collageIn the near future, do you visualize studying in Chinese university? If that’s so, what do you really know about Chinese universities? This is why reading the article below is crucial since it brings you to some of the important facts, like education system in china vs india. Simply read on to find out more.
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India and China have developed two distinct forms of centrist elitist states which are very different but which share common characteristics. First of all, they are highly centrist in nature which means that they exhibit a compelling urge to gather power into the government, and then to hold such power at the national government level. Both have made significant delegations to state level governments, but China in particular believes in the central control of decentralized operations. There is a collateral urge to concentrate power in the hands of a small elite group especially around the power of economic development. In both cases, the logic is that centralized power is more easily controlled and manipulated, and that any sharing of power invites the undesirable prospect of having to negotiate and perhaps to be forced to compromise.
This centrist urge is common to all forms of government: democracies, dictatorships, state socialist regimes, and even in Islamic states, where many of the control mechanisms are guided or compelled by religious imperatives rather than secular principles. While the key to power is usually economic, governments that are particularly authoritarian seek to extend their control to all elements of society: political, economic, social services, and even the definition of acceptable national cultural mores.
Once in power, centrist governments tend to become the captives of their own compelling need to hold on to power. They become very “doctrinaire”; that is, they use a doctrine or philosophy as justification for the correctness of their position and as a political justification for holding on to their power. Examples include the 65 year history of state communism in the Soviet Union, most of Eastern Europe, Cuba, China and North Korea. Islamic states tend to rely heavily on religious doctrine as defined in the Qur’an and Shari’a. Most political parties establish some degree of a doctrinal base as a means to attract supporters and define what the party stands for. The great wave of movement toward state socialism was elaborately defined by doctrine that emphasized the necessity for state control of national social services and large segments of the national economy, accompanied by official suspicion of the private sector, and this pattern persists officially in China, even where communist/socialist doctrine has lost a good deal of its relevance. Ruling elites, even if essentially honest, are still narrow in vision, often isolated and unrealistic in their understandings, and tend to be reactionary, parochial, self-centered and self-important.
THE FAILURES OF EDUCATION IN INDIA
After WW II, the great clash between the concepts of a largely private market based world, and a world of centrist socialism seemed to have been won by the forces of State Socialism in a variety of forms from the total absolute centrist dictatorship in the Soviet Union and China to more moderate versions such as those in Sweden, France, Italy or India.
The leadership in both China and India believed that centrist authority and control was vital in managing their vast, chaotic countries, and both felt that this centrist control should be exercised by a small self chosen elite. In China, that elite took the form of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictatorship under Mao Zedong, who could only see the world in terms of enormous revolutionary conflict with ominous “foreign imperialist” enemies, seeking to ally themselves with dark reactionary forces within the country.
In India, the elite was more benign and not as militant. Power was held as a matter of “right” by a combination of Fabian Socialist theorists, high caste Brahmins, and socialist economists who never doubted their own superiority. Indians eventually learned from painful experience that their State did not necessarily work on behalf of the people. It worked on behalf of itself –the politicians, bureaucrats and the interests that directly supported them – sustained by the theology of centrist Socialism. Thus buttressed and sustained, State employees became a powerful vested interest that was responsible to no one.
This attitude manifested itself in the design of the national education system that emerged after independence. Most positions of power and influence were held by upper caste Brahmins many of whom strongly felt that even elementary education for “lower castes” was a waste; that education was a privilege to be reserved for certain elite castes; that even mid level castes needed only very basic education; that education for girls was outrageous; and that the possibility of lower castes learning to read sacred texts was sacrilegious.
The two giants of post-independence India – Gandhi and Nehru –opposed widespread formal education, but for different reasons. Gandhi felt that educating the people’s children was a good thing, but that it should be confined to basic things such as crafts and practical skills for the boys and child rearing and household skills for girls. Nehru typified the elitist, class biased interpretation of the government’s responsibilities for education, which meant that formal education would be largely reserved for a relatively small elite, mostly the sons (but not the daughters) of senior government officials, military officers, high caste Brahmins, and influential political figures. For this elite group, nothing was spared. Their elementary/secondary schools were first class – all of the amenities, often including swimming pools, tennis courts and cricket fields. Meanwhile, within walking distance were crowded slums where schools for the urban poor were held in rickety buildings lacking toilets, running water and even books and blackboards. The children of the elite were sent away at government expense for advanced degrees in economics, political science, science and engineering, and military training, all very much in the patterns employed by the British in the Victorian era and up to WW II. As with China and the Soviet Union, state socialism was the perfect justification for elite centrist control; the masses were to be led (or driven), and all they needed to know was to do as they were told. India’s political leadership, including the Nehru and Gandhi family dynasties drew their political support largely from the upper caste elite. This caste elitism was especially strong in rural/village areas where it was linked with the landed gentry, most of whom sought preferment for their own children, but were not about to pay for the education of the children of the poor.
This Brahmin elitism was blended in with several other prejudices, the strongest of which was and is against the education of girls. It seems never to have occurred to the ruling elite that girls were capable of serious intellectual attainment, or that almost half of the talent base of children was simply being neglected. Despite repeated earnest and pompous policy utterances to the contrary, in 2005, it was still true that less than 1/3 of girls ever got into any kind of school[1].
India remains an absolutely incomprehensible puzzle of religious, ethnic, cultural, regional, social, economic, and language differences, representing formidable barriers to acceptable progress in the reform – or even the creation – of an adequate education system. For example, classes may be taught and books provided in local languages rather than English or Hindi. This may satisfy some narrow cultural or political need, but it leaves children who are unable to connect with the greater world outside of their own region.
Government schools are certainly not free; instead they charge heavy fees and related expenses. Many rural/village families are so poor that they can’t afford to pay these fees. In addition, upper castes tend to think that it is perfectly acceptable for the children of the poor to work, and that it is equally acceptable for the privileged classes to design for themselves a rich and highly subsidized system of education. Child labor is not, in the last analysis, officially illegal, since huge exceptions are allowed for work in agriculture, family households, restaurants, and so called cottage industries. In other cases, the laws mandating compulsory elementary and secondary education are simply ignored[2]. This helps to explain why, despite laws supposedly mandating universal primary education, almost 50% of all children are not in school. There is a big slippage between “student enrollment” and student attendance.
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