With a postgraduate degree in literature, Ruby Li has ridden China’s education system almost to the top. Now a mother-of-two living in Chengdu, a city in the south-west, she hopes to spare her children the high pressure and long hours of homework that she endured at their age. Some years ago Ms Li and her husband, a businessman, moved their elder son from a conventional kindergarten to another one that uses less formal and rigid methods of teaching. She says that since then he has been happier and healthier, and their home life more harmonious, too.
Ms Li is among the well-heeled parents who send their children to Chengdu Waldorf School, a fee-paying institution inspired by the quirky philosophies of Rudolf Steiner, an early-20th-century Austrian educationalist. The school (pictured) aims to teach in creative ways, says Zhang Li, one of its founders. That means plenty of music, storytelling and play. The campus is scruffy but cheerful, boasting an ink-stained calligraphy studio and a wall daubed with stone-age cave paintings (the result of a class art project). At going-home-time three small children clamber around in the branches of a tree.
Ms Li is among the well-heeled parents who send their children to Chengdu Waldorf School, a fee-paying institution inspired by the quirky philosophies of Rudolf Steiner, an early-20th-century Austrian educationalist. The school (pictured) aims to teach in creative ways, says Zhang Li, one of its founders. That means plenty of music, storytelling and play. The campus is scruffy but cheerful, boasting an ink-stained calligraphy studio and a wall daubed with stone-age cave paintings (the result of a class art project). At going-home-time three small children clamber around in the branches of a tree.
The stellar performance of children in China’s richest cities in international tests of ability in maths, science and reading has lent the country’s education system a glossy sheen abroad. But feelings are mixed in China, where parents fret that state schools are too competitive, that the exam culture is too stressful and that curriculums favour cramming over creativity. One result of this is a steady leak of pupils out of the state sector and into private schools that drill for entry into foreign universities. Another trend is the rise of schools that use less structured approaches to teaching than commonly found in mainstream ones. Sun Yifan, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, says such progressive schools are burgeoning “like bamboo shoots in spring”.
Waldorf schools are one example. The one in Chengdu opened in 2004, the first in China to use that name. It teaches about 500 pupils from kindergarten through to senior high (between the ages of three and 18). Another 70 or so Waldorfs are sprinkled across China’s other big cities. Their free-spirited style of teaching is similar to that of Montessori schools (of which China now has at least 900 at the kindergarten level, and perhaps many more). It is unlikely that many Waldorf parents fully understand Steiner’s theories about “spiritual science”, let alone his mystical approach to agriculture. But Ms Sun says they hear echoes in them of traditional Chinese philosophy, to which some people in China are far better attuned.
Another fad is for education that is directly inspired by ancient Chinese culture, often delivered by small schools in the countryside that offer instruction in subjects such as archery, traditional medicine and Confucianism. Some have only a handful of full-time students, but also run popular workshops and summer schools. (Not all their patrons want touchy-feely education: at the far fringes of this movement are schools that require students to do little besides memorising classical literary and philosophical texts, as their ancestors might once have done.)
A few parents who want to free their children from the state system’s stifling constraints, but who can find no handy alternative, are trying home schooling instead. A survey published this year by the 21st Century Education Research Institute, a think-tank in China, found only about 6,000 families educating their children exclusively at home—still a tiny number, but one that is rising by around one-third each year, the institute reckons.
Rules bent and broken
The national curriculum, which is compulsory for children in the first nine years of school (ie, aged between six and 15), allows some room for experimentation. Primary schools can usually find time to supplement mandatory material with some of their own choosing, says Jiang Xueqin, a researcher and consultant. Motivated teachers can deliver the obligatory stuff in unconventional ways. But some of the progressive schools pay only lip service to the state’s curriculum. Some of them obtain government approval to operate as schools. But others affiliate themselves with licensed schools to avoid the tricky process of having to get their own permits. Many smaller institutions get by without official blessing.
Better-off parents appear unfazed by the lack of proper paperwork for some progressive schools (the Waldorf in Chengdu has licences for its nursery and primary schools, but the authorities want it to find a bigger campus before they will issue a permit for its secondary school). However, some worry about the later years of their children’s schooling. Parents who want their offspring to study abroad can safely keep them in progressive schools. Those who want them to cram for the national entrance exam for universities in China, or gaokao, often choose to move them back into conventional schools for that period of study. Few parents want to take risks with a potentially life-changing test.
The government itself sees benefit in having well-educated youngsters who are self-starting and creative—the kind of people needed to build a more innovative economy. In the early 2000s it began encouraging schools to make lessons more lively and textbooks more varied. Yet the gaokao system continues to give schools a strong incentive to stuff their students with stodgy facts. Parents deplore the pressure that the gaokao imposes. But they also distrust less objective types of assessment, which may be prone to corruption.
The Communist Party has reservations about non-mainstream schooling. It frets that some unlicensed schools may be peddling unsavoury ideologies or religions, such as Christianity or Islam. A government circular issued in February reminded parents that taking lessons at home or attending traditional-culture schools was no substitute for attendance at state-approved institutions during the period of compulsory education. It is highly unlikely that the government will ban progressive schools. Too many wealthy parents want them, and keeping the middle class happy is one of the party’s priorities. But officials are wary of giving schools too much latitude. This year they imposed limits on the number of translated children’s books by foreign authors that are published in China. They are also trying harder to ensure that private schools have active party committees. If such efforts discourage experimentation, Chinese children will be the losers.
This article appeared in the China section of the October 14th print edition under the headline "Salad days".
Click here to view the original article at economist.com.
