land mass as the United States. However, an excellent portion of that area is uninhabitable or sparsely populated: the Gobi Desert is non-arable and the Himalayas and the Himalayan plateau regions are actually largely useless; the eastern 1 / 2 of the nation is where in fact the majority of the people are clustered, with a good deal of the population concentrated in and around the large cities located in that area of the country's land mass. In addition, seventy-five to eighty percent of the people remain agrarian. Such disparate distribution and density of the population certainly makes feeding, housing, looking after, and educating the citizens a continuing challenge, with education being truly a key focus.

Every school day in China, over 300 million students study in Chinese classrooms... more than the complete population of America. Indeed, one of my Chinese colleagues once linked to me an enlightening analogy. Education in China, he illustrated, could be compared to a broad, packed highway resulting in a narrow bridge. The farther across the road one goes, the narrower it gets. Many students get forced out into endless side streets all on the way. And at the end of this crowded road lies an extremely narrow bridge called "post secondary study." If one does not cross that bridge, full participation and success in the Chinese economy is extremely limited. And because hardly any people can ever cross that bridge successfully, entry into post-secondary study is extremely competitive.

All Chinese citizens are guaranteed a simple ninth-grade education and increased literacy in the country is among the primary goals of the federal government. However, given the enormous number of students to be educated, those aims are difficult to accomplish. Average class sizes range anywhere from forty to eighty, depending on specialization of the institution, and can number a lot more if the circumstances demand. The higher schools have smaller classes (no more than forty students) so the teacher can do a better job. However, fifty to sixty students is the norm. From kindergarten on, regimentation may be the rule of your day. Students must listen and take down notes. The teacher traditionally has supreme authority and asking questions or commenting on course content in the classroom is known as to be an affront to the teacher and is thus forbidden. Teacher aides, tutors, or parental assist in the classroom are unheard of. Rote memorization remains the dominant methodology and students learn early on that silence and copious note taking will be the only keys to success. The students themselves spend the majority of their day in the classroom-usually from eight to ten hours-and the remainder of their time is specialized in homework and any extra tutoring or other supplemental courses that the parents can afford. At all levels of schooling, test outcomes determine the caliber and quality of school the students should be able to attend, so continual study for capstone examinations (national exams at the completion of fourth, sixth, eight, tenth, and twelfth grades) do much in determining the direction and quality of the students' lives. A number of the university students I talked to admitted that the rigorous demands positioned on them by their teachers and parents left them with little if any childhood, a condition they vowed they would never impart on their own children.

The Chinese post-secondary education system is vastly different from the America system. The semesters are twenty-one weeks long. Chinese college students often attend classes Monday through Friday and also extra classes, tutoring, and/or study sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Entrance into Chinese colleges and universities is fairly difficult and depends upon the infamous national Gaokao placement exam. No more than 10 to 20 percent of senior high school graduates go on to technical colleges or universities and the exam results determine not merely which universities they are able to attend, but also what majors they are able to study. Once accepted by way of a university, the students move through their span of studies in cadres of thirty-five to forty. Each cohort takes a similar classes and the members share the same, gender separate dormitories, with eight visitors to a little, confined room. Often their shower and toilet facilities come in a separate building. One of the students from each cohort is appointed to be the class monitor, and he or she becomes tasked with assuring that all classroom and dormitory activities take place with as few problems as you possibly can. To be selected class monitor is definitely an honor. The students within each cohort and dorm room form close bonds and interact for the nice of the whole. Interesting enough, a lot of the students I have talked with say there's little collaborative or interactive learning that continues on in the classroom. The totality of the Chinese education system serves to severely restrict creativity and individuality in students. Just like the general public education system, the college classroom experience involves listening, memorization, and continuous preparation for entrance exams and placements tests. However, Additional info take are cumulative and can determine the employment they will acquire after graduation, and therefore their future quality of life. The competitive nature of the Chinese education system has produced students who, generally, have become earnest, obedient, and extremely hardworking, yet who severely lack initiative.

I taught Chinese university students from all grade levels and their abilities and eagerness to learn continually impressed me. Unlike in America, issues with attendance and preparedness never interfered with classroom instruction, which made my teaching experience most enjoyable. And nearly to a person, the students continually exuded a childlike air about them... a certain navet... a feeling of innocence to the ways of the world... indeed, they lacked the hardness present in so many of the students I deal with in my own American classroom. The students who I worked with were highly motivated to do their best because they almost universally felt compelled to have success at any cost; doing so is their duty to not only society, but moreover to their family. Parents often sacrifice a great deal in the education of their child, who comes to feel deeply obligated to repay them for the training he or she has received. A lot of my students said the same thing: "I must get a good job and make much money therefore i can look after my parents. They have worked so difficult and spent so much money on my education." The Chinese still place great focus on family... the ancient Confucian notion of Parental Piety... and on subservience to the society all together... the collectivism so sharply unlike the individualist worldview of Westerners.

Every once and some time, one is given an epiphany, an instant of insight, if you will, that provides more information than volumes of books ever can. The first of my educational moments of enlightenment came whenever we visited several classrooms at a middle school. Following the last class of the institution day, I noticed many of the students were busy cleaning the windows in the classrooms, washing the blackboards, mopping the floors, and also cleaning the bathrooms. I asked the teacher giving us the tour of the school relating to this and her reply was, "These activities are the main students' education." Schools have no janitorial force; all of the cleanup work is delegated to the students. "If the students are responsible for the health of the classrooms and the school," she continued, "they will put much more effort into and value upon their education. This is very much a part of our Socialist tradition... of Chairman Mao's ideas of loving labor."

The second insight came during the second month I was at Northeastern University. On a cold Sunday evening in February a sudden snow storm dropped several inches of snow on Shenyang. Very early another morning, as I left our apartment building and started to make my solution to my first class, I noticed students all over the campus-by the thousands-industriously shoveling snow from the sidewalks and streets and chipping away at the patches of ice that had formed near door stoops and on steps. That they had apparently been at their tasks since daybreak. I could only look on, perplexed, not sure of what I was experiencing. When I met my first class, which coincidentally was a cross-cultural communications course, I took several minutes to describe my fascination with their activities. These were more than pleased to explain the mechanics and the purpose of the activity.

"It really is our duty!" explained Albert proudly (Chinese students learning English usually assume an English name).

"Shoveling snow is part of our education."

"Yes, no one should wear the ice and become injured," chimed in Tiffany, whose muffler remained just below her lips in the cold classroom.

"How may be the work determined?" I asked, still trying to keep carefully the conversation going.

"Each class is given an assigned area. If the area isn't done satisfactorily, the responsible class will undoubtedly be punished," answered Gerald.

"What happens if someone is lazy and doesn't desire to go out into the cold and sleeps in?" I continued.

"That person will undoubtedly be scorned and even ridiculed by his fellow classmates... will be considered as someone who is unreliable... who can not be trusted," said Gail.

Intrigued by the ingenuousness of their answers, I tried to obtain as much information as I could. "And I saw the girls shoveling and chipping in the same way hard because the boys. How come this?"

Connie, who was simply always timid in class, finally found her voice. "Chairman Mao did much for establishing the equality of women to men. He maintained that women need to stand with men in society, not behind them."

Perhaps with a little chagrin, I concluded the conversation with a tale about what my students would probably tell me related to the shovel if I commanded them to venture out and remove snow from our college's sidewalks... a tale nobody really understood. But I had found a "teachable moment"... or rather a "learnable moment"... an instance where the students and I could actually look beyond ourselves and jointly comment on the world around us. And not just had I then found out more info about my environment, I was starting to find those rare moments of teaching when I learned a lot more than I possibly could ever impart.

I had two such other sudden leaps of understanding just recently when I went to Shenyang. In my own several trips there I had never really had the occasion to go in the fall, so because we went during September and October on that visit I was able to observe two very remarkable occurrences. The first was on September 10th, which I did not realize was National Day of the Teacher, a nationwide visit to which students around the country show their appreciation for their teachers by presenting them with gifts of cards and flowers. We knew the day was any occasion for teachers, but we were incredibly surprised when two of our students appeared at our door with two large arrangements of flowers... a token they said of the gratitude our students had for all of us being their teachers. Traditionally, the relationship of the teacher to the student has almost mirrored that of the one between parent and child, a concept that comes from the time of Confucius (Kongfuzi).

This insight was followed up shortly thereafter with just one more, when I was visiting the Foreign Studies College at Northeastern University, just after the beginning of the semester in September. From several blocks away I heard a chorus of hundreds of voices singing a martial anthem. WHEN I walked onto the large concrete square while watching twelve-story Administration Building, I saw arrayed there at least two thousand students dressed up in the drab green of military uniforms. Some were marching, some were standing in large cadres on the building steps, along with other were engaged in military hand-to-hand combat tactics, all under the direction of regular Chinese Army instructors. Later I came to find out that college freshmen, at every college and university round the country, are required to receive a full three weeks of military training before they even begin their classes. A number of the teachers I talked to explained how that requirement was purposeful in helping the students prepare for the rigors of college life and studies; others said it had come out of the Tiananmen Square incident and have been implemented to avoid university students from participating in anti-government organizing and activities. Again, the differences between your students of China and those of America tend to be stark.

But the restlessness and impatience of youth is universal. In China the imposition of Western influences, as a result of the rise of capitalism and the driving force of commercialism and advertising, movies and videos, the web and other glimpses of outside cultures, have generated a rising sense of not dissent, but perhaps discontent... maybe uneasiness with the status quo. The Chinese youth of today are not the same as that of twenty or even ten years ago, which groundswell is probably most noticeable in education. Though still hard-working and conscientious, contemporary students are progressively coming to expect more than only a passive exchange of information and knowledge during the course of their learning; they're, I think, gradually asking for a far more participatory role in their education, which might, in the end, spill over in to the broader social and political realms.

This dependence on change in educational methodology is exerting growing strain on the teaching profession in China to improve. The Chinese teachers and professors I worked with were equally industrious and eager to help and learn. And though the teacher remains the center of authority in the classroom, they are continually asked for much and given little in exchange; they generally are underpaid, making a fraction of these American counterparts, while doing more with less. And they sense the limitations of these traditional methods of teaching... those that have been ingrained in to the culture because the time of Kongfuzi. With the brand new generation of students coming into their classrooms, the old methods prove to not be working so well. The twenty-first century is requiring people who can perform more tha just memorize; instead, abstract thinkers are going to be needed and the teachers and professors want to the West, strangely enough, to supply them with the teaching tools to do this goal. And just like their students, when subjected to new and different means of teaching, such as collaborative learning and independent thought, Chinese teachers are slowly finding out that melding innovation with tradition brings success.

At the chance of over generalization, I could say that the students, and certainly the faculty members, are extremely different from those I've grown accustomed to in the us. Because education isn't a right, but rather a privilege in China, both groups for the most part take their studies, educational mission, and teaching responsibilities quite seriously. Subsequently, I submit that both the American and Chinese cultures and educational systems can learn a great deal from each other.

Note: The above article has been excerpted from a photo narrative entitled An American Academic in Li Bai's Court: China Photos and Reflection, created and compiled by John H. Paddison. Copyright 2010, Paddison-Orvik Publishing.

Copyright 2011 Paddison-Orvik Publishing.

John H. Paddison is Professor Emeritus at Central Arizona College. He taught there and at several other colleges and universities after receiving his PhD from the University of Arizona. Paddison's writing career started with numerous non-fiction publications in the education field and contains since branched out to the fiction genre with the publication of his literary novel The Brothers' Keepers. Upcoming publications include a photo narrative of his travel experiences in China, entitled An American Academic in Li Bai's Court: China Photos and Reflections, and a novella entitled A NEARBY. For more information, or to post comments on these works, please head to: [http://www.reflectionsofchina.com].
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