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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2009
During April and May 1981, at the invitation of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, and with the help of a British Council travel grant, I visited educational institutions at all levels in Beijing and in the provinces of Anhui, Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong to discuss the changes in educational policy since the fall of the “gang of four” in 1976. In addition to visiting schools, colleges and universities I was given extensive interviews with leading officials at the Ministry of Education in Beijing and at the Education Bureaus of Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong.
1. E.g. Pepper, Suzanne, “Education and revolution: the ‘Chinese model’ revised,” Asian Survey, 09 1978, pp. 852–74Google Scholar, and Pepper, Suzanne, “Chinese education after Mao,” The China Quarterly, No. 81, 03 1980CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2. Their criterion of competence is that a teacher can teach all pupils from the first to the ist year group to the requirements as specified in the syllabus. “Pupils trained by such teachers can read 2,500 characters by the end of the second year, and pupils are lively. In the third year they can begin to write compositions.”
3. An education official in Cuangxi told me that in some communes the peasants calculate their work points by counting soya beans.
4. Cf. the minimum pass mark to Beijing Normal College in 1980 of 350, and to Beijing Normal University of 370; and these marks are said to be lower than the minimum pass mark for engineering colleges, teaching still not being very highly regarded.
5. E.g. cf. Kunming Normal College with a student/staff ratio of 4.5:1, or Beijing Normal College with 3:1. Both these colleges train teachers for senior middle school.
6. E.g. clerking, building, repairs – anything connected with education except teaching itself.
7. These percentages should be compared with population figures for the province – 26 million in rural areas and 8·74 million in the urban areas.
