Education in East Asia

Pei-tseng Jenny Hsieh, Colin Brock, Pei-tseng Jenny Hsieh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441181930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Education in East Asia is a comprehensive critical reference guide to education in the region. With chapters written by an international team of leading regional education experts, the book explores the education systems of China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macao, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea and Taiwan, covering local regional developments in each country as well as recent reforms and global contexts. Including a comparative introduction to the issues facing education in the region as a whole and guides to available online datasets, this handbook will be an essential reference for researchers, scholars, international agencies and policy-makers at all levels.

1

China: An Overview

Zhou Zhong

The rise of China as an important player in international economic competition and global politics over recent decades appears to have come as a surprise to the world. Such surprise is often accompanied by overestimations or underestimations of China’s actual capabilities. A strong aspiration for the development has long been a goal of the Chinese government and people. This has involved modernization and industrialization of educational, scientific and technological capacity, and China has impressive records of policy intent, planning and resource commitment for meeting such goals. This chapter provides an overview of education development in modern China. Based on a discussion of selected legacies that have cast a profound influence on Chinese education today, this study describes and analyzes key trends and challenges of education development in China in 1990–2010, then discusses the main features of China’s National Outline for Medium and Long Term Educational Reform and Development (2010–20).

Selected Legacies of Chinese Education

This section outlines the historical development of the Chinese education system over the twentieth century, and discusses three diverse traditions that shape Chinese education systems today. Those three forces have come together with creative tensions that have yet to be fully reconciled (Zhong, 2005). The first tradition is that of indigenous Chinese learning based on the thinking of Confucius and the millennia-old Mandarin system. The second tradition is an amalgam of modern Western-influenced education systems developed in China during the 1900s to the 1940s, and the third tradition is that of the Soviet-inspired system in the 1950s to 1960s. The influence of each of the three traditions can still be seen in China today, and have become caught up in the more recent influences of international interaction and globalization.

The legacy of Confucianism and the Mandarin system

If one is to characterize in one word the Chinese way of education for the last two millennia, the word would be ‘Confucius’ (about 551bc–479bc). No other individual in Chinese history has so deeply influenced the life and thought of his people, as a teacher, an educationist, a philosopher, a political theorist and creative interpreter of the ancient culture, and as a moulder of the Chinese character.

For Confucianism, since the time of its general acceptance, has been more than a creed to be pressed or rejected; it has become an inseparable part of the society and thought of the nation as a whole. It is fundamental to what it means to be a Chinese, as the Confucian classics are not the canon of a particular sect but the literary heritage of a whole people (De Bary et al., 1960, p. 15).

In the contemporary world, the global phenomena of the higher achievement of Asian students in schools and universities has generated much scholarly interest. Several studies have discovered that Confucian values on respect for education and learning are underpinning the diligence and motivation of such students (Volet & Remshaw, 1996; Flynn, 1991; Kim, 1988). These cultural values – such as the educatability of all, perfectibility for all, lifelong learning, learning through effort and willpower, and reciprocity of teaching and learning – all provide an intrinsic motivation for learning for self-realization (Oh, 2001).

If one is to characterize in one word the Chinese way of education today, the word would be ‘Gaokao’, meaning national entrance examination to higher education. No other examination in Chinese society today has so deeply influenced the life and thought of students, parents, teachers, schools and universities. It is a mechanism to select or ‘screen’ people for higher learning, to safeguard equity and promote social mobility, to steer reforms in both general education before Gaokao and higher education and continuing education afterwards; to underpin a Gaokao economy of private tuition in the marketplace, and as a moulder of the character of Chinese intellectuals. Not surprisingly, of course, the idea of Gaokao has a Confucian underpinning, a 1300-year-long tradition of the Mandarin system of the civil service examination.

From year 605, in the Sui Dynasty, until 1905, the Confucian thinking of the education–state relationship was institutionalized through the Mandarin system, a civil servant recruitment examination, and its supporting education system that prepared students for that examination. This examination was a holistic educational and social mechanism for the cultivation, selection and recruitment of talents, social reproduction, and mobilization and distribution of scarce resources of status, power and wealth (Wu, 2002; Jin, 1990). It was hence an embodiment of Confucian thinking on education, learning and the ideal world governed by the scholars. The Mandarin system served to cultivate and integrate intellectual resources, and to maintain the socio-cultural ecological equilibrium of traditional Chinese society.

The extent and significance of social mobility through the Mandarin examinations have occasioned sustained debate both in the past (He, 1962; Kracke, 1957; Cressey, 1931) and in more recent years (Elman, 2000; Liu, 2002; He, 2009). In general, the meritocratic Mandarin system created a sustainable and inclusive social metabolic mechanism between the masses and the well-educated group, as well as within the educated group. Therefore human intelligence, the essence of social development, could be effectively identified and absorbed into the leadership with a sustainable supply of new blood.

Second, though only a small proportion of people could obtain the status and privileges bestowed by the Mandarin examinations, a far larger proportion of the population actually obtained significant education at various levels in attempting the process (Liu, 1996). Consequently there was a powerful incentive for learning and a respect for education as well as esteem for scholars and intellectuals. The result was a relative ‘mass’ education infrastructure throughout the country where people could pursue studies in their local community.

Third, the highly uniform education and examination systems disseminated relatively uniform social values, the Confucian ideology, which in turn reinforced the sustainability of the Mandarin system for over a millennium. Confucian intellectuals selected by the Mandarin system functioned in politics, in governing and managing family and society at all levels, in promoting filial respect and cultural inheritance, and in supporting educational and academic systems as a whole.

The Mandarin system was not without its problems, however. The highly uniform culture was accompanied by rigidity and conservatism. The curriculum became too narrow and too examination-oriented, and it tended not to encourage creativity but rather rote learning and uncritical thinking. It is possible that the system did not select the talent but only the most skilled in passing examinations (Miyazaki, 1981). In contrast to the mobile and open-structured society it underpinned, the Mandarin system in its last stages turned into a mental shackle for ideological submission. It was therefore not surprising that the gentry-literati produced by the Mandarin system and related education system collapsed in the face of the national crisis and challenge of modernization at the turn of the twentieth century.

The legacy of Western-influenced education in China

The emergence of Western-influenced education in China began in the late nineteenth century up to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. It was a turbulent half-century of military and economic Western and Japanese aggression in China, plus continuous civil wars and socio-political disorder. This encouraged increasing rigidity in the Mandarin system, but also substantial growth in China’s contact with Western learning. It was during this period that modern education in China proliferated in varied forms and with many types of foreign influence and participation (Sun, 1986). This led to the growth of a modern national system of education, of urban public informal education through the press, of Chinese students studying abroad, of the formal education of women, of a widespread functional literacy among the common people, and of the founding of educational institutions and associations as seedbeds of reform and revolution (Yang, 2004; Li, 1997; Borthwick, 1983).

The educational goal of this period was how to create the academic institutions needed for modernity, reconciling the Chinese and Western cultural traditions both intellectually and institutionally. There was a wide consensus among different interest groups that education was the way to save the nation from Western aggression and colonization (Rankin, 1971). From 1911 to 1927 China was characterized as a land of warlords with constant conflict between them. As a result, diverse cultures and movements flourished and there was a shift from the Japanese to German and French models of education. The higher education sector saw a growth in universities, university autonomy and academic freedom. As Japanese aggression grew, more Chinese turned towards Europe and the United States for inspiration. While the Japanese model laid more stress on primary and secondary schooling, the European-based models had shifted the focus to the higher education sector.

The USA soon became China’s new authoritative reference between the 1920s and 1940s. In 1922, China adopted the American 6-3-3-4 education system which is still in use in China today. Dewey’s pragmatism and experimentalism became a strong influence on China’s educational policy and practice during this period (Yuan, 2001). The American influence was further strengthened by a growing number of Chinese students and scholars returning from the USA, who formed a central force in Chinese education (Wang, 1966). In higher education, China replaced the French model of a two-tier system with the American three-tier system, comprising the university, liberal college and specialist college, replaced collegiate governance with presidential governance, introduced the credit system, broadened specialized curricula into generalized and individualized curricula, and created a national network of specialist colleges, especially technical schools (Li, 1997).

In 1932 the Nationalist government commissioned the League of Nations’ Mission Educational Experts with a comprehensive consultation of Chinese education at the time. Interestingly, many of the issues discussed in the consultation, The Reorganisation of Education in China (1932), are still relevant today: namely, elite–mass distinctions, urban–rural and regional disparities, and foreign borrowing and adaptation.

The legacy of Soviet higher education in China

Foreign influence on Chinese education culminated in a new and more penetrating mode after the founding of the People’s Republic China on 1 October 1949. At that time China was a war-worn, backward, predominantly rural state isolated from most of the world. The Chinese Communist Party recognized that the key priorities in nation-building were political consolidation and rapid industrialization through ‘learning from the Soviet Union’.

The rationale was that since the best of Western science and technology had already been absorbed by the Russians, the quickest and best way was to take the distilled essence directly from the Soviet Union. And since education and industry are the main social institutions necessary for the application of science and technology, their organisation and management were also reshaped in the Soviet mould. (Pepper, 1987, p. 197)

Those most directly responsible for establishing a Soviet system in China involved 10,000 or more Soviet ‘experts’ who served in China during the 1950s, including some 700 who worked in higher education. Moreover, there were also more than 30,000 Chinese students, academics and professionals who went to the Soviet Union for study and training during the same period (Shen, 2009).

The Soviet-inspired education reconstruction in the 1950s revolved around wholesale transplantation of the Soviet system of institutional structure, curriculum content and job assignment. Then four decades later, in the 1990s, the same route, though in the opposite direction, was taken to reverse that restructuring. However, back in the 1950s the Soviet restructuring of Chinese education proved effective in overcoming China’s serious personnel shortages in many key areas while increasing and widening educational opportunities (Yu, 1994).

A criticism common to all types of educational borrowing is that the model system would itself soon be in a state of transition. After the Sino-Soviet split in 1953, the Soviet model soon fell into disrepute in China. This was partly because the Chinese authorities tried to regain their balance after leaning so heavily ‘to one side’, and partly because the Soviet Union itself experienced important changes when the ‘Stalinist Model’ in education and in politics and economy at large were discarded after Stalin’s death in 1953.

A principal criticism of Soviet education was against the narrow specialization of undergraduate programmes, especially in engineering. Such narrow specialization was only beneficial in the short term. It then became increasingly dysfunctional when a wider range of integrated skills and technologie...