86 CHINESE EDUCATION AND SOCIETY
The discourse contained in this confident little speech was repeated over and over during my research trip. The third quote at the beginning of this article is representative. Through interviews I learned that this script was taught and emphasized by teachers. In private conversations with me, however, the same teachers also asked me for advice regarding the best available teaching techniques and methods for promoting and sustaining students’ belief in the opportunities afforded by doing well on the CEE. As they saw it, high performance on the CEE remained the only path, narrower though it may be, for insuring opportunity for higher education and a (still hopefully) improved standard of living for Huining students and their families. Two Snapshots from a Time of Change: Stories of Failure and Success “Failed” Focus Group Interview: “Successful Ones Will Always Say It’s Fair, Because It’s So Real to Them!” During the third week of my 2010 visit, I organized a focus group interview with four CEE candidates with whom I had had the most extensive interaction over the past few weeks. By this time, all four students had sat for the CEE; each had an estimated score but none knew their admission results. Two were male students and both had repeated their senior year once. The other two participants were females; one had repeated her senior year twice, and the other had just taken the CEE for the first time. Their estimated scores ranged from 430 to 580 out of a possible possibility of matriculating into a first-tier university. The lowest scoring student might likely have had no chance in enrolling in any governmentrecognized college.9 Our interview was conducted in an empty classroom, and I first asked the participants to share their experiences of CEE preparation. Each student responded enthusiastically, describing experiences of hard work. The girl with the estimated score of 430 stated that she really had tried her best, and even her parents had said she had nothing to be sorry about due to her hardworking spirit. They would support her continual study if she was not admitted to college and if she wanted to try another year. I then cautiously asked the students how they perceived alternative extra point and principal recommendation admission policies. The low-scoring girl july–august 2010 87 remained silent, despite my eye contact and attempts to encourage her to speak first. The boy who had scored the highest among the group picked up my question, responding, “It doesn’t really affect us. Nobody in our class, or even in our school, has ever enjoyed those kinds of policies, but we’re still making it.” Without my asking about issues of low employment rate and the disadvantages faced by rural students on the job market, he continued, “This is my second year trying to get into a college, so several of my peers have already been in college. From them, I learned that I can network with many people in universities, and also do internships during the holidays and network with more people in many different areas. So these people can help you when you look for a job. Rural students need to change their minds when we get into college and learn from urban students. . . . So it is not about unfairness—we just need to try in other ways, on top of studying hard.” The girl who scored in the middle of the group and who had already attempted the CEE three times flushed as her peer made this confident speech, which she finally interrupted when he stated, “It is not about unfairness.” The girl stared at him for a second, then turned her head to me and said in an emotional but strong voice, You see, “it is not about unfairness”—you should know that nobody who succeeded would say it is unfair. You really should know this before you do this interview—they do experience that is fair, but only because they have succeeded. Ask yourself, would you say this educational system is unfair? Do you know what I mean? They have truly experienced the fairness, at the very moment they stand out . . . other people’s failure has nothing to do with them . . . the alternative admission policies have taken away many students’ opportunities for getting into college if you are the ones who are close to the cutoff score, which is a situation where every score and every lost opportunity counts. But at the same time, people would say because your score is not high enough, that’s why you are experiencing this, you are whining about the national policies, and you are the one who only complains, but you don’t look for the reasons within yourself. She then started to cry and ran out of the room. Everybody in the group fell silent, and I ran after her with no idea how to comfort her. What was revealed in this truncated focus group interview is that CEE policies favor a certain group of people, generally those who have already been advantaged in other areas of social and material life. This group of people seldom speaks about equity issues associated with the CEE, because the CEE has been so crucial to their “fate” or the fate of their children. As my unhappy focus group participant pointed out, the moment 88 CHINESE EDUCATION AND SOCIETY the successful few succeed and begin to enjoy the potential niceties of the “elite,” their experiences, at least their “recalled memories” of those experiences, and the ways they express “inequalities” along the way, change. Successful students are less likely to voice discontent related to CEE policies—and inequalities. In contrast, students disadvantaged by policies and practices are frequently described as working less hard than others. In turn, they are reluctant to speak up in the way the focus group participant finally did, because they do not want to damage in any way their opportunities of getting into the best possible college and ascending China’s increasingly slippery social ladder. The narratives of fairness, hard work, fate, and what we might call standpoint justice (in other words, how can the winners understand the losers) that infuse CEE equity issues on the ground echo the contradictions that have impeded major overhaul of the entire CEE and college admission systems. An Unrecognized Talent: Whose Fault Is It, and Who Is Asking? We conclude this article with one final story from 2010. While in Huining, Yimin Wang met a female CEE candidate named Hui10 who had attempted to gain admission to college through the avenue of being identified as artistically talented. Through this avenue, she would have been able to enjoy the privilege of being admitted to college without taking the CEE. In pursuit of this dream, Hui quit high school during her last (third) year and attended precollege training classes that were supposed to produce talented students and position them to be identified as artistically talented by university officers responsible for alternative admission. Hui’s parents ran the only grocery store in the area, and they were relatively well-off compared with the rest of the community. Hui’s father was proud of his daughter’s natural talent, and she was often described as the best singer in the county. He was also touched by his daughter’s dream of going to the city to perform for a bigger audience, a dream she could achieve only with specialized training. He and his wife gave their daughter enough money for a year’s worth of tuition, fees, and room and board, an amount that represented a majority of the savings of this middle-aged couple. However, the day I met with Hui was also the day that she reregistered in the local high school as a repeat student, after having spent an entire year in the capital city of the province attempting to gain admission to the university’s special musical talent program, a july–august 2010 89 goal that turned into a failed adventure. In her own words, Hui described her experiences as follows: I think I did well in all the classes and musical performances in the precollege training class during the year, and I got very good scores on all of the tests. But on selection day, when the admission officers came to give us our final tests, my score was only 0.5 points lower than the cutoff score! . . . I cried the whole day, and most of my peers said this was unfair, but I don’t know how to trace this unfairness, and I even don’t know how to describe this unfair experience to you. . . . Many of my fellow students attended other training sections that were taught by the selection officials and professors in these special programs.11 I know it is crucial for me to get into the program, but I don’t have the money to do so. I know the savings of my parents were only enough for me to attend one school here in the capital. Even after such disappointment, Hui has returned to her home county to begin anew her journey down the academic track that ends with the CEE, still perceived as the most fair and “accessible” avenue for rural students seeking college access. Hui’s experience captures how this partially compromised local belief still retains legitimacy and power in a context lacking other avenues for improved well-being and social mobility. The day before I left Huining, after I had completed my scheduled interviews and school visits, Hui came to the place where I was staying and gave me an essay titled, “A Singing Bird Confined to the Village.” In the essay, she explained her failure to gain admission through the alternative admission route as her lack of social connections and information associated with her onsite music test. As I read her essay, I heard two voices quarrelling in the distance. It was an argument between Hui and her father. Hui’s father thought it was very embarrassing and shameful for Hui to describe in detail her “failure” to me, an outsider. As they argued, I heard Hui’s father yell, “You said it is unfair, but whose fault is it? . . . You were the person who chose the dangerous path of being recognized as musically talented, but you didn’t know how to do it. . . . It proves that you didn’t know how to do that!” “Whose fault is it?” is also a question Hui raised in her essay. In the face of mounting evidence that urban students are advantaged in college admissions processes (Chen 2010), the relevance to further research of social reproduction theories and theories of social and cultural capital in Chinese society seems apparent. However, scholars have also made reasonable arguments regarding the lack of “fit” between foundational 90 CHINESE EDUCATION AND SOCIETY assumptions of critical theory and the social relations and practices— especially those related to schooling—in “postsocialist” China (Kipnis forthcoming; Ross, Zhang, and Zhao forthcoming). However, it is clear that the financially, geographically, and socially advantaged are being better and better served by China’s educational system (including its private sector), with numerous examples being found in the college admissions process. In 2009, for example, the college admission rate in Shanghai was 84 percent, compared with 55.2 percent in Gansu (China Ministry of Education 2010). The top two universities in Shanghai, Fudan University and Shanghai Jiaotong University, have implemented a policy of university-based examination that admits up to one-half of each university’s admission quota. These policies applied only to students in Shanghai until 2008; since then they have become a bit more inclusive, including students from the surrounding provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. In addition, many test topics included in these university-based entrance examinations, such as computer skills, are not covered in the high school curriculum of some rural schools. The Ministry of Education has explanations for these explicitly exclusive policies in relation to university admission. Explanations range from promoting university autonomy to the rationale that local taxes support local universities, and therefore locals should have more say about and derive more benefit from admission procedures. What is most relevant to the accounts and experiences of teachers and students in rural and poor areas, especially to those who have failed in the CEE process as a result of tangible or intangible “exclusiveness” or “unfairness,” is that none of these “rationales” address Hui’s question of “whose fault” it is. Summary: The Unfinished Gaokao Puzzle Huining county, once famous for beating the odds and producing Gaokao Zhuangyuan, has inspired a learning ethos and discourse, picked up by nearby urban schools and profit-making tour companies, whose symbolic Gaokao spirit has been rooted in hard work and persistence. This ethos and discourse have been partially challenged by the advent of CEE reforms; their previous foundation of the unquestioned belief in working hard to change one’s fate through CEE has been shaken. Student and family experiences of success and failure across the past fifteen years in Gaokao county tell a story of change and continuity that both explains the “staying power” of the CEE at the individual-family level as well july–august 2010 91 as rising levels of concern regarding eroding state-granted fairness in educational opportunities. The incentives and opportunities associated with success in the CEE remain attractive in impoverished rural areas, where people lack other avenues for improved well-being and social mobility. The CEE also still remains the best and in many cases only avenue to postsecondary education for most students. No one in China likes the pressure and fierce competition that arise as a result of CEE implementation on the ground or the fact that it only serves well a relatively small percentage of the population, that is, despite expansion of college opportunities, the financially, geographically, and socially privileged are increasingly better served (e.g., Chen 2010; Liu 2010). At the same time, the hope of “fairness” that has been summarized in practice through the CEE principle “Everyone is equal in the system of a grade” (Kwong 1983) is still shared by many people and is reinforced through the state’s national policy discourse and developmental agenda. This kind of “fairness” also is seen as preferable to the politicized selection criteria of the chaotic Mao period, which many parents still vividly recall. Thus, despite mounting evidence that recent reforms to the CEE and the increasingly stratified nature of higher education institutions disadvantage rural students’ chances at social mobility, rural students, parents, and teachers cling to the (albeit tarnished) meritocratic ideal supporting the CEE, as well as the exam-centered teaching methods that have been roundly criticized by national educational reform policies. Their stories illustrate why the equity-based reform measures outlined in the National Educational Reform and Development Plan (2010–2020) are so important and why they will be so difficult to implement. Notes an entire province. of whom resided in rural areas. In 2004, the average rural per capita income was 60 percent of the national average, about 30 percent of that of Beijing, about 25 percent of that of Shanghai, and about the same as that of Tibet (UNESCAP 2005). According to UNESCAP (2005), Gansu has the second-highest illiteracy rate in China, with most illiterates residing in rural areas.” (Hannum and Kong 2007: 6). Examination Reforms Since1980.” 92 CHINESE EDUCATION AND SOCIETY “Bitterness comes before sweetness.” difficult to obtain; in a conversation between Premiere Wen Jiabao and representatives of Gansu, Wen mentioned that his secretary was from Huining (Yuan 2005), a story widely circulated in the area. the context of the unusually large number of fu du sheng (repeating students). Since 1980” for more detailed reform policies. Gansu in the year 2010 were 511 (social science and humanities track) and 531 (natural science track); the cutoff scores for second-tier colleges were 467 (social science and humanities track) and 481 (natural science track). to key “gatekeepers” by attending special classes with them. References Apple, M. 1995. Education and Power. 2d ed. New York: Routledge. Chen, B. 2010. “The Regional Distribution Differences and Influencing Factors of Higher Education Opportunity in China: An Analysis Under the Context of Enrollment Expansion.” Peking University Education Review 8, no. 2: 71–82. China Ministry of Education. 2010. “The Statistics on the College Entrance Examination Candidates and the Enrollment Rate (1977–2009).” Available at www.gookao.com/Article/551.html, accessed September 2, 2010. Giroux, H. 1981. Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Gould, S. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton. Hannum, E., and P. Kong. 2007. “Educational Resources and Impediments in Rural Gansu, China.” (World Bank Report, Paper No. 2007–3, May 2007). Scholarly Commons. Available at http://repository.upenn.edu/gansu_papers/10, accessed September 12, 2010. Lareau, A. 2000. Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. ———. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levinson, B.A.U. 2001. We Are All Equal: Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican Secondary School, 1988–1998. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Liu, H. 2010. “Which Direction Should the College Entrance Examination Go?” Peking University Education Review 8, no. 2: 2–14. Noah, H.J., and M.A. Eckstein. 1989. “Tradeoffs in Examination Policies: An International Comparative Perspective.” Oxford Review of Education 15, no. 1: 17–27. Kipnis, A. Forthcoming. Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kwong, J. 1983. “Is Everyone Equal Before the System of Grades: Social Back- july–august 2010 93 ground and Opportunities in China.” British Journal of Sociology 34, no. 1: 93–108. Ross, H.; R. Zhang; and W. Zhao. Forthcoming. “The Reconfiguration of StateUniversity-Student Relationships in Post/Socialist China.” In Post-Socialism Is Not Dead: (Re)reading the Global in Comparative Education, ed. I. Silova. Bingley, UK: Emerald. United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). 2005. “Population and Family Planning in China by Province: Gansu Province.” Bangkok. Willis, P. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Yuan, S. 2005. My Dream of Pavlish School. Lanzhou: Gansu People’s Press. To order reprints, call 1-800-352-2210; outside the United States, call 717-632-3535. Copyright of Chinese Education & Society is the property of M.E. Sharpe Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print,
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