by Bickey Chang It has been more than two years since I saw James, one of my most inspiring friends. In high school, we often teasingly accused him of being the guy who did not believe in having fun; rather, he believed in always learning. He had gone on to study at Stanford after graduation, and I had not seen him since. We met over dinner with a couple of friends for an update on each other’s lives. “Actually, I wasn’t at school the past quarter. I’ve spent the last four months in China, teaching elementary kids English and doing some research.” This opened the main topic of our dinner together. It struck me how our lives had grown apart since graduation. More than that, as he began to talk of some of the social and economic problems China was facing, I realized how little I really knew about China. I had much to learn. The situation in China is dire. Granted, China has made remarkable progress in the past ten years, but there is still much room for improvement. Education there, for one, is a big problem which, as he found, is closely tied to the problem of migrant workers. Most peasant laborers travel to big cities because they can no longer survive in their hometowns. This hinged on the national economic climate. When the economy looked up, peasant laborers would often have five jobs to choose from, but when the economy was down, they could not find jobs and thus would be forced to move elsewhere for opportunities, thereby becoming migrant workers. City life is hard for these migrants. Though they are better off in large cities, in the sense that they at least have a means for living there, they cannot obtain legal citizenship permits. The lack of immigrant rights essentially leaves them at the bottom of the city-life food chain – becoming prey to policies and people. The peasant laborers’ situation takes its toll on their children’s education. Under the decentralized education policy of the Chinese government, cities must raise their own money for education. The cities, in turn, delegate this responsibility to their schools. A school’s education quality thus becomes strongly correlated to the economic ability of the students’ parents. For ‘‘migrant schools,’’ with students coming from peasant laborer families of poor economic standing, this means a serious lack of resources. Education quality is low, for only teachers who have not passed the teaching exams have the incentive to work at migrant schools. Once these teachers gain the necessary experience to pass their teaching exams, they would go on to teach at bigger or richer city schools. Another product of the government’s decentralized education policy is that the schools in different regions use different educational texts. For migrant children, this threatens to undermine even what poor education they have. Because of their lack of immigrant rights, these children must return to their place of citizenship to take their entrance exams. As the exams are based on the different texts used, migrant children face the crisis of having to study one text in their city school whilst being examined on another in their hometown. If exams were not difficult enough for these children, they now become almost impossible. The social mentality behind all this is devastating to perceive. Many migrant parents are ignorant of the hidden problems in the education of their children. For those who do understand, many lack the economic ability to alter the situation. Then, there are those who accept it as a matter of course – it would only be a matter of time before their children would have to drop out of the education system and join the workforce. Before then, any education the children get would have to be good enough. It doesn’t help that the social discrimination against peasant laborers and their children is deeply embedded in the thoughts of the urban Chinese. Peasant laborers are thought to be an uncivilized tribe with atrocious habits such as wiping their bottoms with their hands. When they enter the workforce after their education, discriminatory and stereotypical images stay with them, as if they are tattooed with “peasants” on their foreheads. It is more than an education problem. What is being done to alleviate the situation? Not enough. The Chinese government has mainly decided on a money solution, by providing money for the schools’ infrastructure. James was surprised to find that the projecting equipment at more than one of these schools was even better than that at his own college, which is easily among the most expensive American universities. But better facilities will not solve the migrant worker and educational policy problems that are a greater part of this issue. I walked away from dinner thinking about these problems. Is there anything we can do to improve the situation? “I’ve seriously thought about becoming a teacher. Maybe one day I’ll set up a school in China,” James mused. “There are just too many problems waiting to be solved in that system.” But then again, he was an American citizen who’d spent most of his life in Taiwan. He was still only becoming familiar with the culture in China, and there are many difficulties. Migrant education in China is after all only the tip of the iceberg. a
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
|