Editorials
Lessons on education
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-19 08:01
It was like the elephant in the room which no-one was willing to talk about, that is, until former vice-minister of education Wei Jue spoke out: Many of the proposals and motions on education tabled at the annual sessions of the National People's Congress and the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference were bewildering to the education authorities.
We know that. As do many others. We know the composition of the two all-important entities where representatives of educational circles are few, and those who consider education as a science are even rarer. We are not at all surprised if some of their proposals confuse and astound.
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This may sound self-contradictory - with all the hoopla surrounding the thundering drumbeats of education reforms, how come the country's education administrators have belittled themselves? We, too, have difficulty believing public officials in this country would knowingly diminish their own importance. So, if we are not getting Wei wrong, she meant those charged with national education have not taken their responsibility seriously.
Education has been treated as a business, or just another sector of public administration, but hardly ever as a scientific undertaking that requires undivided attention and respect for the laws of its own.
Our entire national education system, from primary schools to colleges, needs a reshuffle to keep up with the times. That might well be the only point on which a truly broad consensus has been built. Differences on how reforms are to be implemented are nothing to be afraid of, as long as they are rooted in, and based on, reason and rationality.
The last thing we want to see is treating institutions of learning as cash cows, or as extensions of the administrative machinery. But that is exactly what we have witnessed over the years. We cannot expect otherwise when those in charge of education are career bureaucrats who know or care little about the way national education should be managed.
We have seen colleges merged, enlarged and renamed in the recent past. But except for a dramatic rise in enrollment, little has changed.
Much of the criticism has been targeted at the bureaucratization of education but reform in that direction is on the horizon.
Wei says the only way out for Chinese national education is to treat it as a science.
We are with her on that.
(China Daily 11/19/2009 page8)
