EAST-WEST DIALOGUE in KNOWLEDGE and HIGHER EDUCATION

Editors Ruth Hayhoe and Julia Pan；An East Gate Book； New York London, England：M.E. Sharpe Armonk,1996

East-West Dialogue in Knowledge and Higher Education addresses the theme of alternative approaches to knowledge and higher education, which challenge the dominant modes of knowledge and patterns of higher education that have characterized the Western university. The papers are organized into five sections:

The authors include six well-known Chinese scholars who elaborate on traditions and the history of higher learning in China, as well as contemporary themes in higher education. Scholars from Africa, India, Pakistan, Korea, and Japan explore parallel issues in their societies. On the Western side are scholars who approach the same issues from the viewpoint of the challenges facing the Western university at present, as it stands on the threshold of the twenty-first century, and embraces dimensions of postmodern thought and epistemology. The volume is a genuine dialogue, international in scope, which took initial form in a conference held in the famous Yuele Academy in China.

Contemporary Chinese Education

Ruth Hanyoe Armonk, New York：M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 1984

EDITORIAL PREFACE

The main features of China's new social and economic policies are often conveniently summarised by reference to the 'four modernisations' - the modernisation of agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology. The need for a serious commitment to economic modernisation in these four areas was first put forward by Zhou Enlai in 1975, and made the keynote of government policy after the demise of the radical 'Gang of Four' which followed closely on the death of Mao Zedong in September, 1976. National conferences on science and education were held in March and April 1978, in which the scientific and educational implications of service to the four modernisation were discussed and the main lines of a new educational policy began to emerge. Parallel to these new developments in education have been changes in the political structure. Provision for the greater utilisation of democratic institutions within the socialist system has replaced the former 'mass-line' approach to socialist democracy and there has been a streamlining and professionalisation of the bureaucracy. The revival of a concern for socialist legality has been another development, highlighted by the passing of a new constitution in 1982 which has important implications for education. Finally, on the economic front, changes include the introduction of a responsibility system which allows local units greater autonomy yet demands of them greater economic accountability and China's increasing economic interaction with the capitalist West. These new developments call for a comprehensive reassessment of the contemporary Chinese education system and its response to the call of service to the four modernisations. This has been the guiding rationale of the book, linked to subsidiary concerns that it should be both comparative and future-oriented.

No further introduction should be necessary in that the first two chapters are both introductory in different ways. In Chapter One Brian Holmes has drawn upon his rich experience as a leading figure in the field of comparative education and his specialist knowledge of the Soviet and American education systems to put the Chinese educational experience into a global perspective and discuss how far China's leaders responded in distinctive ways to widely shared problems of the post World War II period. In Chapter Two I have begun from the opposite end of the spectrum - China's own historical experience and her unique educational traditions - and traced the evolution of new educational institutions in the twentieth century which were to meet the requirements of being both modern and Chinese. For the five following chapters which deal intensively with different aspects of the contemporary Chinese educational scene we have been fortunate in finding scholars who have done specialist

research, in most cases in recent doctoral work, on the particular level of the education system which they write about.

Billie Lo had the unique advantage of being Chinese and situated at Hong Kong University's Centre of Asian Studies where close contacts with the Mainland were possible. She is thus able to offer sound insights into the vital and interlinked areas of primary and teacher education in the service of the four modernisations. Stanley Rosen also used Hong Kong as a base for his solidly empirical doctoral research on Red Guard factionalism in Canton, which has enabled him to bring depth and penetration to his analysis of the dramatic change in the direction of secondary schooling in the post Cultural Revolution period. Jürgen Henze has collated valuable statistical, data on higher education, much of which has only recently become available, and on the basis of this quantitative evidence has addressed himself to the contentious issues of quality and equality in higher education provision over the three decades of China's post-revolution history. David Chambers was able to draw on both his own doctoral research on adult education and recent visits to China to give a clear and incisive picture of present policies and provision for adult education in urban industrial areas, and to set this into the wider framework of the Communist Party's social and economic aims. Finally in the last chapter I have brought together the scattered information which is so far available on Chinese-western scholarly exchange and offered tentative reflections on how this new international stance, unprecedented in Communist China's 35-year history, is likely to affect the educational trends which have been identified in earlier chapters.

Every effort has been made to include in this volume substantial empirical data which will enable our readers to make their own judgements on Chinese educational achievements. I am particularly grateful to Jürgen Henze for preparing the chart of the education system which appears on pages 4 to 5, and to David Chambers for undertaking the demanding task of collating the up-to-date educational statistics which are presented in the statistical appendix. I must express sincere thanks to Ma.Gpe.Gonzalez-Paredes for her patience, enthusiasm and professionalism in preparing the whole camera-ready manuscript on a word processor. Finally I would like to thank Lu Jiande of Fudan University and Cambridge for the contribution of his Chinese calligraphy.

Modernising Education in Britain and China

Patricia Potts LONDON AND NEW YORK: RoutledgeFalmer 2003

Preface

Two dragons

1988 and 2000 were both Years of the Dragon. In each I participated with Chinese colleagues in an international conference, the first in China and the second in England. Chinese cultural traditions appreciate a sequence that has a beginning and an end. As the head and the tail of the fish are therefore valued at a banquet so these two years become the head and tail of my project. The book is an account of what I have learned in between.

Dragon One tells a story of the 1988 conference. I follow this with a reflection on how my own experiences of education have shaped later professional commitments. In Dragon Two, following an account of the 2000 conference, one of my Chinese colleagues does the same.

Dragon One, 1988: The International Special Education Conference, Beijing

I first visited China to present a paper at the International Special Education Conference held in Beijing in 1988. I was also invited to act as a Strand Leader. My experience of the conference and the related pre-conference tour of other cities prompted the questions I later wanted to ask about China and provoked some critical thinking about western perceptions of Chinese educational practices.

In the January 1987 issue of the British magazine Spare Rib there was a short item in the news roundup at the back on the position of disabled people in China.  A photo showed a woman working in a factory. The text said that there were major developments planned for education and employment. I saw that the news item was written on the basis of a special issue of Women of China, the English-language magazine published by the All China Women's Federation, which included a whole section on education (December 1986). A number of factors had combined to give children and young people who experienced barriers to their learning a higher profile in the 1980s (see Introduction and Chapter 1).

I began to explore the possibility of visiting China. A colleague in Bristol had visited China in 1983 and a delegation from China had visited the

UK that same year. While I was writing to members of this Chinese group, my British colleague sent me the leaflet announcing the Beijing Conference, the first to be held in China on the subject of 'special education'. The issue of Women of China for June 1988, the date of the conference, also carried a number of articles on disability and education.

Before joining a pre-conference tour, I spent four days in Shanghai on my own, visiting schools with the city's Inspector for Special Education, Yin Chin Ming (see Case study 1). I then met up with a group of about thirty conference participants, mainly from the United States and Canada and visited more schools and other provisions as a member of this much larger group. Most of the westerners assumed that they would have a lot to show our Chinese colleagues. I met some western educators whose materials indicated a progressive approach, based on respect for the learners and a desire to minimise their social exclusion. However, it seemed to me that some of the glossy leaflets described schemes to fit the students into the existing system rather than transform the system to fit them, just the criticism that was sometimes levelled at our hosts. You could not say that western mainstreamers necessarily responded to students' requirements. Nor, I came to realise, could you say that Chinese educators did not try to respond to their students' individual requirements when they removed them to segregated settings, for these were the only places where flexibility was possible.

The conference strand that I was to chair was entitled: 'Curriculum and Promising Practices'. Papers in my strand (which I had not selected or grouped together myself) included:

'Special Education - The Main Access to Rehabilitation for Handicapped Children';

'A Curriculum for the Social-Emotional Development of Troubled Children';

'Epidemiological Studies and Services for Mentally Retarded Individuals in the People's Republic of China;

'Positive Programs for Children with Behaviour Disorders';

'Sensory Motor Training of the Mentally Retarded';

'Disabled Are People too!!! … In the USA and China

Elsewhere in the Conference, there were papers on: 'A New Conceptualisation of Special Education', 'The Pathology Study of 110 Low-Intelligence Children', 'Freeing People from Architectural Barriers' and 'The Neurological Significance of the Parameters of Auditory Brainstem Responses of Newborns with Hyperbilirubinemia'.

You could not assume that the more social approaches were western and the more pathological approaches Chinese. It was much more

complicated than that. There were many western papers, for example, whose social content was at odds with the laboratory report style of the presentation. There were participatory sessions in which the validity of a new measuring instrument was demonstrated. And there was a good deal of consensus that a core task was assessment, not curriculum reform.

In my strand, the issues and projects presented were so widely different in their aims, values and social contexts that it was impossible to relate their content directly. I was charged with responsibility for drawing out themes for discussion and reporting back to the plenary session but it became clear to me that this could not be done. Instead, I set up an activity in which I encouraged colleagues to think about what they would like to know about the other countries represented and to ask one another about their working lives. We moved away from statements about our own country to questions about another. To begin to make sense of the experiences of colleagues from other cultures we had to construct a bridge.

In my diary, I noted how difficult it was for us to keep working on this bridge, for there were many inequalities built into the organisation of the conference. As a result of the previous two weeks' travelling across China visiting schools and other institutions, I was looking forward to meeting up with colleagues with whom I had begun to make friends, particularly those from Shanghai, where I had been on my own. They did not arrive in Beijing until two days after we did and they therefore missed some outings and social events. They had only been given permission to take the minimum time off work.

The Chinese did not stay in the same hotel as we did, a brand new, five-star palace. They were not staying at a hotel at all, I discovered, and were not on the phone. Also, there was a bus that came to take them back to their lodgings at about 9.00 p.m. All this made 'International Colleagueship' difficult. Of course, the hotel was expensive, out of the question for the Chinese, but important as a source of foreign hard currency. No possibility of our all staying together in a Chinese hotel, as I had done comfortably in Shanghai.

Also, there was insufficient interpreting for the monolingual participants, which was most of us. The conference language was English but there were Chinese presentations. I was fortunate to receive a lot of support in my strand from bilingual Chinese participants, who were generous with their time. This, while essential, made it hard to keep to the schedule. There were no bilingual materials and I did not see a Chinese version of the book of abstracts, though there may well have been one. I wondered if the Chinese had asked for equality of access for their colleagues and, if not, why not. (See Chen, 1996, for a Chinese perspective on the conference.)

Social Transformation and Private Education in China

JING LIN Westport, Connecticut London:PRAEGER 1999

Introduction

Until the early 20th century, virtually all schooling in China as private. However, since 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took power, up to the early 1980s, private schools disappeared throughout the country. Under the communist government, educational policy-making, curriculum design and teaching, school finance, and personnel management were all centrally controlled. While the state provided over 85 percent of funding for urban schools, the rural schools, called "minban" schools or "people-run" schools, received little to no financial support from the state and had to rely on local governments and fees charged to students.

Private schools resurfaced in China after 1978, when the Chinese government led by Deng Xiaoping embarked on economic reform for modernization. Reform has thrust private ownership and competition into the state-planned economy, and consequently profound changes have taken place in culture and values in the society. Private education has developed in the changing social, cultural, and economic context of the reform era, catching national and international attention and raising hopes but also many new questions.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND FIELDWORK

My interest in doing research on private education in China was aroused during the summer of 1993, when I met a former university president from a province in northern China. He and a few other former university administrators had just set up a private university in the northeastern city of Shengyang. He and his co-founders were planning to enroll more than 700 students during the

first term, offering courses in accounting, international trade, foreign languages, hotel management, and so on. According to him, applications to the school were three times greater than the number of students they could admit. Then, during June and July of 1993, 1 made a trip to the southern province of Guangxi, where I learned that more than half of the kindergartens in the city of Guilin were privately owned and also that a number of private vocational schools and regular secondary schools were being set up each year. In a local county of the same province, I learned to my surprise that four private secondary schools had sprung up. Colleagues and friends informed me that in provinces like Sichuan, Guangdong, and Hunan and in municipalities such as Beijing and Shanghai, private schools were developing at a fast pace.This rapid change prompted me to want to know more about private school development in China. Sponsored by three research grants--a Spencer Foundation Small Research Program grant, a three-year grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council in Canada, and later a portion of the Spencer Foundation Major Research Program grant that Professor Heidi Ross at Colgate University and I received in 1996--I visited schools in China in four years-1995, 1996, 1997, and 1999. The nearly 40 schools I visited were located in cities such as Beijing, Shengyang, Dalian, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Guilin and a local county in Guangxi province. The schools included elite private schools, ordinary urban/township private schools, rural private schools, and private universities. I also visited some elite public schools (called "key schools" hereafter) and ordinary public schools for the sake of comparison.To obtain as much information as possible, I constructed the following list of questions as a guide for interviews, which were to be conducted in an informal manner:

To gain access to schools, I relied on connections set up by friends and colleagues in China. On most occasions, they also accompanied me to schools. The friendly introductions they made before questions were asked reduced uneasiness on both sides and broke down reluctance to share information with a stranger.

I usually stayed in a school for half a day or sometimes for a whole day. Activities included talking with principals and founders for a couple of hours, interviewing teachers and students, and touring the schools' teaching facilities and student dormitories. Afterwards, there was usually a lunch meeting or dinner together with school founders, administrators, and some teachers. These occasions provided opportunities to ask further questions about the school. Several times, I also participated in activities organized by the schools, such as celebrating Children's Day (June 1) or attending an arts festival. Because I am of Chinese origin and because I had been referred to the schools by friends and colleagues, the principals and teachers were quite open and frank with me. They sometimes discussed extensively their philosophy of education and described their teaching experience in private and public schools. In exchange, I was often asked to make comparisons of Western and Eastern education since I have lived and taught in both China and North America.

I returned to revisit some of the schools afterward in order to update myself on their new development. I also maintained contact with some of the founders and principals who continued to supply me with new information. On all occasions, I tried faithfully to record conversations, interviews, and my own observations of events. I took numerous pictures and collected dozens of school brochures and advertising materials, school newsletters, and other publications. Whenever it was convenient, I would also visit government offices and exchange ideas with officials in charge of private education. Daily encounters with ordinary citizens also provided invaluable information about the public's attitudes toward the development of private education.

These visits produced hundreds of photos, eight notebooks and boxes of Chinese scholarly articles, school brochures, and publications. With the help of several research assistants, the notes were reorganized and translated into English according to the following categories: school purpose, clientele, admission criteria, tuition and fees, curriculum, living and learning environment, teacher qualifications, teaching approaches, teachers' responsibilities, student motivation, principals' responsibilities, school administrative structure, teacher hiring and salary, special problems facing the school, and so forth. While these notes

form the foundation for the book, I also draw from articles written by Chinese scholars.

OUTLINE OF THIS BOOK

As a comprehensive study of development, context, characteristics, problems, issues, and future prospects of private schools in China, this book attempts to provide rich contextualized information on several types of private schools, accompanied by varied analyses. I intend this book, largely based on my fieldwork, to be a systematic, comprehensive study of the rise and development of private schools in modern China.

The book contains four parts. Part I (Chapters 1-3) contains an overview and explains the context of private education development. Part 2 (Chapters 4-6) profiles the characteristics of three major forms of private education. Part 3 (Chapters 7-8) reports on distinctive features of private schools, notably elite private schools, and examines moral and democratic education in these schools. Part 4 (Chapters 9-12) considers social and government reactions to private schools and discusses issues and problems facing private schools, equality issues arising from private education development, and the significance and future prospects of private education development in China.

Specifically, Part 1 provides an overall picture of private schools at the primary, secondary, and university level; it then examines the economic, social, and educational context of private school development. Part 2 describes the characteristics of different types of private schools, ranging from elite private schools (called "elite schools" hereafter) for children of very wealthy families to ordinary private schools of all kinds and private universities.

In Part 3. Chapter 7 attempts to identify distinct characteristics and an organizational culture of private schools; Chapter 8 adds a glimpse of moral and democratic education in the schools. In Part 4, Chapter 9 reviews the social response and government reactions to private education development, Chapter 10 discusses issues and problems facing private schools, and Chapter 11 reflects on the issue of equality and choice. Finally, the significance and future prospects of private education development are focused upon in Chapter 12.

PRIVATE EDUCATION: DEBATES AND ARGUMENTS

The 20th century has been marked by a great expansion of public school systems throughout the world, based on the belief that private schools had served mainly the rich and powerful and that education is a fundamental right for all children. However, private schools continue to operate in many countries. In the United States, private education has been argued to be a fundamental right of choice for parents, who should be able to send their children to private schools if the public school system does not provide what they want ( Ravitch, 1992; Levy, 1986).

Private education has been closely related to the issue of social equality.

Research reveals that many private schools feature exclusivity and elitism, serving only, or largely, the children of economically advantaged families. Because children's access to private schools has been closely connected to parents' political and economic power, private schools have been criticized for helping to reproduce social hierarchies ( Kane, 1992; Griggs, 1985; Cookson and Persell, 1985; Baird, 1977).

Private schools tend to provide decentralization and competition. They have been found to produce higher achievement by children of comparable ability to students in public schools, partly because they possess a different organizational culture ( Kane, 1992; James and Levin, 1988; Powell et al., 1985; Coleman et al., 1982). On the other hand, private schools may also be underfunded, serving a rural clientele in remote areas and with a quality of teaching and learning much worse than that found in public schools ( Kwari, 1991).

In general terms, private schools can be boarding schools, single-sex schools, or co-ed schools. Distinguishing features of private schools include selfgovernance, self-support, self-defined curriculum, self-selected students and faculty, and small size ( Kane, 1992, 1). Richard Barbieri ( 1992) notes that private schools have the freedom not to follow state mandates and that they can have their own distinct missions. However, the freedom and autonomy private schools possess are conditioned by the marketplace. What they offer is closely connected to needs within the economic system.

In developing countries, the rationale for the existence of private education tends to be very different from that in more developed countries. Carnoy and Samoff ( 1990) see private education in developing countries as an inescapable solution to the demand for education, particularly at the secondary level. Parents who send their children to private schools are not necessarily exercising a constitutional right of choice but rather solving personal problems or using a system that increases their children's chance for social mobility.

Thus, the major issues and concerns centering on private and public education have been those pertaining to school autonomy, choice for parents, access to quality education, and the democratic ideal of equal opportunity for all, which is supposed to be fulfilled by public education. In China, these issues are more acute than in any other country, perhaps save India. First of all, China has a huge population. In 1988, within a total population of 1.1 billion persons, a total of 200 million students were studying in schools, 125 million of them in primary school, 40 million in junior secondary school, and 13 million in senior secondary school; about 2 million students were enrolled in universities ( Cheng, 1992, 1415). This enormous student population has engendered a mammoth school system. In 1988, China had 800,000 primary schools, 180,000 secondary schools, and 1,075 universities. The number of teachers totaled 10 million, of whom 5.5 million were primary school teachers, 2.4 million were junior secondary school teachers, and 1.1 million were senior high school teachers; about 390,000 were university teachers ( Cheng, 1992, 15). In 1996, there were 960,653 schools across the country.

The extensive demand for education has led to a great shortage in funding,

and public schools in China have not been able to meet all the demands for kindergartens, elementary schools, secondary schools, and higher education. We will detail this aspect later in the book. Meanwhile, under the economic reform, the Chinese people have had more autonomy in private entrepreneurship, such as running one's own school, which has become possible. A new class of people has arisen from the new market economy. These people want better education for their children and are willing to pay high tuition. As the demand is so great, running a private school can become a profitable business. Finally, especially in the rural and township areas, students who fail to pass the highly selective admission exam to secondary schools but who still want a chance to obtain a higher education (as the university is still the main avenue of social mobility in most rural areas) also yearn for an alternative form of school in which to continue their education.

Private schools in China have come to life again in the era of economic reform and opening to meet new social demands. The diversity and plurality in their orientation and organizational features have markedly altered the overall picture of China's educational system. The facts that elite private schools charge very high fees and offer a superior learning environment have occasioned concerns over equality of education, especially regarding students' access to quality education. In time, private schools will also present a challenge to the public school system, in that they have a different organizational culture and greater decisionmaking power. Private schools and universities might have a positive impact on the country's economic development, as they try to respond to needs in the economic system and as they enlarge access to primary, secondary, and postsecondary education.

Private education has caused heated debates in North America and has been a congruent part of many educational systems. At present, it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the impact of private education in China, though there is a firm base for some pointed diagnosis and prognosis, the latter depending on what circumstances prevail. This book is an attempt, then, not only to record this significant change in patterns of education but also to explore important issues relating to social equality, public school efficiency, and plurality in Chinese education.

The reappearance and rapid development of private schools open a new stage in Chinese education. Questions they raise touch on equality of educational opportunities, public school reform, and diversity in the education system. Private schools provide an alternative to public education, give parents more choices, and may provide stimuli to public schools, in effect linking schools more closely with society. It would seem that, as a developing country, China needs the supplement of private education to solve the great societal demand for education.