Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

Indeed, the figures for supplementary education in China need to be considered
in tandem with another phenomenon: the increasing use of boarding schools.
Since the 1990s, the state has been ‘concentrating’ rural junior secondary (and
often upper primary) schools in county towns, creating larger institutions with
better facilities and more qualified teachers. As Murphy (2004) argues, such
schools are also designed to ‘turn peasants into modern Chinese citizens’, by
subjecting village children to the standardised curriculum of urban China, taught
in the standardised national language. Timetables typically ensure that lessons
or supervised study occupy almost every waking moment of the day. In regions
where public boarding facilities are scarce, private boarding schools catering to
rural students — including many ‘left behind’ by migrant parents — have become
increasingly popular. Here the curriculum tends to be even more narrowly
examination-preparatory, pedagogy more rudimentary, and children’s time more
strictly regimented, with lessons and study periods timetabled from 6AM to 9PM
(or later) (see Vickers and Zeng, 2017, p. 222).
The competitive intensity of Chinese education has been further fuelled by a
distinctive structural feature: the ‘key-point school’ system. Since the late 1970s,
public resources have been funnelled into selected (invariably urban) schools with
the aim of training an elite to lead the national modernisation drive. Although the
‘key-point’ terminology was officially abandoned in the 1980s, the persistence
of a hierarchy of prestige within the public schooling sector is universally
acknowledged. ‘Key point’ institutions exist at every level of the system from
kindergarten upwards, equipped with superior facilities and better-qualified
staff than their run-of-the-mill counterparts. Securing entry to such institutions
for one’s child is a prime objective for urban parents. While the government has
recently mandated the stricter enforcement of school ‘zoning’ rules, persistent
inter-school inequalities mean that attempts to block the competitive impulse
have so far been largely ineffective (Vickers and Zeng, 2017, Chapters 3.4 and 8).
The post-war Japanese and Korean schooling systems have placed a far greater
emphasis on uniformity and equality — at least until recently. There, as in China,
examinations for entry to senior high school constitute a principal selective
watershed, prompting intense competition. However, ensuring the equitable
provision of public schooling, at least during the compulsory years, has been a
central priority of public policy. Japan, for example, has taken pains to ensure
that per-student funding levels were broadly equal across the country (in rural
and urban areas). Teachers are employed not by individual schools but by local
school boards, with staff regularly transferred between schools.
However, in both Japan and Korea, official commitment to uniformity and equality
has steadily eroded in recent years. In addition to the growth of private schooling,
Japan has witnessed official attempts to promote new varieties of publiclyfunded
high schools (e.g. ‘Super English High Schools’) that explicitly aim to
select and nurture ‘elite’ talent. The language used to justify such initiatives — of
‘creativity’, ‘21 st -century competencies’ and ‘global human resources’ — is highly
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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