The more I stare, the more I want to stare.

Not sure when I’ll be back yet. Got my Expo and plush Haibao urging me on though!

• Doing nothing and feeling guilty about it
• Living near Chinatown
• Getting a Chinese-speaking girlfriend and hoping for the best
• Watching Crouching Tiger and Gong Fu over and over
• Having daily lessons but not doing the homework and vocab review properly

Water calligraphy at Lu Xun Park

Recently work has suffered a few upheavals, keeping me quite busy – I didn’t get bored of China or Chinese, but just let life get in the way. In a week I’m returning to Australia for crisis control/to explore some new project possibilities. I’ll be sorry to leave Shanghai for now, but I’m not done with China yet.

More photos at Flickr.

There are more people interested in China’s education with the increasing number of Chinese students studying overseas. Although China used to have famous educators like Confucius who still has a far-reaching influence in today’s world, China’s existing education system incurs (warrants) some criticism.

Overview of China’s education system
In ancient times, without a public education system, Chinese people employed teachers personally, thus education was a luxury that only rich people could afford. In the early 1900’s, China started to set up school system that learned from western countries. Today there is a free primary and middle school system in China. Recently, a system of 3 years kindergarten, 6 years primary school, 3 years middle school, and 3 years high school forms the basic educational infrastructure in China. Within this infrastructure, a 6 years of primary school and 3 years of middle school education are free of charge countrywide (nationwide). In capital cities, children start their school life from kindergarten at age 3 while there are still many children who start from primary school at age 6 in the countryside.

After graduating from middle school, students need to take a high school entrance examination. Students can choose to enter secondary vocational and technical school or high school separately, depending on their scores. In order to enter college, students have to pass a college entrance examination.

In China, a bachelors degree is set up on a four year full-time schedule; a masters degree takes 3 years full-time studying, while normally it only takes 3 years for a doctoral degree (which is shorter than Western universities). The studying time is quite fixed in colleges comparing to their western counterparts’ more flexible timetable. Besides full-time colleges and universities, there are many part time schools in China’s colleges and universities. However, the education quality (quality of education) in part-time schools is much lower than full-time schools. As a result, many recruitment advertisements announce that only a full-time education background is acceptable.

School life

Primary, Secondary, and high School

In China’s schools, there is a monitor and a vice-monitor chosen by the chief teacher or elected by the students in the class. Besides monitors, there are some “management level” students chosen or elected. These students probably have special power in the class, like “super students”. Secondly, a teacher is assigned to be in charge of a class, whom we call the “chief” of the class. The chief is responsible for almost everything in the class, which heavily relates to his or her performance at school. Finally, there are many ways the classes compete with each other at school, like sports competitions，discipline, sanitation, (test) scores, and so forth. In short, we can imagine a normal student’s school life here. Probably, what they did, what they said, what scores they acheived, will all be reported to their parents sooner or later. Furthermore, normal students have to endure a school life watched over by the management level “super students” and their teachers.

College

College students have much more freedom compared to their younger counterparts. The difference between college students in China and their Western counterparts is that there is still a chief who is in charge of the class. Frankly speaking, however,, China’s colleges are not as strict as western colleges. Many colleges have no penalty for students’ absence or late assignments. I remember I often skipped my lectures and some of my classmates had many excuses for their late assignments without any penalty from the lecturers in my college. On the other hand, in Australia, any late assignment meant zero score when I was studying there and the attendance rate was important for undergraduate students there.

Teachers

Education background

In China’s kindergarten and primary school, most teachers graduated from secondary vocational teaching school, a three- or four-year teaching school after middle school. The education they have is equivalent to high school graduation. In order to improve these teachers’ educational level, recent requirements are to study for a bachelor degree in China’s big capital cities, like Beijing and Shanghai. Concerning the real situation, that these teachers can not compete with the high school graduation students in college entrance examinations, they are allowed to enter colleges’ night schools as part-time students. However, it is widely known that most of them just chase a degree rather than academic knowledge. They copy essays; cheat at examinations; even bribe their teachers during their college life. A classic story was told by one of my friends, Owen, a senior manager in a Fortune 500 company. Owen told me that his wife, a primary school linguistic teacher, asked him to complete her exam paper for her English final examination in her college- Zhejiang University, one of China’s top 10 Universities. (He did not know where the exam paper came from. Probably one of his wife’s classmates stole it from their college or bought it from an employee at their college.) When the examination day arrived, she brought the completed exam paper to the classroom. Her classmates (they are primary school teachers too) really appreciated her homework. They copied her paper during the exam. Because so many classmates copied it, finally she could not find the original paper. It must have happened that somebody wrote his or her own name on it and handed it in. She cried and had to sign her name on an unknown paper as her own.

Teachers in middle school and high school are required to have at least a bachelors degree in the major of education. Some of them have masters degrees. However, college lecturers’ education background is verified. Some of them just have bachelor degree, while most of them only have masters degrees. In China, there are still very few lecturers have doctoral degrees in colleges.

Characteristics & teaching methodology

Compared to other teachers, lecturers in college are more flexible and relaxed. Primary, secondary and high school teachers are responsible for not only teaching, but students’ behavior. In order to control their students and compete with other classes at school, Chinese teachers are quite strict and stubborn. They hate any noise and undisciplined behavior happened in their class. Students who question their teachers’ academic knowledge and teaching methodology are not appreciated(!). Moreover, students who have questions out of school (outside of the core curriculum), like life, value, love and so forth are considered an annoyance. Because of heavy teaching tasks (workload), especially because of the pressure regarding performance in the entrance examinations such as high school entrance exams and college entrance exams, teachers have to emphasize academic knowledge that must be tested rather than practicing. (teachers have to focus on material that will be on the exams, rather than a broader range of material.) Two years ago, when I attended a parents’ meeting at my daughter’s primary school, I heard her English teacher talking to some parents and her opinion was quite clear: Language practicing is useless for exams. The reason is simple: English entrance exams in China are focus on true or false options rather than listening, speaking, reading and writing. I was shocked at that time. In today’s Shanghai, the most advanced capital city in China, primary school English teachers still focus on true or false options. It reminded me of a Chinese saying we have known for thousands of years: “Do not listen to anything outside your classroom. The only thing students need to do is focus on their textbooks.”

Moreover, in order to have high scores in entrance exams, teaching methodologies emphasize memorizing and repeated exercises. Students are requested to repeat similar assignments for the main points in their textbooks. Normally, a student is required to complete not only an assignment from the teacher, but several similar additional exercise books bought from bookshops as daily homework.

In order to get into college, most high school students work all day and night during their whole high-school life. There were some news reports of “sudden death” – dropping dead from exhaustion – occurring several times in a high school. The youngsters in this high school get up at 5 o’clock and go to sleep at 12 o’clock every day. They have no holidays, no weekends, no entertainments except assignments and lessons.

Finally, it is common that many teachers, especially public school teachers require presents from students and their parents. On some important festivals, like Teachers’ day, Mid-autumn Festival and the Spring Festival, students and their parents are encouraged to send presents to their teachers though it is illegal in China. Even some college professors cross the line, soliciting sexual favours from female masters and doctoral candidates.

Academic Subjects
Outwardly, academic subjects are quite complete in China’s primary school and middle school. Students have linguistics, mathematics, foreign language (mainly English), history, geographic, politics, physics, chemistry, computer science, biology, arts, music and sports(physical education) lessons. However, linguistics, mathematics, and English are the most important three subjects because these three subjects are the compulsory subjects on the entrance examinations. In China, all the students’ efforts are only for the entrance examinations.. Besides these three subjects, extra-curricular activities such as music or participation in the Math Olympics are encouraged as they can win extra points on college entrance tests. Moreover, because of the additional scores added in entrance examination for minatory nationality people, some Han students change their races for the college entrance competition, though it is illegal in China. Because all examinations in China are limited to paper tests, students invariably emphasize academic knowledge over practical experience. It is quite common that a bachelor of computer science could have outstanding scores in mathematics, physics and software design in college but does not even know how to set up a computer or how to make an Excel spreadsheet or power point presentation.

In conclusion, although education in China has had huge improvements in this century, there are still many problems to be found in today’s China.

While I was being screened in quarantine for a runny nose (honesty is the best policy), I was checking out the passengers coming into the country, and it struck me how often Chinese bring in these bags of goods. Nothing wrong with bringing home stacks of stuff, but there’s a particular style of bag – like a heavy-duty plastic bag – that you always see in these situations. What are those things called? Do they have a name?

The other problem is larger and more annoying: The street maps aren’t aligned with the satellite view or the GPS coordinates. This means that when using the GPS feature on the phone, the blue dot is actually about 500m away from your real location. This leads, as you can imagine, to a lot of guessing and mistakes.

I assumed that this was a temporary glitch and somebody would notice and fix it, but not so. Searching Google yielded no information. I got to wondering about it again today, though, thinking there must be more to it. After some searching, all I was able to find was a tiny snippet in a forum post 58 pages into a thread: ” Most maps available for China are misaligned by ~300-600m.” The poster claimed this was a government regulation.

I couldn’t find any confirmation of this, and besides, I’ve seen Chinese cars with GPS in action. Can anyone else explain why the Google maps data provided by Mapabc in China is off by such a large amount and nobody, apparently, can do anything about it?

As another friend pointed out, my alter ego has more hair than me…

It’s interesting to me that English now lacks a common feature of many languages – a polite version of the pronoun “you”. As you may be aware, we used to have one – “you”. We were so polite that the familiar form, “thou”, and its verb conjugations, has fallen into disuse. (For some reason, English speakers imagine that “thou art” is more polite. I suppose because it sounds old-timey, harking back to an imaginary era when people had some god-damned respect.)

It can be tricky when learning a foreign language to remember to use the polite form or to know when to use it. We’ve all made a few mistakes with Usted, vous or Sie. And there can be a few surprises. It’s pretty clear what to use when you greet a customer, headmaster or prime minister. What about your parents or grandparents? In European languages, and in Chinese, the parents seem to get the familar treatment. (After all, we would think a kid who called his dad “Sir” had an unusually strict upbringing.) In Chinese, though, grandparents get the more respectful term. Not surprising in a culture where age is respected – even revered.

What about God? The traditional Lord’s prayer tells us that in English we historically use the familiar form (“who art in heaven… thy name”). This hadn’t occurred to me when I discovered that Germans use the familiar form, “du” for God. It seemed to me that if you are talking to God you probably believe in him, and if anyone deserved respect, it’d be someone who could decide the outcome of your latest war or give you an aneurysm without working up a sweat. But we Westerners seem to have a more casual relationship with the almighty – “Dear God: Hey buddy, please make sure my pizza gets delivered soon, ‘k, thanks.” The same is true in Spanish, for instance – although you probably wouldn’t say “tu” to God, the conjugation of the verbs indicates familiarity. The Chinese on the other hand are a bit more cautious – God gets the 您 (nín) polite treatment here. What does this say about the respective cultures?

I’m especially curious how this all works in Japanese, which is famous for many levels of formality and a plethora of pronouns. Can anyone enlighten me?

Update: Actually, asking some more Chinese, I’ve been contradicted on both the grandparents and God situations- it apparently varies, and seems to be a generational thing. For instance, someone told me you would never address a grandparent with 您 (nín, polite) or 你 (nǐ, familiar) at all – only by “title”, such as grandmother, which I admit makes little sense to me. What’s even more interesting, though, is there is a separate pronoun just for God that I wasn’t aware of – pronounced the same, but with its own character. Thanks to leyan for pointing me at John Pasden’s excellent write-up at Sinosplice.