Top-Down Reform in Chinese Schools and Classroom Practices | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Top-Down Reform in Chinese Schools and Classroom Practices | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Top-Down Reform in Chinese Schools and Classroom Practices

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

The “Little Soldiers” of Chinese Education | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The “Little Soldiers” of Chinese Education | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The “Little Soldiers” of Chinese Education

The second day of school, Rainey came home with a story. Four times he found egg in his mouth. He hadn’t placed it there himself; instead, his most hated food made its way past his teeth by the hand of the fearsome Teacher Chen.

‘ She put it there,’ Rainey told me, mouth wide, finger pointing inside. Then what happened,? I asked.

“I cried and spit it out.”

Then what. She did it again,” Rainey said….”I cried and spit it out again.”

Rainey is three years old and enrolled in one of the best Shanghai kindergartens in the city. Lenora Chu, Mom, journalist and author of Little Soldiers: An American Boy, A Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve,(2017) from which this incident is taken, decides to meet with Teacher Chen to discuss force-feeding egg to her son. Chu describes the conference with Teacher Chen:

“We don’t use such methods of force in America,” I blurted in Mandarin, my son clutching my hand. (I was born and raised in America but grew up speaking Chinese at home.)

“Oh? How do you do it?” Teacher Chen challenged.

“We explain that egg eating is good for them, that the nutrients help build strong bones and teeth and helps with eyesight,” I said, trying to sound CONTINUE READING: 

The “Little Soldiers” of Chinese Education | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice