One of the interesting things about being an outsider who is semi-involved with education here is the opportunity to hear ideas about educational systems and quality. Most recently the question of corruption has extended to education. While cheating and plagiarism have long been recognized as natural parts of education here, it appears that educators have figured out how to get their fingers into the sweet pies that are education and corruption.
The wealth of weekend training schools for English, other languages and the arts complements the well-documented explosion of services for helping people get into college abroad and for helping people with test preparation. This combination keeps students in class seven days per week and at all hours. Indeed, education here is a zero-sum game. A student's and (since most families only have one child) an entire family's future hinges upon a series of tests, and families pay through the nose to ensure that their child can get what ever advantage may be gleaned from extra schooling. The psycholgical and physical costs on the child are as yet undetermined, but I have trouble seeing the benefit of denying children creative and physical outlets. Then again, such impractical activities as sports and physical education have fallen by the wayside precisely because the modern has generally advanced to such a state that physical strength no longer pleats to be the primary determining factor to success... In china, test scores are. Most recently, I have noticed a flood of students riding the bus from school at 7:30 in the evening, only just returning from a long day's studies. These young men and women are not coming from soccer practice. They are coming from their teachers' homes. The latest trend in securing educational advantage is for teachers themselves to cash in by giving cursory or surface-level lessons during the day and charge students in the evenings for in-depth "make-up" or "cram" classes. In the last week and a half, three different people from different walks of life have discussed this new phenomenon with me without any provocation. The economics of it are particularly interesting. One alleged to me that a teacher can make upwards of 7000rmb extra in a month. That is quite a supplement considering that public school teachers sometimes make about one-third of that in terms of official salary. All very interesting...
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I had an interesting conversation yesterday that led me to briefly ponder the nature of theory and practice of culture (and particularly religion) on the plateau. This post does not intend to engage with any body of theory or literature, but just is a remark on a trend I feel like I have noticed in these parts:
Yesterday, I had a very interesting discussion with a young man about local deities. In the course of our discussion, I unwittingly used an inappropriate verb asking about people having dad pa 'faith' in local deities rather than yid ches 'belief.' This led to the distinction generally made between these two verbs, and the way in which they classify inherently different sets of human actions in worship. Faith is a term reserved for higher-level Buddhist deities, while belief is a term for local deities of the earth. This seemed to generally seemed to agree with Tucci's distinction between gods of the mundane world (belief) and supra-mundane deities (faith). What struck me however, was my friends statement that local deities (those in which you should have belief but not faith) should not be the object of prostration and other such extreme forms of veneration. What's more, my friend said that people don't venerate those deities by prostration. And yet, I have personally seen people prostrate to such deities. My friend then explained that they just don't know the difference. This made me think about the difference between theory and practice. There is the notion that there is an objectively correct theory that exists, and is the standard to which any line of argument needs comparing. This objectively correct theory is also frequently the earliest source. For a person with even a modicum of education, it seems less important to observe that a certain practice is widespread. The fact that a certain theory suggests that the practice shouldn't be is enough for many young intellectuals to remove "practice" entirely. from their explanations of concepts. I believe that there's more to be made of this, but I'm still pondering it. |
About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |