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 purpose of education in china. Simply read on to find out more.
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Did you know that China is the largest market for education in the world?
Education aims to provide a guided and structured academic understanding that promotes students’ holistic development and underpins political, civic, and economic purposes.
In China, the education policy adopted in 1957, mainly focuses on developing the students morally, educationally, and physically (Powell, n.d.). Education in China permeates in a larger scale, constituting the entire social order rather than merely focusing on the school. It is geared towards producing individuals who are not just educated but also loyal to the Party.
Purpose Of Education In China
Education in China is a major vehicle for both inculcating values in and teaching needed skills to its people. In the early 1950s, the Chinese Communists worked hard to increase the country’s rate of literacy, an effort that won them considerable support from the population. By the end of that decade, however, the government could no longer provide jobs adequate to meet the expectations of those who had acquired some formal schooling. Other pressing priorities squeezed educational budgets, and the anti-intellectualism inherent in the more-radical mass campaign periods affected the status and quality of the educational effort. These conflicting pressures made educational policy a sensitive barometer of larger political trends and priorities.
Traditional Chinese culture attached great importance to education as a means of enhancing a person’s worth and career.
The Chinese educational structure provides for six years of primary school, three years each of lower secondary school and upper secondary school, and four years in the standard university curriculum. All urban schools are financed by the state, while rural schools depend more heavily on their own financial resources. Official policy stresses scholastic achievement, with particular emphasis on the natural sciences. A significant effort is made to enhance vocational training opportunities for students who do not attend a university. The quality of education available in the cities generally has been higher than that in the countryside, although considerable effort has been made to increase enrollment in rural areas at all education levels.
The traditional trend in Chinese education was toward fewer students and higher scholastic standards, resulting in a steeply hierarchical educational system. Greater enrollment at all levels, particularly outside the cities, is gradually reversing that trend. Primary-school enrollment is now virtually universal, and nearly all of those students receive some secondary education; about one-third of lower-secondary graduates enroll in upper-secondary schools. The number of university students is increasing rapidly, though it still constitutes only a small fraction of those receiving primary education. For the overwhelming majority of students, admission to a university since 1977 has been based on competitive nationwide examinations, and attendance at a university is usually paid for by the government. In return, a university student has had to accept the job provided by the state upon graduation. A growing number of university students are receiving training abroad, especially at the postgraduate level.
A brief introduction to the Chinese education system
Structure of the Chinese education system
In China, education is divided into three categories: basic education, higher education, and adult education. By law, each child must have nine years of compulsory education from primary school (six years) to junior secondary education (three years).
Basic education
Basic education in China includes pre-school education (usually three years), primary education (six years, usually starting at the age of six) and secondary education (six years).
Secondary education has two routes: academic secondary education and specialized/vocational/technical secondary education. Academic secondary education consists of junior (three years) and senior middle schools (three years). Junior middle school graduates wishing to continue their education take a locally administered entrance exam, on the basis of which they will have the option of i) continuing in an academic senior middle school; or ii) entering a vocational middle school (or leaving school at this point) to receive two to four years of training. Senior middle school graduates wishing to go to universities must take National Higher Education Entrance Exam (Gao Kao). According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, in June 2015, 9.42 million students took the exam.
Higher education
Higher education is further divided into two categories: 1) universities that offer four-year or five-year undergraduate degrees to award academic degree qualifications; and 2) colleges that offer three-year diploma or certificate courses on both academic and vocational subjects. Postgraduate and doctoral programmes are only offered at universities.
Adult education
Adult education ranges from primary education to higher education. For example, adult primary education includes Workers’ Primary Schools, Peasants’ Primary Schools in an effort to raise literacy levels in remote areas; adult secondary education includes specialized secondary schools for adults; and adult higher education includes traditional radio/TV universities (now online), most of which offer certificates/diplomas but a few offer regular undergraduate degrees.
Term times and school hours
The academic year is divided into two terms for all the educational institutions: February to mid-July (six weeks of summer vacation) and September to mid/late-January (four weeks of winter vacation). There are no half-terms.
Most schools start in the early morning (about 7:30 am) to early evening (about 6 pm) with 2 hours lunch break. Many schools have evening self-study classes running from 7 pm-9 pm so students can finish their homework and prepare for endless tests. If schools do not run self-study evening classes, students still have to do their homework at home, usually up to 10 pm. On average, primary school pupils spend about seven to eight hours at school whilst a secondary school student spends about twelve to fourteen hours at school if including lunchtime and evening classes. Due to the fierce competitiveness to get into good universities, the pressure to do well for Gao Kao is intense. Many schools hold extra morning classes in science and math for three to four hours on Saturdays. If schools do not have Saturday morning classes, most parents would send their children to expensive cramming schools at weekends or organise one-to-one private tuition for their children over the weekend.
history of education in china
By 2000 B.C., Chinese education had developed to the level of institutions specifically established for the purpose of learning. From 800 to 400 B.C. China had both guoxue (government schools) and xiangxue (local schools). Education in traditional China was dominated by the keju (civil service examination system), which began developing around 400 A.D. and reached its height during the Tang Dynasty (618-896). Essentially, the keju was a search program based on the Confucian notion of meritocracy. This civil service examination system remained almost the exclusive avenue to government positions for China’s educated elite for more than 1,000 years.
Historically, formal education was a privilege of the rich. Mastering classical Chinese, which consisted of different written and spoken versions and lacked an alphabet, required time and resources most Chinese could not afford. As a result, for much of its history, China had an extremely high rate of illiteracy (80 percent). The result was a nation of mass illiteracy dominated by a bureaucratic elite highly educated in the Confucian classical tradition. The earliest modern government schools were created to provide education in subjects of Western strength such as the sciences, engineering, and military development to address Western incursion and to maintain the integrity of China’s own culture and polity. The aim of these schools was to modernize technologically by imitating the West, while maintaining all traditional aspects of Chinese culture. These schools were never integrated into the civil service examination system.
In 1898, Emperor Guang Xu, supported by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, well-known reformers, issued a series of decrees to initiate sweeping reforms in Chinese education. The measures included the establishment of a system of modern schools accessible to a greater majority of the population, abolition of the rigid examination system for the selection of government officials, and the introduction of short and practical essay examinations.
Between 1901 and 1905, the Qing court issued a new series of education reform decrees. The old academies that had supported the civil service examinations were reorganized. A modern school system was built on their foundations with primary, secondary, and college levels reflective of Western models. Schools throughout China were organized into three major stages and seven levels. Elementary education was composed of kindergarten, lower elementary, and higher elementary; secondary education consisted of middle school; and higher education was divided into preparatory school, specialized college, and university. The Qing Court also instructed provincial, prefectural, and county governments to open new schools and start a compulsory education program. The civil examination system (keju) was officially abolished in 1905, marking the end of the trademark of traditional Chinese education.
Six years later, China’s dynastic tradition also came to an end when the new Nationalist Republic replaced it. With this political metamorphosis, China’s educational system experienced further transformations. The search for modern nationhood and economic prosperity created the first golden age of education in modern China. Education in China enjoyed a rare interval of uninterrupted growth as the Beijing government enthusiastically pursued educational development in both the public and private sectors as an essential component of the Nationalists’ nation-building program. In 1912 and 1913 the Republican government issued Regulations Concerning Public and Private Schools and Regulations Concerning Private Universities; these documents laid out the criteria for private schools and stipulated proper application and registration procedures, while calling for financial investment in education nationwide.
The eruption of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and rapid Japanese conquest of coastal areas in the months immediately following changed the educational situation dramatically. As a result of military operations, 70 percent of Chinese cultural institutions were destroyed. By November 1, 1937, no less than 24 institutions of higher learning had been bombed or demolished by the Japanese. Seventy-seven of China’s institutions of higher learning were either closed down or literally uprooted and moved many hundreds of miles into the interior. Not all the students could follow their respective universities. As a result, the retaining rate of their original student bodies for these institutions ranged from 25 to 75 percent. The subsequent civil war (1946-1949) between the Nationalists and the Communists continued to subject China to a state of political turmoil in which education suffered drastically as a result.
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the new Communist government pursued the movement to “learn from the Soviet Union” with all the enthusiasm that had characterized the Western imitation process in earlier decades. The entire national educational system was first reorganized to conform to the Soviet model in 1952-53. American-style liberal arts colleges were abolished, with arts and science facilities separated from the larger universities to form the core of Soviet style zonghexing (comprehensive) universities; about 12 of these were formed, in more or less even distribution around the country. The remaining disciplines of the old universities were reorganized into separate technical colleges or merged with existing specialized institutes. Also following the Soviet example, nationally unified teaching plans, syllabi, materials, and textbooks were introduced for every academic specialty or major.
The Great Leap Forward of 1958 introduced educational reforms as part of a comprehensive new strategy of mass mobilization for economic development. To end the continuing influence of such pre-revolutionary ideas as “education can only be led by experts” and “the separation of mental and manual labor,” as well as to strengthen party leadership, the Ministry of Education (MOE) issued a directive on September 19, 1958, launching the educational reforms. It called universities to fill both academic and administrative leadership positions with party members. Productive labor became part of the curriculum in all schools at all levels. More specifically, the half-work/half-study schools were founded to meet the task of rapidly universalizing education for the masses, since these schools could be run on a self-supporting basis without financial aid from the state. The party directives also stipulated that no professional educational staff was necessary; anyone who could teach would suffice.
The Cultural Revolution further broke the power of the existing educational bureaucracy, the professional academics, and any party leaders who supported them. This represented a final abolition of the obstacles the Chinese intellectual establishment had always imposed against radical reform of the educational system as a whole. It ended the authority of education professionals, which led to a general lowering of academic standards, particularly in higher education. As a result of the experimentation in that area, the content of college curricula on the average was reduced by half. The policy of sending city youth to rural areas to be “re-educated by peasants” also produced many millions of dissatisfied young people who failed to adapt to the rural lifestyle.
After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping’s reform period began with a major national education conference in April 1978, which abandoned the Cultural Revolution’s goals of class struggle and adopted modernization as the main goal for educational development. The nation witnessed a remarkable new era of rapid reconstruction and expansion of all levels of education, especially higher education. In both the formal and nonformal sectors, one of the goals of the reforms was that a college-level education was to be a prerequisite for all officials, including county-level leaders. This is a goal yet to be accomplished in the twenty-first century, but it is already underway in the political reintegration of China’s intellectuals within the ruling class.
The scene in higher education in the PRC has changed rapidly since the 1990s. With the increasing drive to modernize China by integrating free-market forces, the government has introduced radical new reforms to privatize education. The most recent reforms include introduction of student fees, abolition of guaranteed job assignment after graduation, localization of institutions, and the development of private educational institutions.
aims and objectives of education in china
The Education of the Republic of China, based on the Three Principles of the People, is to improve national living, support decent existence in the society, pursue economic development and prolong the life of the nation so as to achieve independence of the nation, implementation of democracy, and advancement of national livelihood. The ultimate goal is to attain to the ideal world of universal brotherhood.
curriculum of china education system
China’s national curriculum for the nine years of compulsory school and the three years of upper secondary school spells out what subjects should be taught at each grade level, how much time should be devoted to each subject, and performance standards for each subject. Until 1988, China also used standardized syllabi and centrally issued textbooks. In that year, the Ministry of Education (MOE) began to approve the use of multiple texts and resources, and schools can now choose their textbooks from a ministry-approved list. Provinces and schools also have more leeway to modify the national curriculum than they once did. The revised curriculum released in 2001 more than doubled the proportion of material allocated to “local discretion,” from 7 percent to 16 percent.
The 2001 curriculum also represented a major shift in emphasis for Chinese education. Since at least the second century CE, with the advent of the Imperial Education system, Chinese education focused on examination preparation and the transfer of knowledge from teachers to students, and that practice had continued into the 20th century. The 2001 curriculum embraced a more student-centered approach, emphasizing active learning and learning how to learn. The curriculum document makes these objectives explicit, endorsing students’ active participation.
The curriculum also sought to integrate subjects more than the previous curricula. In the primary grades, for example, the previous curricula prescribed 10 subject areas; the 2001 curriculum prescribes only four: Chinese, mathematics, art and music, and a subject called “morality and life.”
In keeping with its usual practice, the MOE piloted the 2001 curriculum, along with experimental textbooks, in 38 areas, including Shanghai. In 2002, the MOE expanded the pilot to 530 counties and cities and, in 2005, implemented it nationwide. In 2018, China added the subject of artificial intelligence to the high school curriculum.
Shanghai has moved aggressively to reform its curriculum within the limits of the national framework. Beginning in 2017, the Shanghai government embarked on a new round of reforms grounded in the core competencies developed by the United Nations Education Committee: social responsibility, civic pride, international awareness, culture and humanity, science and technology, aesthetics, innovation, and learning to learn. Shanghai is piloting new course curricula structured around these domains. Following modifications, the central government expects to implement these curricula in the rest of China by 2022.
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