Adventures in China

The large Chinese public educational system is relatively new. The Chinese government tries to provide compulsory education through 9th grade, though many rural students (especially females) do not complete this much schooling. While public education has expanded and matured since its inception, there are still serious strains on the public educational system including a low teacher to student ratio, corruption in the educational administration, and a lack of resources.

Because most Chinese classrooms have so many students in them (sometimes over 100 per teacher), it is difficult to employ as many western teaching methods. Most teachers do not make lesson plans or many visual aids for their classes. Text books are determined by the nation or the province. Teachers come to class and often read directly from these textbooks, occasionally writing on the blackboard. Most Chinese teaching methods involve lectures, readings, call and repeat, and repetitive drills.

Because of the size of the class, it is impossible to give attention to individual students or have real class discussions. The students either sit at attention and verbally respond to the teacher's queues or take notes. Even teachers with the luxury of smaller class sizes have not had training in teaching methods and do not know how to take advantage of their situation. Training in western teaching methods is now more common in Beijing and Shanghai and is slowly spreading outward, but progress is slow.

The lack of resources also limits what options teachers have in the classroom. Many teachers don't have the resources for flash cards or assigning student projects. Most schools don't have the resources for art classes. The libraries (if there is a library) are too limited to support student research projects. However, this lack of resources also makes students more responsible for their classrooms. Students are responsible for keeping their classroom clean and neat, often sweeping and straitening up once or twice a day.

There is a strong focus in Chinese education on teaching information that can be tested. English classes focus on reading, writing, and listening, but never speaking, even in universities, in part because it is impossible to take a standardized speaking test.

The focus on measurable information also seems to reduce creativity. In Chinese art, the beginning of education, often through college and an apprenticeship is focused on mimicking famous artists and pieces of art. During a sixth grade art class I attended, the students followed the teacher in painting a picture with two birds and strands of grass, carefully mimicking the teacher's brush strokes and object placement. Students were not given the opportunity to create their own compositions. Even in preschool, students are shown how to draw objects, then receive a percentage score on their drawings based on if their apple stems are all pointing upwards. A future artist will have had years spent trying to master painting techniques and compositions, without any encouragement to attempt to make original works, before they are considered worthy to make original works.

Good Chinese students have very strong memorization skills. They have excellent math and science backgrounds, a large foreign language vocabulary, and high school students often have a better understanding of English grammar than I do. However, students do not have very much creativity. Students never design their own experiments, never take an art class, never take a creative writing class, much less written their own poems or stories, or been encouraged to express themselves artistically or scientifically. The Chinese government seems to recognize on a rhetorical level that this educational approach has drawbacks and seems to be attempting to change it. But, as in all other places of the world, change is often slow and the rhetoric may only be rhetoric..