Recently, writers in both the United States and China have been critically exploring the growing trend of Chinese students studying in America.
In his Businessweek article ‘China Rush to US Colleges Reveals Predatory Fees for Recruits,’ Daniel Golden explores how unscrupulous Americans and Chinese make false promises to wealthy but ignorant Chinese students.
In The Daily Illini, Zhou Yeran exposes a study abroad programme that takes ill-prepared Chinese students and leaves them to fend for themselves on US campuses.
But there’s no American conspiracy to defraud rich Chinese. First, as Professor X tells us in the Atlantic Monthly, US higher education provides an equally unsatisfactory education to both unqualified Americans and Chinese. Moreover, it’s no secret among rich Chinese that they’re overpaying for an inferior education when they send their child to the United States.
Last week, the Chinese Communist Party’s English mouthpiece China Daily ran an article ‘More Chinese flock to US schools but at a steep price, a fierce criticism of the trend of Chinese students studying in the United States:
‘Dennis Wang and Herman Qiao, both 18, are absolutely sick of being in the United States. “We don’t want to spend a single day more than necessary in the US,” said Wang…Both, like many Chinese students who have come to the US for a high school education, feel a sense of being lost, isolation and of not being integrated into the social spheres at their high schools at a time when many students that age are finding out who they are.’
The question that arises in both articles by Daniel Golden and Zhou Yeran is why rich Chinese who became so by understanding risk would risk their child with complete strangers in a different culture. The China Daily article offers an explanation of the seeming irrationality driving the phenomenon of Chinese students studying in the United States:
‘On many weekends, Dennis Wang is out of the house partying with his Chinese friends at someone else’s house, free from adult supervision. That can be a bad formula for destruction, said George Zhao, who used to be a Chinese student host in Southern California. ‘These young people will run into trouble. It would be a surprise if they don’t.’
Zhao also said many lack a healthy relationship with their parents. ‘It’s not unusual that the parents worked hard to accumulate wealth but neglected their children. Now they hope the US school to fix their children.’
Bingo!
There are currently 128,000 Chinese students studying in US colleges and universities, and there are many reasons why they opt to do so. But a disturbing trend is how rich Chinese parents are paying US schools to take their troubled child off their hands.
Last year, when we at the Peking University High School International Division selected our students, we didn’t consider our students’ relationship with parents in our admissions decision: It was a naïve and costly mistake.
After a year, we realized there are no smart or stupid students: Whether our students choose to use the Internet to read the New York Times or play World of Warcraft is determined by the student’s relationship with his parents. Those students that come from supportive and loving, tolerant and progressive families thrive here, while those who don’t have turned out to be too much to handle. It seems some parents just dump their problem child on us, and run away.
Last semester, one particularly problematic student was caught stealing. We presented evidence of her crime to this student, but she denied her guilt. Her mother came, and stood by her daughter. So we felt we had no choice but to expel this student, and her mother subsequently spent six months suing our school for tarnishing her daughter’s reputation.
I believe this mother was driven by something more than money or revenge. She sought to prove her daughter’s innocence because her daughter’s guilt would force her to look in the mirror. If she could, this mother might have been tempted to sue us for fraud. After all, she paid the tuition money so that we would take the problem away from her, not throw it back at her.
Each time we face a troubled student we find ourselves in the middle of a family struggle; either the student is trying to win his parents’ attention, or break away from his parents’ strangling grasp.
That’s why we decided that with our new group of students we would emphasize students’ family relationship and psychological well-being in our admissions decision.
And, in doing so, what we now realize is that wealthy and healthy families who want to send their child abroad are the rare minority in China.
This is also a strong warning to all those US high schools and colleges looking to recruit Chinese students. Yes, $50,000 a year does sound a lot of money, but just wait until you meet these kids.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Resistance Futile in Chinese Class (Diplomat)
Last week, I visited a Shenzhen elementary school in a haunting but revelatory experience.
I sat in on a grade one English class taught by the school’s best English teacher, an attractive twenty-something Chinese woman dressed in a white blouse and black skirt. This was a ‘show classroom,’ a class performed by the same teacher with the same 35 students for visiting ‘dignitaries.’ Within 40 minutes, the teacher, with control and precision, went from textbook reading to group work to audio-visual vocabulary drilling back to group work, and concluded with vocabulary testing.
In the dim cramped classroom, I noticed a student who yawned and stretched his arms and legs, and complained how simple and boring the class was.
While the class seemed like a frenzy of activity, very little learning actually occurred. First graders are sponges, and ought to be reading English children’s books; instead, they just did simple vocabulary drills.
Much more perturbing was that the teacher didn’t seem to notice the children’s presence. In another instance of form over substance in China, the teacher stood on her lectern, and performed her routine without engaging the students and offering them constructive feedback. And group work, in which the students splintered off to reinforce each other’s Chinglish, seemed like the herding of sheep. The disinterest of the teacher translated into apathy, laziness, and dullness among the students.
A good elementary school teacher appreciates and cherishes the curiosity, energy, and diversity of her first grade classroom. But Chinese elementary school teachers have been taught to ignore students who raise hands, silence students who ask questions, and punish any students who stand out. And this Chinese woman was doing her job rather too well.
By creating a stale, structured, and simplistic learning environment, she was crushing the natural enthusiasm and curiosity of her students. It was a disheartening sight: Siting in the back of the classroom, I could see the windows darken and the walls close in around the students as they sought eagerly and innocently to explore the world, challenge boundaries, and open their minds.
What I was witnessing in that Shenzhen first grade classroom was, in other words, nothing less than the methodical and mechanical dismantling of the human soul. As I walked around the campus, I noticed that the spark in the eyes of the first graders had died out in the older kids – a natural consequence of the ‘education’ they were receiving. Resistance is, indeed, futile.
In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described the qualities of an ideal learning environment that could be applied to the family home, the school classroom, and the work office:
‘The family context promoting optimal experience could be described as having five characteristics. The first one is clarity: the teenagers feel that they know what their parents expect from them – goals and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous. The second is centering, or the children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be getting into a good college or obtaining a well-paying job. Next is the issue of choice: children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules – as long as they are prepared to face the consequences. The fourth differentiating characteristic is commitment, or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defences, and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever he is interested in. And finally there is challenge, or the parents’ dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children.’
The Shenzhen elementary school classroom fails on all five counts. The classroom suffered from hypocrisy (the teacher pretended to want the students to learn, while really wanting them to just sit still), from an emphasis on test performance, from rigidity, from teacher apathy and disengagement, and from a repetitive mundaneness.
At the end of my visit, I went into a sixth grade classroom where they were immersed in an English listening test. I walked around, as the students listened to an English audio recording; the recording would pronounce an English word, and the students had to circle the word on their multiple-choice answer sheet. I noticed a particularly serious student, and looked at her answer sheet. Her answers were all wrong. In fact, as I looked closer, I couldn’t find any of the correct answers on her page. When I looked over at her neighbour’s test sheet, I realized why: she was on the wrong page of the test book.
Here was this young Chinese girl who looked so serious, but really didn’t even care enough to find the right test page. Or maybe she just knew something the other kids didn’t.
I sat in on a grade one English class taught by the school’s best English teacher, an attractive twenty-something Chinese woman dressed in a white blouse and black skirt. This was a ‘show classroom,’ a class performed by the same teacher with the same 35 students for visiting ‘dignitaries.’ Within 40 minutes, the teacher, with control and precision, went from textbook reading to group work to audio-visual vocabulary drilling back to group work, and concluded with vocabulary testing.
In the dim cramped classroom, I noticed a student who yawned and stretched his arms and legs, and complained how simple and boring the class was.
While the class seemed like a frenzy of activity, very little learning actually occurred. First graders are sponges, and ought to be reading English children’s books; instead, they just did simple vocabulary drills.
Much more perturbing was that the teacher didn’t seem to notice the children’s presence. In another instance of form over substance in China, the teacher stood on her lectern, and performed her routine without engaging the students and offering them constructive feedback. And group work, in which the students splintered off to reinforce each other’s Chinglish, seemed like the herding of sheep. The disinterest of the teacher translated into apathy, laziness, and dullness among the students.
A good elementary school teacher appreciates and cherishes the curiosity, energy, and diversity of her first grade classroom. But Chinese elementary school teachers have been taught to ignore students who raise hands, silence students who ask questions, and punish any students who stand out. And this Chinese woman was doing her job rather too well.
By creating a stale, structured, and simplistic learning environment, she was crushing the natural enthusiasm and curiosity of her students. It was a disheartening sight: Siting in the back of the classroom, I could see the windows darken and the walls close in around the students as they sought eagerly and innocently to explore the world, challenge boundaries, and open their minds.
What I was witnessing in that Shenzhen first grade classroom was, in other words, nothing less than the methodical and mechanical dismantling of the human soul. As I walked around the campus, I noticed that the spark in the eyes of the first graders had died out in the older kids – a natural consequence of the ‘education’ they were receiving. Resistance is, indeed, futile.
In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described the qualities of an ideal learning environment that could be applied to the family home, the school classroom, and the work office:
‘The family context promoting optimal experience could be described as having five characteristics. The first one is clarity: the teenagers feel that they know what their parents expect from them – goals and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous. The second is centering, or the children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be getting into a good college or obtaining a well-paying job. Next is the issue of choice: children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules – as long as they are prepared to face the consequences. The fourth differentiating characteristic is commitment, or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defences, and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever he is interested in. And finally there is challenge, or the parents’ dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children.’
The Shenzhen elementary school classroom fails on all five counts. The classroom suffered from hypocrisy (the teacher pretended to want the students to learn, while really wanting them to just sit still), from an emphasis on test performance, from rigidity, from teacher apathy and disengagement, and from a repetitive mundaneness.
At the end of my visit, I went into a sixth grade classroom where they were immersed in an English listening test. I walked around, as the students listened to an English audio recording; the recording would pronounce an English word, and the students had to circle the word on their multiple-choice answer sheet. I noticed a particularly serious student, and looked at her answer sheet. Her answers were all wrong. In fact, as I looked closer, I couldn’t find any of the correct answers on her page. When I looked over at her neighbour’s test sheet, I realized why: she was on the wrong page of the test book.
Here was this young Chinese girl who looked so serious, but really didn’t even care enough to find the right test page. Or maybe she just knew something the other kids didn’t.
Friday, June 3, 2011
The Sad Truth of China's Education (Diplomat)
June 7 and 8 are the two days that China’s senior three students (twelfth graders) have lived the first 18 years of their lives for, and whatever anxiety, neurosis, and insanity that has simmered beneath the surface among students, parents, and teachers this past year will now reach its climax.
Everyone’s in agreement: the national college entrance examination (gaokao) robs Chinese students of their curiosity, creativity, and childhood. So as gaokao students, with their thick textbooks and memory pills, sequester themselves in four-star hotels while their parents prowl the neighbourhood for construction noise and rambunctious restaurant patrons, now might be a good time to devise an alternative to the gaokao.
In his book A Theory of Justice, the political philosopher John Rawls conducted a thought experiment in which people, shrouded under a ‘veil of ignorance,’ were asked to devise a new social structure to live under. Unsure of their lot in this new society, people would be risk-averse, John Rawls assumed, and would agree to a society that ‘maximised the minimum,’ which is to say a society that aimed for equality, fairness, and social mobility.
So let us return to John Rawls’ ‘original position’ and ‘veil of ignorance,’ gather 1.3 billion Chinese into a nice conference room, and see if we can all work together to negotiate an alternative to the gaokao.
Because everyone in the room has Chinese cultural values and lives in the not too pleasant realities of modern China, there’ll be certain constraints that this new education system must consider. First, every Chinese can agree that this new education system ought to be a meritocracy and that the most diligent and brightest students ought to reach the top.
Second, every Chinese can agree that China has limited education resources for too many people; while it would be nice to educate everyone to the best ability of the state as is the case in Finland and Singapore, China is too poor to do so. Third, China is a guanxi-based society with little respect for institutions, processes, and laws; whatever new system that everyone agrees to must be able to resist the pull and power of the well-connected and wealthy. Fourth, Chinese can agree that education is first and foremost about social mobility (rather than about national economic development), about the opportunity for anyone who is willing to work hard to rise in society.
So, given all this, we can now begin constructing an alternative to the gaokao.
First, this alternative must be an objective indicator of a student’s academic performance. College admissions committees or admission interviews would be unacceptable because it would offer too much power to individuals and institutions that can’t be trusted. No one would agree to a college lottery whereby qualified students are just randomly assigned a college. And artificial intelligence technology hasn’t yet advanced to the point where computers can replace college admissions officers. Thus, the only alternative seems to be a series of tests.
But even with tests we need to consider what we want to test. If we were to test writing and thinking ability, then that would mean an automatic bias towards the children of well-educated parents who have from an early age discuss books, current affairs, and travel plans with their child over the dinner table. Moreover, to teach thinking and writing (or any soft skills such as creativity and collaboration) would require highly specialised and highly professional teachers who would naturally congregate in expensive private schools or prestigious public schools in Beijing and Shanghai. And if this were the case, China would just be like the United States, where education is monopolised by the self-perpetuating and self-interested educated elite, and social mobility through education becomes a distant dream for everyone else.
But China has 800 million peasants who depend on schooling as their child’s only chance out of the rice fields. Rural children don’t have access to the libraries, well-trained teachers, and intellectual spaces that wealthy cities can offer — all they have is their willingness to work hard to improve themselves. If Chinese believe in fairness and social mobility, then tests must be more about the student’s ability to memorise the textbooks he has access to, rather than about his ability to think critically, which is the result of making the most of a special set of resources available only to society’s elite.
So, if we were to start from scratch and try to build an alternative to the gaokao, we would end up with as the only viable alternative…the gaokao. That’s what a lot of people tend to forget: that given the complete lack of trust in each other and in institutions, given the stifling poverty that most Chinese find themselves in, and given China’s endemic corruption and inequality, the gaokao, for better or worse, is the fairest and most humane way to distribute China’s scare education resources.
Yes, the images of children memorising and regurgitating away for 18 years may be disheartening. The poor eyesight, bad posture, and crushing of imagination, independence, and initiative will haunt them for the rest of their lives. But we must remember that many of these children and their families find themselves fortunate just to be able to dream of a better life.
Everyone’s in agreement: the national college entrance examination (gaokao) robs Chinese students of their curiosity, creativity, and childhood. So as gaokao students, with their thick textbooks and memory pills, sequester themselves in four-star hotels while their parents prowl the neighbourhood for construction noise and rambunctious restaurant patrons, now might be a good time to devise an alternative to the gaokao.
In his book A Theory of Justice, the political philosopher John Rawls conducted a thought experiment in which people, shrouded under a ‘veil of ignorance,’ were asked to devise a new social structure to live under. Unsure of their lot in this new society, people would be risk-averse, John Rawls assumed, and would agree to a society that ‘maximised the minimum,’ which is to say a society that aimed for equality, fairness, and social mobility.
So let us return to John Rawls’ ‘original position’ and ‘veil of ignorance,’ gather 1.3 billion Chinese into a nice conference room, and see if we can all work together to negotiate an alternative to the gaokao.
Because everyone in the room has Chinese cultural values and lives in the not too pleasant realities of modern China, there’ll be certain constraints that this new education system must consider. First, every Chinese can agree that this new education system ought to be a meritocracy and that the most diligent and brightest students ought to reach the top.
Second, every Chinese can agree that China has limited education resources for too many people; while it would be nice to educate everyone to the best ability of the state as is the case in Finland and Singapore, China is too poor to do so. Third, China is a guanxi-based society with little respect for institutions, processes, and laws; whatever new system that everyone agrees to must be able to resist the pull and power of the well-connected and wealthy. Fourth, Chinese can agree that education is first and foremost about social mobility (rather than about national economic development), about the opportunity for anyone who is willing to work hard to rise in society.
So, given all this, we can now begin constructing an alternative to the gaokao.
First, this alternative must be an objective indicator of a student’s academic performance. College admissions committees or admission interviews would be unacceptable because it would offer too much power to individuals and institutions that can’t be trusted. No one would agree to a college lottery whereby qualified students are just randomly assigned a college. And artificial intelligence technology hasn’t yet advanced to the point where computers can replace college admissions officers. Thus, the only alternative seems to be a series of tests.
But even with tests we need to consider what we want to test. If we were to test writing and thinking ability, then that would mean an automatic bias towards the children of well-educated parents who have from an early age discuss books, current affairs, and travel plans with their child over the dinner table. Moreover, to teach thinking and writing (or any soft skills such as creativity and collaboration) would require highly specialised and highly professional teachers who would naturally congregate in expensive private schools or prestigious public schools in Beijing and Shanghai. And if this were the case, China would just be like the United States, where education is monopolised by the self-perpetuating and self-interested educated elite, and social mobility through education becomes a distant dream for everyone else.
But China has 800 million peasants who depend on schooling as their child’s only chance out of the rice fields. Rural children don’t have access to the libraries, well-trained teachers, and intellectual spaces that wealthy cities can offer — all they have is their willingness to work hard to improve themselves. If Chinese believe in fairness and social mobility, then tests must be more about the student’s ability to memorise the textbooks he has access to, rather than about his ability to think critically, which is the result of making the most of a special set of resources available only to society’s elite.
So, if we were to start from scratch and try to build an alternative to the gaokao, we would end up with as the only viable alternative…the gaokao. That’s what a lot of people tend to forget: that given the complete lack of trust in each other and in institutions, given the stifling poverty that most Chinese find themselves in, and given China’s endemic corruption and inequality, the gaokao, for better or worse, is the fairest and most humane way to distribute China’s scare education resources.
Yes, the images of children memorising and regurgitating away for 18 years may be disheartening. The poor eyesight, bad posture, and crushing of imagination, independence, and initiative will haunt them for the rest of their lives. But we must remember that many of these children and their families find themselves fortunate just to be able to dream of a better life.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Internationalizing Education (Diplomat)
Late last month, I attended a Beijing government education conference which, if Guinness had such a category, would break the world record in most instances of irony – verbal, dramatic, and situational – in a meeting of three hours or less.
Last year, China promulgated its 10 year education development plan, and so China’s education bureaucracy has speedily and busily organized meeting after workshop after conference to discuss the plan. A major part of the overall strategy is 'internationalizing' Chinese education: creating study abroad programmes, increasing international partnerships, experimenting with Western curricula, teaching Mandarin to foreigners, and opening international schools at home and Chinese schools abroad.
You'd think that 'internationalizing' Chinese education would be simple and straightforward, at least compared with actually useful and important tasks like keeping Chinese banks solvent and poisonous baby formula off shelves. But, at the conference, Beijing’s education bureaucrats launched a litany of self-contradictory statements: 'We must teach students to be creative and be independent, and to love the Party and country'; 'We must be bold and experiment, but we must respect the law and avoid risks'; 'We must avoid empty sloganeering, and take concrete action; 'There are no contradictions and conflict in our goals.'
These statements reaffirm to Beijing’s public school administrators that it’s easier and safer to have meetings to discuss reform than to actually implement reform. Other statements such as 'We must avoid opportunistic profiteering' and 'We must avoid the blind pursuit of goals and statistics' and 'We must follow to the letter education rules and regulations' are the government’s tacit recognition that Beijing schools will 'internationalize' by fleecing Chinese and foreign students, subcontracting to 'consultants' to secure foreign university placement for rich lazy students, and breaking all sorts of legal and ethical principles in their pursuit of profit and statistics -- and there’s nothing the government can do about this. A final category of statements such as 'Understanding is more important than policy' and 'We must raise our awareness of global awareness' are education bureaucrats’ subconscious admission that they just don’t know what they’re talking about.
Welcome to China’s education bureaucracy, where even as the Chinese economy soars, as society is in upheaval, and as reform is all the rage among parents and educators, nothing ever changes. To be fair, all bureaucracies, inherently inward-looking and self-interested, are opposed to change and criticism. When I worked there in 2006, the United Nations mission in Kabul was obsessed with office politics and vacation plans while Afghans starved and civil strife raged. In his book The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam wrote how even though presidents have different personalities and creeds, they all focused on protecting and promoting the prerogative of the presidency, which is to say to empower and extend further the entrenched bureaucracy. That’s how four radically different American presidents collaborated to mire the United States in Vietnam, and why Barack Obama seems so much like George W. Bush.
As the foot soldiers of China’s education bureaucracy, Chinese principals and teachers have learned to take advantage of new education trends to do the least work for the most reward. Any and all education reform plans will have the following elements: cadre and teacher training (pointless meetings followed by expensive dinners and KTV, free junkets abroad), curriculum reform (changing the name of courses), evaluation and reward mechanisms (opportunities to solicit bribes and backstab enemies), awareness-raising (empty sloganeering and expensive ad campaigns), experimentation (shameless speculation and profiteering), and shared learning (conferences where principals can suck up to higher officials).
But while everything will stay the same at the end of the day, it doesn’t mean that China’s education bureaucracy won’t embarrass itself and make a mess of things with their 'international education with Chinese characteristics' strategy.
An ironic mantra at the conference was 'raising global awareness' because China’s education bureaucracy is neither capable of being global or being aware. At the conference, it was clear that the Beijing education authorities regarded the perfectly stage-managed and superlatively pointless 2008 Beijing Olympics as the ideal as Chinese education 'internationalizes': Chinese students need to learn English to tell foreign tourists how great China is, and foreign students need to come to China to learn superior Chinese culture. Despite all this talk of 'global awareness,' Chinese schools still insist to students that all cultures can be reduced to dress, song, and dance (I’m still counting my good fortune that the conference didn’t organize a foreign talent show to raise our global awareness). I took it as a very bad sign that, at the conference, Beijing’s education officials mentioned that they thought a good example of 'global awareness' was the Model United Nations, a school activity which prepares students to think and behave like them.
After this conference, I’ve now decided to hire someone to attend future 'international education with Chinese characteristics' workshops, meetings, and conferences on Peking High’s behalf. I welcome any and all applications, starting right now.
Last year, China promulgated its 10 year education development plan, and so China’s education bureaucracy has speedily and busily organized meeting after workshop after conference to discuss the plan. A major part of the overall strategy is 'internationalizing' Chinese education: creating study abroad programmes, increasing international partnerships, experimenting with Western curricula, teaching Mandarin to foreigners, and opening international schools at home and Chinese schools abroad.
You'd think that 'internationalizing' Chinese education would be simple and straightforward, at least compared with actually useful and important tasks like keeping Chinese banks solvent and poisonous baby formula off shelves. But, at the conference, Beijing’s education bureaucrats launched a litany of self-contradictory statements: 'We must teach students to be creative and be independent, and to love the Party and country'; 'We must be bold and experiment, but we must respect the law and avoid risks'; 'We must avoid empty sloganeering, and take concrete action; 'There are no contradictions and conflict in our goals.'
These statements reaffirm to Beijing’s public school administrators that it’s easier and safer to have meetings to discuss reform than to actually implement reform. Other statements such as 'We must avoid opportunistic profiteering' and 'We must avoid the blind pursuit of goals and statistics' and 'We must follow to the letter education rules and regulations' are the government’s tacit recognition that Beijing schools will 'internationalize' by fleecing Chinese and foreign students, subcontracting to 'consultants' to secure foreign university placement for rich lazy students, and breaking all sorts of legal and ethical principles in their pursuit of profit and statistics -- and there’s nothing the government can do about this. A final category of statements such as 'Understanding is more important than policy' and 'We must raise our awareness of global awareness' are education bureaucrats’ subconscious admission that they just don’t know what they’re talking about.
Welcome to China’s education bureaucracy, where even as the Chinese economy soars, as society is in upheaval, and as reform is all the rage among parents and educators, nothing ever changes. To be fair, all bureaucracies, inherently inward-looking and self-interested, are opposed to change and criticism. When I worked there in 2006, the United Nations mission in Kabul was obsessed with office politics and vacation plans while Afghans starved and civil strife raged. In his book The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam wrote how even though presidents have different personalities and creeds, they all focused on protecting and promoting the prerogative of the presidency, which is to say to empower and extend further the entrenched bureaucracy. That’s how four radically different American presidents collaborated to mire the United States in Vietnam, and why Barack Obama seems so much like George W. Bush.
As the foot soldiers of China’s education bureaucracy, Chinese principals and teachers have learned to take advantage of new education trends to do the least work for the most reward. Any and all education reform plans will have the following elements: cadre and teacher training (pointless meetings followed by expensive dinners and KTV, free junkets abroad), curriculum reform (changing the name of courses), evaluation and reward mechanisms (opportunities to solicit bribes and backstab enemies), awareness-raising (empty sloganeering and expensive ad campaigns), experimentation (shameless speculation and profiteering), and shared learning (conferences where principals can suck up to higher officials).
But while everything will stay the same at the end of the day, it doesn’t mean that China’s education bureaucracy won’t embarrass itself and make a mess of things with their 'international education with Chinese characteristics' strategy.
An ironic mantra at the conference was 'raising global awareness' because China’s education bureaucracy is neither capable of being global or being aware. At the conference, it was clear that the Beijing education authorities regarded the perfectly stage-managed and superlatively pointless 2008 Beijing Olympics as the ideal as Chinese education 'internationalizes': Chinese students need to learn English to tell foreign tourists how great China is, and foreign students need to come to China to learn superior Chinese culture. Despite all this talk of 'global awareness,' Chinese schools still insist to students that all cultures can be reduced to dress, song, and dance (I’m still counting my good fortune that the conference didn’t organize a foreign talent show to raise our global awareness). I took it as a very bad sign that, at the conference, Beijing’s education officials mentioned that they thought a good example of 'global awareness' was the Model United Nations, a school activity which prepares students to think and behave like them.
After this conference, I’ve now decided to hire someone to attend future 'international education with Chinese characteristics' workshops, meetings, and conferences on Peking High’s behalf. I welcome any and all applications, starting right now.
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