Page 143 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

130 STEPHANIE HEMELRYK DONALD
the young (most dramatically articulated in the Little Red Schools of the Cultural
Revolution period, but more consistently in the instatement of national curricula and the
distribution of national textbooks). Prior to the modernisation efforts of reform, she
carried some of the responsibility for producing an educated mass able to contribute to a
partial modernisation of China, from a society based on privilege to one organised through
national priorities and development plans.
As Pepper argues, this responsibility was not achievable in the exam-based, urban-
focused educational system of pre-1965 (Pepper 1996:365 and passim). Nonetheless, she
more or less successfully taught literacy and numeracy skills to many children, which
would serve them and the nation whatever political (factional) group was in the
ascendancy When young people were encouraged to turn against bad class elements in the
mid-1960s and re-invent continuing revolution, the attack on teachers was then both
inevitable and tragic. They did indeed embody the communication of state policy to young
people, and even though not all were engaged in political instruction and monitoring,
nonetheless it was impossible to be a teacher without wearing the mantle of the state in
the eyes of teenagers and younger children. This period was the nadir of teaching as a class
position in modern China. As I argue below, it was followed by an era of modernisation
which lifted teachers from class-bound idols and sometime villains into a professional class
of educators.

Professionalisation
Modernisation requires a high standard of education in all spheres of employment and
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deployment, starting with the educators themselves. Professional educators in China
have a distinguished history, but their training and status have had to be re-visited in the
past two decades of reform. In 1977, the national examination system for entry to tertiary
education was restored, having been replaced in the late 1960s by a recommendation
process, which proved corrupt (Ma 1995: 293–4). Projects to support the development
of the western regions (high on the national economic agenda in the 1990s and today) rely
on increased access and retention rates at school (Yang 2000a, 2000b).
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Teacher education has been a feature of Chinese tertiary systems since 1949, but its
public face is now much more apparent than its previous incarnation as respect based upon
political rectitude. Teachers fell from favour in the 1960s arguably because they were
perceived to be elite political agents and actors of state authority. Now they are bearers of
qualifications, which fit them to direct the socialisation of China’s youth towards a
principled and appropriate readiness for change. Without figures on overall gender
breakdown of recent graduating cohorts one can only surmise from observations and from
statistics on teachers in general, that a large number of women are entering training for
primary school with only secondary education behind them. Their professionalisation is
enhanced by programmes of continuing education, many of which deal with ethics and
ideological training, but which also include courses on modern educational technology
The training in itself enhances their prospects for achieving respect in the system, but
perhaps their skills in modern technologies will be most likely to filter out to parents and
to bolster their status in a society charged with a modernising ethos. The programme of