The first thing I found surprising in Gutek’s chapter on education in China was the stark differences between rural and urban education. I found this striking because from what I know the opposite holds true in the united states. Inner city schools struggle because there are too many students and not enough resources whereas school whereas schools in more rural areas are able to cater more towards the needs of individual students. In china the rural schools don’t have access to the same things the urban ones do and consequently students outside the cities have a distinct disadvantage. Being a country with such a large population, however, it is not surprising that the Chinese flourish at catering to bigger crowds. Consequently, it makes more sense that the government is advocating an increase in professor-student ratios in order to reduce costs.
The system of education in China is extremely different from my own, and I feel that a lot of this has to do with the fact that I grew up in an extremely small town. An average class size in secondary schools in china is 60 whereas our classes maxed out at fifteen. From my reading I found that ranking was extremely important to Chinese students. They are constantly in competition against one another and are compared to each other publicly. I’ve never experienced a situation where my grades or schoolwork was available for others to see. It’s always been an extremely private matter. I was also struck by the lack of importance of grades from teachers. Gutek made it clear that examinations were what mattered the most. I’m certainly glad that this has not been the case in my education.
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Megan brings up an interesting difference between the US and Chinese systems: city schools. Our public city schools tend to be lacking in comparison to those in the suburbs and the problems often associated with this trend are over-crowding and lack-of-resources. However, the Chinese do not have that obstacle and have classes of 60 – something I have never heard of in the US; to me, one of the primary differences why the classroom size is less of an issue in China is that they have a greater emphasis on structure and hierarchical formality in schools. The lecturing style is well suited to an attentive classroom and the students would be exposed to a large amount of academic material, but the values would be extremely different from many US classrooms, where individual achievement, development and exploration are encouraged.
ReplyDeleteI think it's important to note the difference between urban and rural in the contexts of China and the U.S. As both of you have said, "city schools" in the U.S. are definitely on the weak side. The best public schools in the U.S. are probably in suburbs. But one thing you may not realize is that rural schools in the U.S. are also suffering in the same way that Chinese rural schools are. This is clear with national exam scores: rural states such as Mississippi, Alabama, etc. tend to have the lowest scores. I believe China's "inner-city schools" are probably lacking in the same way that U.S. city schools are. In general I think that Gutek is referring to "urban" as the metropolitan area as a whole, including suburban areas, as there is a growing middle class.
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