Students schooled in the Chinese educational system apparently encounter great difficulties when studying Western humanities and social science subjects. The issues of language barrier and unfamiliarity with terminologies are only peripheral, as compared with the structure and mode of thinking that their Chinese pedagogy has inculcated in them.
The study of humanities and social sciences is a complicated affair, which gets ever more and seemingly endlessly complicated as one delves deeper. Such studies often demand the cognitive capabilities to relentlessly refine categories, differentiate, dialecticize and, not least of all, to keep track of protracted arguments and extended chains of developing/evolving ideas.
These cognitive capabilities are precisely the ones that Chinese school training almost completely neglects. Chinese literacy/literature textbooks comprise of short articles or short excerpts from longer pieces. Students are expected to study these small pieces pretty much without paying attention to socio-historical or intertextual references. Each piece stands as if self-sufficient, on which students are expected to arrive at some definitive interpretations. Worse still, there are always a set of standard answers that students are expected to conform to, and this is reinforced through standard exam marking.
Learning through open-ended and self-driven research, no matter how mini-scale, which are normal in Anglo-American educational contexts, is virtually non-existent in Chinese education; and even when such experiments are attempted in the name of ‘educational reform’, they remain hypocritical perfunctory window-dressing. In any case, such a model of learning would present an impossible problem for the mass examination system which is ultimately based on the logic of standardization.
Here, I am not rehearsing the cliché though true critique that Chinese education suffocates creativity and independent thinking. I am more concerned with a structure or mode of cognition that makes dialectical reasoning virtually impossible.
The Socratic mode of questioning, which investigates a problem ever more deeply, by relentlessly unpacking and reinventing the terms of the discussion, until some satisfactory state is reached just seems absent in the Chinese literary pedagogy. Students are expected to arrive at simplistic and clear-cut statements, with little tolerance for ambivalence. Soon enough, they start to understand and welcome only those statements that are simplistic and clear-cut. Thus, America bombs Libya just for oil; non-Caucasians cannot say they are from Britain.
Studies in other subjects such as mathematics and physics further reinforce the aforementioned tendency. Chinese students are often praised for their fantastic mathematical abilities, as reflected in their good performance in problem-solving tests. But one effect of being used to solving mathematical problems is a relatively short attention span, and a belief that every question must have a short and beautiful answer, like the affirming sound of ‘QED’. The fact that mathematical and physics problems in school education are often set (or perhaps ‘concocted’ would be a better word) in such a way that they have ‘perfect’ solutions further entrench these beliefs. All Chinese students probably remember from the mouths of their maths teachers phrases like ‘clever and elegant solution’ (“巧妙的解法”).
All these above, which are characteristic of Chinese school education up to at least high school level, I argue, incapacitate the Chinese students to deal with open-endedness, with uncertainty, with complex arguments that defy closure.
The fierce academic competition that prevails at all levels of Chinese school education leaves little space for students to develop those neglected cognitive capabilities outside the school system. There is little time to read complete works of sophisticated literature. The slightly more ‘slack’ students might read some of the so-called ‘ancient classics’ (“古典名著”) and ‘world classics’ (“世界名著”), from a list dictated by some long-dead modern Chinese authorities on literature. But it should be a non-brainer as to how a stressed-out student might choose between Plato’s Repubic and the Harry Potter series during the meagre time of relaxation in his summer holiday, if indeed he gets any.
This, thus explains the common response Chinese students give when they encounter Western humanities and social science studies: ‘Durkheim is so difficult’, ‘Bourdieu writes in such long sentences’, and ‘Foucault is like dream-talk’… I used to be, and still am one of them.
But the problem is much greater and more serious than just an academic incapacitation, for what is incapacitated is also a humanistic reflexivity and self-awareness that China seems to be desperately in need of at a time of dizzying and confusing social transformations such as now. Envisionings of democracy and imaginations of a good human life might well have been sacrificed in the instrumental and one-dimensional school education that only teaches students to solve one problem after another, analyze one article after another, with the expectation of giving the standard correct answers.
Education (should) stand(s) in a dialectical relationship with society. At present, the former seems to have become a totally passive function of the latter. But we must not loose faith, for if anything is capable of changing the face of a nation or even the world, it is education!
China needs a Great Humanist Educational Revolution!
