What is going on with education in China's countryside? Since I live and work here, I thought I would make a few comments on a very interesting article I just read on the Washington Post's website.
Western nations' governments, researchers, and reporters often blast China for this and that policy. And clear statistics of the illiteracy rate among China's massive rural population is of great concern for the Chinese government. In this matter, though, there are a great many factors at play. This is not a matter that more money or better drafted government resolutions are going to solve. I would say the biggest factor is cultural.
The Washington Post's article made several excellent points, and had some very telling interviews and quotes. Among them, the one that, for me, hits the biggest issue dead on is a quote from professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology:
"Farmers don't see a bright future from receiving more education. Many believe it won't help them much in making money." ...
That is the true sentiment of many of the rural folks with whom I work. They are quite able at what they do, but education and reading hundreds of characters just is not very high on their list of priorities. They do not see how it affects their life and how it will benefit them.
For young women, the most frequent subject of conversation when the issue of illiteracy crops up, the responsibilities of the home start pretty young in most villages. They simply have too much to do, and with generations of women before them with no education, it is an odd girl indeed that breaks the mold and magically places importance on schooling. And for young men, dropping out and moving to the big city to earn big money is often the only thing on their mind.
Simply stated, my point is that the people themselves do not want to go to school...much to the disappointment of government officials, I would guess. The government is putting truck loads of money into rural education, building schools, trying all they can to expand educational opportunities, but working against all those efforts is the village mindset, the worldview that does not place importance on education.
What's a government to do?
And realistically, something that few articles on this topic talk about is the difficulty of the Chinese language itself. Chinese is easily the most difficult to learn written language in the world. You could claim Japanese, but only one of the three Japanese written scripts is as difficult, and that is straight from Chinese. Teaching a peasant to read and write in Thailand, Mexico, or Russia is going to be a lot easier than one in China. That is just the way it is.
A lot of people who would never be so naive as to take the PRC government's business-related statistics at face value nonetheless accept without question China's absurdly inflated claims of literacy -- and then base business decisions in part on this. So I'm glad that more information on literacy is beginning to trickle out.
Professor Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations has some relevant comments on the WaPo article on illiteracy in China on Language Log, which is widely viewed as the most important blog on linguistics.
Posted by: Mark S. | 5 May 2007 at 13:17
Well, the point of my article above is not to criticize China and their statistics, but rather to look at the issue from a perspective that very few see...or at least, if they do see, there certainly are not many reports about it. The cultural worldview of the rural population often does not put an emphasis on education.
I am suggesting that even if China did have easily accessible and affordable education for all the rural population, there would still be significant numbers of illiterate people for years to come. I am actually trying to give the Chinese government a little credit here. They do not hold sole, or even primary, responsiblity for illiteracy. The people have to choose to go to school.
Sure, the government needs to provide more school buildings, provide books, and get rid of prohibitive tuition fees. That is what they can do. But there are two sides to this coin.
Posted by: Cooper Strange | 5 May 2007 at 15:11