Shanghai's recent PISA success has intensified the Western fever to “learn lessons” from China's high-achieving educators (with a December 2013 CNN documentary dedicated to this end). However, many Chinese educationalists – among them, the author of this book – perceive a crisis afflicting their schooling system. Students, Zhang tells us, are captive to a tyrannical educational culture, condemned to spend years on the literally soul-destroying treadmill of examination preparation. On the one hand, relentless testing fosters a trend towards “extreme individualism,” while on the other a stultifying ideological conformity and the overwhelming dominance of market values ensure that students emerge from schooling profoundly atomized and alienated. Moreover, Zhang argues, they are alienated not only from any meaningful sense of community or society, but also from a consciousness of their own “unique” inner selves. Convinced that these two forms of alienation are related, Zhang addresses herself to the question of “how to cultivate a continued sense of self in the radically changing Chinese society” (p. 2).
Such is the diagnosis. What of the prescription? Here Zhang draws on the thought of John Dewey and Liang Shuming. From the former, she takes the importance of relating education to the experience of students themselves. Rather than filling young minds with pre-packaged gobbets of “knowledge,” education, she declares, should be seen as an individual voyage of self-discovery – challenging students, through interaction with others at school and in the wider community, to arrive at their own understandings of themselves and society. At the same time, following Liang, she argues that education should launch students on an inward-directed search for “enlightenment.” Education should be about teaching students to identify an inner “self” and be true to it, rather than requiring individuals to adapt themselves to a given social context. Zhang asserts that Dewey's emphasis on the cultivation of a “social self” and on the importance of “experience” (individual and communal) is complemented by Liang's greater focus on the “inner” dimension of selfhood.
After extended philosophical discussions of these notions of “the self,” the two short final chapters feature an attempt to relate these to educational practice. Highlighting the “aesthetic” dimension of self-transformation, or (following Dewey) the role of art as an expression of individuality, Zhang calls for a pedagogy founded on the use of “narrative” as an intrinsically creative process. Through narrating our experiences, and listening to others’ narratives, we come to understand the variety and uniqueness of individual understandings of the world. To facilitate this process, teachers need to provide “not concrete knowledge” but an “empty space” for students to explore their own lives (p. 155) – something that Zhang recognizes will require sweeping changes to teacher education (namely a greater focus therein on the arts and humanities). An education thus conceived will, she declares (citing Dewey again), constitute a “critical foundation” for a “democratic society.”
Such references to “democracy” (never defined) underline the key missing link in Zhang's argument. While she acknowledges, on her final page, that “education is part of social reform,” she does not discuss the connections between education and politics. But politics was central to the thought of both Dewey and Liang, although more clearly articulated by the former than the latter. Dewey saw his educational vision largely as a means of revivifying the institutions of American democracy, while through the Rural Reconstruction Movement Liang sought to achieve what Alitto calls the “schoolification” of government and society (The Last Confucian, UC Press, 1979, p. 248). Although both her heroes were very much concerned with the political implications of their educational ideas (and vice versa), Zhang does not directly address this aspect of their thought.
Indirectly or implicitly, however, a political vision clearly does inform her analysis. Though she does not use the term, the concept of “agency” is central to her interpretation of Dewey and Liang. Indeed, there is much in her argument that resonates with Amartya Sen's vision of “development as freedom,” where development involves the “enhancement of capabilities” – meaning the scope for individuals to pursue the sorts of goods that they have reason to value. For Sen, too, enabling individuals to “flourish” implies affording them scope to participate actively in shaping the priorities of the wider community.
One obvious problem with all this is that China's Communist authorities are hardly likely to sanction, let alone sponsor, an approach to schooling that fosters autonomous, critical individuals. The contradictions and failures of the suzhi jiaoyu movement, which Zhang accurately identifies, are largely attributable to this political constraint on educational innovation – the metaphorical elephant in the Chinese classroom.
This book is a passionate and thought-provoking reflection on the real failings of China's schooling system with respect to the “spiritual” or moral realms not susceptible to PISA testing. It is all too easy to scoff at such concerns, but for many Chinese parents they are very real – as witnessed by the desperation of so many to send their children overseas for education. This book should also give pause to Western educators tempted to discard all remnants of Deweyan progressivism in frantic pursuit of PISA success.
However, in arguing for the relevance of Dewey and Liang for 21st-century Chinese education, abstract philosophizing on its own is not persuasive. Many other modern and contemporary Chinese educationalists have invoked these thinkers – and yet their influence on actual educational practice remains minimal. How, then, have they been interpreted, misinterpreted or selectively invoked by Chinese educators and policymakers over the decades? And what might that sort of historiographical analysis tell us about the challenges that would need to be overcome in order to put their ideas into practice?
