Abstract
In the 67 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the country claims to have achieved an ‘educational miracle’. According to official records, China has reached a 99 per cent literacy rate (compared with 20 per cent in 1949). In addition, in 2010 China declared that universal basic education had been achieved, meaning that all youth were provided with nine years of free schooling, with a zero attrition rate and 100 per cent grade promotion. Globally China has outperformed many of its Asian neighbours in meeting the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Furthermore, students in Shanghai outperformed those from all other participating countries on the Program for International Student Assessment tests in math, reading and science.
Jinting Wu examines China’s education miracle in light of its true meaning for rural ethnic students during her 16 months of fieldwork in the Qiandongnan Prefecture of Guizhou Province. Wu carried out participant observation at two village middle schools while working as a volunteer teacher. She also conducted numerous informal interviews with teachers, staff, students, parents and villagers.
Different aspects of Wu’s identity first as a Chinese national, and second, as an educational anthropologist trained at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, allow her to examine issues surrounding education with a keen eye. Her study was conducted in two ethnic minority villages under the pseudonyms of Majiang and Longxing. Her starting premise is that the reality of schooling in Southwest China falls well short of the education miracle that the PRC purports to have achieved.
Wu begins by contesting the claim that universal basic education has truly been achieved throughout China. She observes that both the Majiang and Longxing middle schools have dropout rates as high as 30 per cent. In part this is because ‘free’ education is never really free for students. The money needed for required uniforms, school supplies and supplementary lessons adds up to a sum not easily affordable for rural households dependent upon farming.
Furthermore, for both students and their families, the relevance of schooling as it relates to employment is waning. A growth in ethnic tourism – and the accompanying construction boom needed to support this tourism – means that minority youth are more likely to find jobs in song and dance troupes or road building crews than they are to access higher education.
In addition, a nationwide wave of curriculum reform, designed to make education throughout China more student-centred, has brought about an unexpected result. Rural schools now deliver an urban-centred, national-standard curriculum that has little connection to the life experiences, current or anticipated, of students in Majiang and Longxing. All of these factors discourage school attendance among those in most need of it.
China’s Two Fundamentals/Basics Project, begun in 1994, aimed to universalize nine-year compulsory education and to eliminate illiteracy among adults aged 15 to 45, both commendable goals. In attempting to monitor progress toward these goals, however, Wu maintains that teachers have become so overwhelmed by performance audits and educational inspections that more emphasis is now placed on evaluating schooling than delivering it. Wu describes one farmers’ school where peasants were supposed to attend evening classes to learn reading and writing. In fact, these classes were rarely held because so few farmers were willing to show up for school after labouring all day in their fields. On the day of the official state inspection, ‘several male teachers asked their wives to come to their rescue by playing illiterate peasants…. Two dozen women were summoned to the distance-learning lab waiting for a lesson on scientific pig husbandry’ when the audit crew arrived (pp. 117–18).
The slogan ‘Today’s education is tomorrow’s economy’ (p. xiv) describes the foundation upon which the Two Basics Project is built. Throughout the book, Wu adeptly uses the lens of critical theory to examine the unintended consequences of the project: an immense number of school dropouts engaged in menial, low-skill jobs that, to them, appear to be the most realistic path toward earning a living. Wu relies heavily on the work of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu to support her claims. Given the extraordinary amount of time, effort and expertise Wu invested in her fieldwork, the text could benefit from the inclusion of more ‘thick description’, to borrow the words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, that is, additional data which is meaty, layered and rich in description.
The book presents a grim, if arguably realistic, view of national minority education in China’s Southwest. Emphasis is placed on illustrating deficiencies, and little mention is made of the successes in schooling that do exist. Wu is an astute observer of both compulsory schooling and rural development in the PRC. Students of educational policy, ethnic studies and critical theory will benefit greatly from her work.