While I do read a lot of articles and books on the history of Chinese education and once spent a month lecturing at Beijing universities in 1987, I am no expert on how children and youth are schooled in the People’s Republic of China. But journalist Lenora Chu who wrote about Chinese schooling from the perspective of a mother of a kindergartner, Rainey–see previous post–and her deep interest in grasping the complexities of the planet’s largest state system of schooling also may not be an expert but she surely has more data than I ever had.
Chu’s family experienced seven years of Chinese primary school and she wrote engagingly of the intersection of state-driven curriculum, culture and classroom teaching. She reached for that elusive policy-to-practice continuum that marks every national system of schooling on the globe: from the PRC’s Ministry of Education policy mandates to Teachers Chen and Wang hovering over the 28 children in Rainey’s kindergarten. No easy task.
I had a glimpse of that policy-to-practice journey in my brief experience as a lecturer over three decades ago. I was there during Premier Deng Xiaoping years as leader of the nation (1978-1997) when he pushed modernizing the country CONTINUE READING: Top-Down Reform in Chinese Schools and Classroom Practices | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice