Job Discussion Forums

[LongShiKong]

[Buck Lin]

Good news. I want of work with Chinese in China, and the current situation where I make more than my Chines co-worker is not productive. I want to see class sizes like in other countries become the norm here in China.
Education is a business but it is also an investment in the future.

[eddy-cool]

It would be extremely helpful if the parents could be roped into school management as responsible for their own kids.

FOr instance, schools could organise compulsory parent meetings to discuss discipline issues and objectives set for each subject.

Principals should be made answerable to someone; at the moment many of them seem to be little local emperors or empresses with unlimited powers and despotic management styles.

Also the local Education Bureaus implement policies that seem to be locally designed, suiting personal interests.
For instance the schools in the town where my wife works were recently told that 5 English teachers were expected to come forward to go to study in Canada for one term.
They have to make up their minds this very term as they will have to fly over to Canada in August.

No further information was provided except that 'it's going to cost them 65'000 yuan each, including a round trip, accommodation and tuition fees.'

Yes, that's right: They have to foot their further education by themselves (though they will receive their regular pay while studying). No promotions have been linked to their participation in the study programme.

[Neilhrd]

I have to disagree with the idea that major educational reform in China can be achieved from the bottom up.

It seems to me that the central problem is that the government sees education not as a tool to access knowledge but as an instrument of political control. This is seen in the appointment of school and college principals based on their loyalty to the party and guanxi within it rather than their educational competence.

Furthermore the teacher training system remains obsessed with a very prescriptivve approach to teaching methods designed to ensure uniformity and inhibit creative thinking.

These things can't be changed by student or parent power exercised from the bottom up. Change has to be initiated from the top down. Only when the dead hand of political conformity is removed from the education system will classroom teachers be able to initiate change in their own classrooms without fear of political reprisals.

Another problem with bottom up theories of change is that they assume that parents and students have some awareness of the possible alternatives. In my experience this is not the case, at least outside Beijing and Shanghai. Many, many parents resist change of any kind and insist that their children be taught as they were taught. Fear of these parents often inhibits classroom teachers and even principals.

This problem is not unique to China. In Britain educational reform became so radical in the 1970s and 80s that parents were left behind and in many cases don't understand what schools are trying to achieve. The result has been an almost complete breakdown in dialogue between schools and parents in many places. China needs to avoid this mistake.

If reform is to happen here it will have to start from the top down but at the same time find some channel of communication to keep the parents onside.

[Lorean]

They will start to reform their education system when their economy can no longer grow on cheap labor.

Until then,
Don't bother.

[LongShiKong]