Page 145 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

132 STEPHANIE HEMELRYK DONALD
leadership of a male coach. There is also a shift from the teacher-student pairing to the
father-child relationship. At the end of the film the boy and his father are very much
together, and the sports coach is working to build a compromise career with his
professional charges. The sports-coach genre is not entirely new, but its prominence in
recent film could suggest that the first, the coach is himself less of a final mentor than in
earlier films, and second that the class teacher in China’s schools is no longer the obvious
character in a genre that relies on amateur enthusiasm and selfless dedication. The female
teacher in China now is a professional whose qualifications count most for her school’s
reputation.

Technologies of teaching: ‘learn to know, learn to do and
learn to develop themselves’
Teacher quality (and skilled teacher shortages) are pressing problems, which threaten the
implementation of the nine-year education policy, and the desire to create a ‘scientific and
humanistic spirit’ (Gu 2001) based on the all-round moral education of all children. The
teacher in the PRC is trained and deployed by the Ministry of Education and then
becomes a formal employee of the state, deployed to an area of need. Teachers trained at
national institutions (the most prestigious) may be asked to travel anywhere in the
country. In practice, teachers tend to train and work near home. The distribution of
teachers across primary, secondary and tertiary schools is perhaps related to this practice.
In 1995, the total number of workers in education was 11,863,000, of whom 4,835,000
(42 per cent) were women. The proportion falls to 37 per cent for higher education, 35 per
cent for secondary schooling, and then rises to 44 per cent for primary education.
Twenty years of reform has produced a competitive, outcome-driven society, with a
focus on the new. A commensurate shift in pedagogic thinking has also occurred, and
changes to the curriculum and to teaching styles are underway. Surprisingly, however,
while there is a strong demand for vocational ‘post WTO’ training, many of the advocates
of change advise a soft approach to teaching, that emphasises technology but which also
makes the knowledge canon more relevant to the interests of students. Proposals also
criticise the difficulty of the 1990s curriculum, which, it is argued, has changed only
slightly from the 1960s model, and which favours only the cleverest students
(Gu 2001:21–3).
The most far-reaching proposal is to introduce comprehensive (practical, academic and
contextual learning) education in areas, which may appeal to the gifted students, but also
to the larger majority of average-ability learners. These subject areas include information
technology, community services, social research, fieldwork and general technology.
Starting in 2001, elementary and secondary schools were strongly encouraged to initiate
courses in IT, and to teach students using Internet technology The aim was to get all
schools networked by 2003 (Gu 2001:22). Experimental schools were set up in the
mid-1990s to accommodate these priorities, and their promotional literature looks mainly
at teacher qualifications, ‘scientific management’ (kexue de guanli), resources and multimedia
equipment.