Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

per cent or less; and average years of schooling have reached 8.6 years (SCIO,
2015). From 2011 to 2015, 528 educational aid projects in Xinjiang have been
implemented involving the investment of RMB 10.8 billion (approximately USD
1.57 billion) (SCIO, 2016).
However, apparent success on such quantitative measures should not obscure
serious problems with the recognition and accommodation of diversity in China.
This applies not only to the treatment of officially-recognised ethno-cultural
‘minorities’, but also to other marginalised groups. For the officially-recognised
minorities, bilingual education is largely restricted to primary level, with learning
in Chinese the sole route to full participation in the modern economy. There is
a pervasive assumption that the relative ‘backwardness’ of minorities renders
them in need of assistance from the more ‘advanced’ Han; education and
development are viewed as means of ‘raising’ the former to the level of the latter.
Narratives of the histories of ‘minority’ peoples and regions are highly selective,
ensuring conformity to the overarching teleology of unification and assimilation
(Vickers, 2006), and religious freedom has in recent years been increasingly
tightly circumscribed. Meanwhile, amongst Han Chinese taught to celebrate
the developmental benefits bestowed upon ‘backward’ regions such as Tibet
and Xinjiang, anger at Tibetan and Uighur ‘ingratitude’ has recently mounted
(Leibold, 2014).
The Han themselves are also highly diverse — something barely acknowledged
in official discourse on citizenship, identity and values. Not only is this diversity
linguistic, cultural and ethnic, but crucially it is also residential. The urban-rural
divide, institutionalised by the country’s household residency (hukou) system,
remains the most crucial division within Chinese society, cutting across all others
and profoundly fragmenting the experience of citizenship. This is manifested
not least in the educational plight of the children of migrant workers, millions of
whom are either ‘left behind’ in often rudimentary rural schools, or compelled (as
a result of their effective exclusion from, or marginalisation within, urban public
schools) to study in substandard community-run schools (Goodburn, 2009;
Vickers and Zeng, 2017, Chapter 9).
In contemporary Japan, by contrast, the discourse of national unity and
homogeneity has implied a strong commitment to uniform and equal
provision of schooling — even if, as Kariya (2013) argues, this commitment has
been eroded in recent years. At the same time, domestic diversity has been
acknowledged through celebrating marginal local variants on the theme of
homogenous Japaneseness, or with reference to non-cultural issues. Curricular
stipulations relating to ‘respect’ or ‘appreciation’ of diversity thus mostly refer
to longstanding regional variations in customs, handicrafts and festivals; intergenerational
differences; and understanding of the challenges faced by disabled
people (specific references to, for example, Nikkei Brazilian or ethnic Korean or
86
Chapter 3: East Asia