Two Decades of Education Reform in China: Priorities and Implications

in this chapter Cheng Kaiming provides many examples of how the current education reform policy context differs from earlier eras.

important contrasts include a shift from the overwhelming focus on political development during the CR to an overwhelming focus on economic development during the Deng era of opening and reform.

"Although economic development ("production") was never forgotten, the ideological underpinning of the Cultural Revolution was that economic development could be achieved only by carrying through radical ideological changes and political development ("revolution"). From this perspective, the reforms of the past two decades are a restoration of economic rationality and legality in the society. There has been a reversion of political ideology, back to one that believes that economic development should prevali as a policy priority. This was the crux of Deng Xiaoping's Four Modernizations pronounced in the late 1970s, and confirmed by his later advocacy in the mid-1980s. In this context, educational development is formulated as part of the economic discourse. Although one may aruge that there are still traces of the radical ideology here and there in the education arena, those are at best residuals of a bygone era. To date, economic development is still seen as the prime goal of education reform and hence still colors discussions of the educational agenda." p. 2-3


a second dilemma is the national needs/individual needs dilemma. this is manifested for example in the previous emphasis on centralized manpower planning which with increasing decentralization has shifted to individuals having the right to make their own career decisions...

"from a historical perspective, the emphasis on specialization could be regarded as a remainder of the socialist planning ideology. until the 1970s, China practiced perhaps the world's largest and most sophisticated system of manpower planning and accordingly educational planning...each individual was seen as a cog in a large machine."

"moral/ideological education is still very much seen as a necessary instrument for national development, and political stability for the sake of economic prosperity. the entire system sill works in a paradigm of pragmatism; only economic pragmatism has taken over political pragmatism. there is little in policy discussions even among academics that goes beyond such a paradigm. teh lack of humanistic disocurse in the discussion of education policies is rather peculiar in a culture that has always placed a high value on teh non-cognitive dimension of education."

this movement towards decentralization is an important one distinguishign CR and OR eras...

decentralization has resulted in increasing disparity...

I like Cheng's discussion of the creation of political concepts that unite basic paradoxes. He includes:

disparity vs. diversity
Long term goals vs. transitional expediency
authority of central government vs. decentralization

the transition from quantity to quality goals.

"there is a general movement to depoliticize moral education at teh school level. teh non-academic lives in schools have been very much enriched over the years as resources have become more available. ..."moral educaton" now concentrates on the cultivation of personal behaviors and values. Studies on student development, parental beliefs, and career choices concur that individuals' future and returns have overwhelmed student and parent decisions. this is very different from the high values placed on national goals during the revolutionary days."

Cheng, K. M. (2003). Two Decades of Education Reform in China: Priorities and Implications. In E. Hannum & A. Park (Eds.), Education Reform in China: Unpublished manuscript.