Cleverlands Page 17
I was invited to stay with a friend of Michelle’s one weekend – a lady called Raye who had a six-year-old son – and she told me of her own experiences of this pressure, and how the dissatisfaction from her parents continued even into adulthood: ‘I know my pressure from my parents to me, really really, it’s very big. When I was in Shanghai working, the salary was much higher than before, but still my parents weren’t satisfied.’ Raye didn’t want to pass pressure on to her own child, nor did Michelle, Jenny or Raye’s friend Erin, but all were aware of the context in which their children were being educated.
Raye’s son, Alexander, played the ukulele, so while we were chatting about this topic in a local coffee shop with Erin, I asked her a slightly tongue-in-cheek question to try and understand her motivations. ‘Would you be happy if Alexander became a famous ukulele player, and was very successful at music, but failed all his school exams?’
She laughed. ‘For my own opinion, I don’t care about that. Most parents, when their kids are very small, they don’t care. But I don’t know, if he really got into that situation, when the teacher pushes the pressure on me, I don’t know if I can hold out! Many parents, their pressure comes from the teachers. Schools put pressure on teachers, and then the teachers transfer it to the parents.’
‘How?’ I asked. ‘How do the teachers transfer the pressure to the parents?’
‘SMS!’ Raye’s friend Erin now started talking in Mandarin, and I waited while Raye interpreted for me. ‘SMS [text messages] every day. Like, 10 messages. Your child did bad. You have to check his homework.’
She leaned over the table, moving my coffee to one side, to show me the texts from her son’s teacher. Although I couldn’t read the script, I could see that she’d been in regular correspondence with the teacher, and I was told that these messages were mainly the teacher telling her that she needed to supervise her son’s homework better to make sure he did it properly.
Even without this pressure from the teachers – the reasons for which we’ll return to in a minute – the existence of the gaokao as the sole measure of success and sole pathway to university and highly-paid jobs is reason enough for parents to focus heavily on their children’s academic attainment. I wondered aloud to a few people during my time in Shanghai about why there had to be such a singular route to success: such a narrow bridge for all of those troops. Why couldn’t they conduct interviews for at least the most prestigious courses to allow for an understanding of the students’ thinking processes or passions in addition to high scores, or have broader criteria for university entrance to include a range of different types of exams or student achievements?
It turns out, the Chinese government are thinking along the same lines, and a few weeks after I returned to England, the Chinese Communist Party announced that there would be reforms to the gaokao, to try and reduce the pressure on young people.156 Rather than having to select arts or sciences, students in the future will be allowed to choose three out of seven elective subjects, in addition to the core subjects of Chinese, maths and a foreign language (which no longer has to be English). Students will be able to take their elective exams twice, and choose the best score out of the two. And university entrance will also take into account high-school performance in other areas, such as morality standards, art cultivation and social practices. While having a greater choice of subjects and a chance to retake will reduce the pressure, some are concerned reducing the significance of the gaokao scores could lead to unfairness in admissions.
This was Rony’s take on it. ‘If the government really wants to give more of a say to the universities, they need to ensure transparency. This might be harder in some provinces than others; in some inland provinces it would be terrible, and it would be the rich kids, the mayor’s son, who would most easily get in.’
Essentially, the reason that a single exam has remained the only route to university for so long, despite attempts at reform, is because it is incorruptible in the current exam-determined system (providing the drones are effective and exams are policed properly). Unfortunately, Chinese universities are prone to corruption; 52 members of senior management were reprimanded for violating laws and regulations in 2015 alone, and that is without the possibility of them taking bribes for letting students in. If university entry becomes more nuanced, officials will most likely be called upon to do favours, in the same way that they are for school admissions, due to a cultural practice called guanxi.
Guanxi and School Access
Guanxi is commonly translated as ‘relationship’ or ‘connection’, but neither of these terms really cover its pervasiveness and complexity. Guanxi is fundamental to Chinese culture, and describes a network of mutually-beneficial relationships that can help you in your personal life or in business. In a country where the official governmental bodies will not necessarily support you financially or legally in times of need, networks that might offer this support are all the more important. Extended family ties form part of guanxi, as can people you went to school with or people you’ve worked with, and these ties are maintained by the giving and receiving of favours and gifts. Once someone has done you a favour, failing to reciprocate leads to a major loss of face, and is considered unforgiveable. Hence if an admissions official at a coveted university has received help from a school friend in the past, it puts him in a very difficult position if asked for special consideration for his school friend’s niece.
If you have a primary-school-aged child, guanxi can be very helpful in getting them into your chosen school. While officially there is no longer a system of ‘key schools’ – schools which used to be given priority by the government in the assignment of teachers and resources, and permission to pick the ‘best’ students – some schools are still considered to be better than others, and different types of school are subject to different regulations. Officially, children in Shanghai are supposed to go to a local junior high school once they finish primary, and schools are supposed to select on locality alone. However, a well-timed gift to a teacher or expensive dinner with a principal can give your child a better chance of getting into the most desirable schools.
There is also a more official process of selection by financial means (not forgetting the ability to afford a home near a prestigious school). While ordinary schools can only accept students from their district, ‘municipal exemplary schools’ are allowed to select students from all over Shanghai. They are also allowed to charge these out-of-district students a ‘school choice’ fee – up to 30,000 yen, which at about $4,400 American dollars might still not be enough to get your child in if you can’t afford the gifts required for guanxi.157 You can now see an additional, slightly cynical reason why teachers put pressure on parents to get their children to study: the schools’ continued reputation, exclusivity and ability to charge ‘school choice’ fees depend on their students’ grades, which they advertise to parents.
These official and unofficial policies combine to form a system where the schools with the best resources are only accessible to those whose family have the money and the contacts. It is no surprise then that in Shanghai, the percentage of variance in PISA results explained by student background is significantly above the OECD average, bigger than any other country in the top PISA 15 except Singapore, and greater than the variance explained in both the UK and the United States. And that is just Shanghai; these figures would likely be worse were they to take into account student performance across the whole country.
Shanghai is not at all typical of China as a whole. We are going to hear from Rony again, because he was educated outside of Shanghai, in Inner Mongolia (an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China), but then moved to Shanghai for university, allowing him to observe some of the major differences. Without being prompted, he warned me: ‘I really want you to think of Shanghai as an exception; it’s really different to the rest of China. They have a lot more resources from a very early stage. There are good schools. The GDP is a lot higher, and that’s related
to exam results. It’s a hugely international city compared to a lot of other places in China.
‘A lot of people would misrepresent the result and think that Shanghai represents China, and think ‘Oh look, China is doing so well. Yes, in part, if you look at a few big cities, but there’s huge disparity as well. I had some friends who moved from north-eastern China to Shanghai in the middle of their schooling, at 13 years old. They experienced culture shock; it took them many years to get used to it. And they were so impressed by how developed the Shanghai school system was.’
‘How did they manage to get into public schools?’ I asked. I asked because there is a system in China called hukou where people are registered according to their family’s hometown, and can only access public services in that area. ‘Was it guanxi?’ I asked, trying out my new vocabulary.
‘Exactly. These are not migrant-worker kids, they would be the kids of business people or professors, so I guess they had hukou, or an arrangement where the parents’ employers would make sure their kids were educated in Shanghai public schools.’
Hukou and Migrants
The first time I’d come across the idea of hukou was during my chat with Nancy in the Parisian coffee shop, where she’d explained that her parents had originally moved to Shanghai without her and her little brother, leaving them with grandparents. Because her family are not originally from Shanghai, they do not have a Shanghai hukou, so Nancy would have had trouble getting into a regular public school in Shanghai. Parents who want to migrate to the cities in China are therefore often faced with a choice – leave their children behind, or bring them along and send them to a low-cost private school in the city. To their credit, the Shanghai government has recently admitted many of these migrant students into local public primary schools, but a few migrant schools remain in the outer regions of Shanghai where there isn’t capacity in the public system.
I spent a week in one of these migrant schools, teaching English to Classes 4 and 5. It wasn’t terrible – the teachers seemed to care and certainly worked very hard, and they had textbooks and large TVs in each room on which they could show PowerPoint presentations. But it was of significantly worse quality than the public schools I’d spent time in.158 The toilets, for example, were just three long channels dug in the floor; no cubicles, and used by both staff and students, which meant I drank as little as I could during the school day to avoid having to use them. When chatting to the teachers I learned that many of them didn’t have the same qualifications as teachers in public schools would, and those that did were hoping to leave and get a job in the better-paid public sector. The standard of English was also far below the level that was expected in the curriculum. I’d been given the Class 4 and 5 textbooks to prepare my lessons, and completely abandoned my plans after the first 15 minutes of class when it became clear that the children barely knew any verbs, let alone tenses.
I was told by one of the teachers that these were the children of Shanghai’s migrants with ‘residency permits’ only – granted to those who can demonstrate a stable job, accommodation and social security payments for at least six months. There are also migrant workers in Shanghai who are only on ‘temporary residence permits’, who may have been working in the city for many years, but in part-time or unstable jobs or housing. I can only assume that these are the workers that leave their children by themselves or with grandparents when they come to the city for work, adding to the 60 million ‘left behind children’ in China.
Children of migrant workers with residence permits who come to the city with their parents can attend primary school there – either in public schools or registered private schools. However, no one without a local hukou was allowed to take the high-school entrance exam in Shanghai – residency permit or no residency permit. This meant that young people who wanted to attend high school would be forced to go back to their ‘hometown’ to take the high-school entrance exams, and because these exams differ by region, they would most often go ‘back’ for at least the last year of junior high school to prepare for them, if not for the whole of junior high.
Zhan Haite is one of these migrant young people. Although she’s been in Shanghai since she was four, her parents don’t have a Shanghai hukou, so at age 14 she was faced with a choice: go back to your parents’ hometown for high school, or don’t go to high school. Zhan didn’t like the idea of going to school miles away from her family, in an area she didn’t know, so instead she made quite an unusual move; she stayed in Shanghai, self-studied some high-school courses, and took it upon herself to draw attention to migrants’ rights on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter). On 8th June 2012, Zhan posted a photo of herself holding a sign that read, ‘Where is my right to the high-school exam?’ and later requested a debate with those who were against migrants attending high school in front of the Shanghai Education Commission. She hadn’t been the first to raise these issues, and in a move to make the system more equitable, the government responded by bringing in a change of policy, allowing certain ‘qualified’ migrant students to attend high school in Shanghai. But this only came into place in 2013, after Shanghais’ wowed the world with stellar PISA results in 2009 and 2012.
As a consequence of the original policy, many migrant students, the least educated in Shanghai society, had to leave the city by 13 or 14; just before the age at which students sit the PISA test. This makes sense of the strangely low number given by Shanghai authorities as the total student population of 15-year-olds in 2012; 108,056 out of a population of 23,019,196. Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, points out that this is a similar number of 15-year-olds to countries with just half the total population of Shanghai. While migrant residents account for approximately 40 per cent of the total population, 43 per cent of five-year-olds and 63 per cent of 20-year-olds, in the 15-year-old age group they make up only 27.7 per cent.
Having a significant proportion of your poorest and least-educated students leave the city just before the age at which they’d take the PISA test is likely to have a positive effect on the results of those PISA tests, but a negative effect on the students who are forced to leave. This is not cheating – the Shanghai authorities are still including a representative sample of all the 15-year-olds who are in the city at the time of the tests – but their results may well be artificially inflated by this counter-educational (though arguably practically necessary) policy. An analysis by faculty members at the Indiana University School of Education suggests that the exclusion of migrant students from the PISA tests could exaggerate Shanghai’s maths results, to the extent where if Massachusetts were to exclude the same proportion of low-performing children, it would cut Shanghai’s lead over them by half.159
The recent government changes to include more migrant children in public schools and allow ‘qualified’ students to attend high school in the city show that they are taking steps to address this challenging problem, but the current reforms do not go far enough to make the system fair (or to make their PISA score representative of the true make-up of the city). Only those whose parents have a residency permit and at least 120 points – based on age, education and type of profession – are allowed to stay in Shanghai for high school. Low-paid, less-educated workers – without whom the city could not function and grow as successfully as it has – are still forced to send their children hundreds of miles away if they want them to attend high school and improve their lot in life. Zhan Haite still does not qualify for high school in Shanghai.
Chapter 13: Memorisation,
Deep-Fried Chicken and the Paradox of the Chinese Learner
A frog on the bottom of a well.
(Chinese proverb)
I could hear it before I saw it. As I approached from the back of the school, a loudspeaker piped out lively classical music, with chanting played over the top of it – ‘Yī èr sān’ (‘One, two three!’) I rounded the corner and walked into the school yard, and was met with the sight of hundreds of primary school children in bright or
ange tracksuits, lined up in rows and dancing in time with the prefects, who high-kicked and spun their arms on the stage at the front. This was morning exercise, and there was definitely more enthusiasm coming from some children than others.
When the music stopped, the students ‘marched’ back to their classrooms, swinging their arms wildly, and got ready for their lessons. In Grade 2P they sat in rows, facing the front of the room, where the class prefect directed the class in their singing of English nursery rhymes (‘There was a man who had a dog… ’) as they waited for their English teacher. She arrived and greeted the children, and started the lesson by playing them a recording of a story about a frog who lived in a well.
Frog’s friend, Bird, came to perch on the side of the well one day, and asked him, ‘Oh Frog, what do you see?’
Frog replied, ‘I see the sky. It is very small.’
‘Oh no, no, no!’ said Bird (in a terribly posh English accent). ‘The sky is very big!’
Having spent some time watching lessons in China, and speaking to Chinese teachers about their practice, I’ve come to think that the common Western perception of Chinese education is similar to the perception of the frog. He saw the sky, and it really was the sky that he saw, but he didn’t see the whole sky, so he didn’t have a full understanding of what the sky was. In the previous two chapters, we’ve looked at some of the cultural and contextual factors that might explain Shanghai students’ success in international tests; here we’ll look in more detail at what these children actually do in school, how it differs to the stereotypes and how their teachers contribute to their studies.