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WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGY IN TEACHING 129
ideally an international, sporting stage. Their role was to endure hardships and to
encourage their team to do the same. Victory was the only possible denouement.
However, the place of women as teachers and students has been uncertain over the
centuries. As Stanley Rosen (1992) and Shi Jinghuan (1995:140) have argued, Chinese
cultural tradition, ‘a slaughterhouse for women’s intelligence’ (Shi: 140), has not tended
to prioritise women in the educational pecking order. Rather, outside influences,
including missionary and colonial interventions, have been instrumental in destabilising
the assumption of the inappropriateness of female learning. Arguably, of course,
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initiatives from within, and the instatement of the CCP in 1949 is a case in point, are
much more effective in producing long-term change than impositions and incursions from
outside the national cultural imaginary Between 1898 and 1907 Shanghai authorities began
to implement regulations for the education of women who wished to teach (especially at
kindergarten level). In 1908 Hu Shi (1891–1962) published a volume suggesting that first,
women (mothers) were fundamental to national education, which must begin at home,
and that second, girls should therefore be schooled, otherwise the home would not be an
adequate educational incubator for Chinese modernisation (Bainian zhongguo ertong 2001:
87, 39). Educating girls for motherhood is perhaps a familiar compromise from
progressive males wishing to support women’s intelligence without being overwhelmed
by its more ambitious potential.
From 1949 such initiatives were attached to the stated aim of equality between the
sexes in revolutionary China, and women’s participation in education increased rapidly
(Shi 1995:141). The progress in women’s educational attainments has been monitored
and is clearly successful if not complete. The most commonly cited statistic concerns the
extension of female literacy. In the late 1940s over 90 per cent of Chinese women were
illiterate. By 1998, only three western provinces/autonomous regions (Tibet, Gansu and
Qinghai) had levels of illiteracy over 26 per cent. In all provinces, however, a significant
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proportion (70 per cent) of those semi-literate or illiterate were women. There is also a
continuing problem of female retention rates. Although some children manage to
complete nine years of compulsory schooling, many of the (conservative estimate)
1 million who drop out annually are female, and of those who do graduate junior school,
many do not proceed into further training at high school and at tertiary colleges. This is
partly due to levels of personal expectation, and partly due to active discrimination. This
was so marked in the 1970s and 1980s that Shi contends that males were admitted to
teaching (Normal) universities with lower grades than were the women (Shi 1995:145).
The statistics are therefore both good and disappointing. Cultural predictors of female
achievement levels remain biased—and are probably worsening in some areas as
underemployment leads cultural bias back into the equation of whose education matters
most in a modern economy with significant unemployment.
Nonetheless, I can contend that the post-1949 teacher has been a figure of—generally
female—power in the discourse of revolutionary and liberated China. This revolutionary
teacher has also been multi-modal in a sense rather different from that understood in
contemporary educational debates. Her roles have been diverse and have required a
subjective assumption of a variety of social roles and responsibilities. She was (and
arguably still is) in the vanguard of change through her work in political socialisation of