China’s exam-driven education system is notoriously competitive and stressful. For many Chinese students, they must overcome a gauntlet of high stakes exams to get into high school and university. These high stakes exams become an all-encompassing force that sucks up their life. By high school, in the years leading up to the college entrance examination (gaokao), many Chinese students are subjected to long grueling days of study both in and outside of the classroom. In recent years, Western media has reported on scandalous gaokao preparation horror stories such as IV induced studying, suicides, and test-prep factories.
But this system has been criticized for decades in China. In the early 1990s, suzhi education, or roughly translated as “qualities-based” education, became incorporated in the national curriculum. Suzhi education was meant to be the anecdote to the rigid exam-driven education system. With the aim of facilitating the country’s modernization and boosting its human capital, this education reform project emphasized student-centered learning and well-rounded individual development. In practice though, despite ongoing government support, it has largely failed to make inroads into China’s public education system. According to one researcher, the failures of suzhi education reform stem from a number of factors including lack of financial support and practical guidance from the central government, inadequate teacher training and preparation, lack of evaluative structure for the curriculum reforms, education funding inequality, and limited reform to the country’s examination system.
As institutional and cultural barriers have inhibited meaningful reform of China’s exam driven education system, affluent middle class families are increasingly opting out. Symbolic of this is the rise of international programs guojiban which in the past 10+ years has spread to over 300 public high schools throughout China. Beginning in the major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the international program craze guojibanre has made its way to the second and third tier cities of China’s less developed inner and western provinces like Kunming, the site of my Fulbright program research project, in Yunnan province. Introduced in Kunming in 2010 by the provincial government, international programs have flourished in the local elite public high schools as an estimated 30 programs were established by 2013.
Largely founded as a partnership between private education companies and prestigious public high schools, the structure and curriculum of these programs vary quite significantly. But overall they aim to prepare Chinese students to study abroad. Through these programs, instead of attending the regular high school classes, students take courses taught by Westerners where they develop their English language abilities and academic skills as well as gain exposure to Western-style pedagogy. Typically international program students also take test prep classes for standardized English exams (like TOEFL and IELTS) and college entrance exams (like SAT/ACT) to study in English speaking countries. The programs usually provide counselors to help student through the college application process.
As my fieldwork and other Chinese research indicates, international programs have become a reprieve from the Chinese education system. One newspaper survey found that parents who placed their children in international programs pointed to the stress and competition of China’s exam-driven basic education system and the perceived lack of quality of higher education in China as significant reasons for their decision. Many international track students interviewed also saw foreign education as more “humane” and “interesting” than Chinese education and “testing would no longer decide [their] entire life”. One Chinese administrator of a Kunming international department I talked to said that some parents send their kids into this program because the China’s college entrance exam was “too hard” and they thought their child wouldn’t be able to get into a top tier domestic university. Thus, as the administrator put it, if their child “couldn’t get into a top tier university in China, they would rather send their child abroad.” Another American administrator and teacher in a Kunming international program that I talked to described this phenomenon as a “backlash against the Chinese education system.” But with average tuition between 40,000 to 150,000 yuan a year (compared to the average 800 yuan a semester for regular public high school tuition), these programs are largely out of reach for ordinary families. In Kunming, the students in international programs often come from “nouveaux rich” families in agriculture, mining and various businesses that have benefited from booming development in Yunnan in recent years. These international programs have thus become simultaneously an oasis from the intensity of the Chinese education system and a pipeline to a Western university in an English speaking country for children of affluent middle class families.
Along with the perceived lack of quality and grueling nature of the education system, increasing inequality in China drives this revolt. In 2009, two researchers argued that the growing number of Chinese studying abroad is largely driven by the country’s growing social stratification. Within 30 years China has gone from being one of the most economically egalitarian countries to one of the least. In turn, investment in overseas education at an increasingly young age has become a way for parents with means to ensure their children stay ahead in the fiercely competition for white collar jobs in China. Thus international programs has become a means for affluent middle class parents to put their children in a position of social advantage.
As international programs have grown in popularity in China, they have faced harsh criticisms. In particular they have been criticized for significant gaps in quality of education between various programs, lack of government oversight, and using public education resources to subsidize typically privately owned international programs. Rather than a means to incorporate pedagogical and curricula innovations as originally envisioned, these programs have become a revenue-generating source for prestigious public high schools underfunded by the local government. As a result of these concerns city governments in Beijing and Shanghai have initiated the process of divorcing these international programs from public high schools and the national Ministry of Education has tightened regulations over them.
Despite these criticisms, the middle class revolt against the Chinese education system is clear and English speaking countries like the US (the top choice for many Chinese parents) are feeling its ripples. The number of Chinese taking the country’s college entrance exam has steadily declined for the past ten years while the number of students studying abroad continues to grow. In the US, Chinese have become the highest percentage of international students in higher education. Their numbers have swelled especially at the undergraduate level in the US creating linguistic, cultural and social problems on campus and in the classroom. At the K-12 level, Chinese now make up half of all the foreign students in the US many of which enroll in private schools.
Such trends will no doubt become an additional driver of social inequality in China and have a major impact on the character and composition of education systems in English speaking countries like the US.