Exam-Driven Learning Intensified, Watered-Down, or Critiqued: Class and Educational Inequality in China

• In Event: Education for Whom and for What? Reconceptualizing Educational Inequality in Urbanizing China

Abstract

Social reproduction theorists have long argued about the role of schooling in reproducing social hierarchies (Anyon, 1981; Giroux, 1983; Willis, 1977). In the context of contemporary China, ethnographic researchers have explored how rural, urban, and migrant schools cultivate different aspirations and identities (Fong, 2006; Ling, 2015; Lin, 2011). However, because the aforementioned research is primarily based on single-site ethnographies, there is not yet any integrative account about what schooling does for whom and for what in contemporary China.

My dissertation research fills this gap through a multi-site ethnographic project examining the paradigms of learning (clusters of explicit or implicit assumptions about the purposes, goals and process of learning) across rural-urban and class boundaries. I spent 14 months observing 7th grade classroom, interviewing children and teaching and visiting homes at four different schools in Southern China: a rural school and a town school in an impoverished rural county in Yunnan; a migrant private school and an elite public school in a large coastal metropolis in Guangdong.

Within classrooms, exam-driven learning is the dominant paradigm across all four schools: the purpose of and motives for learning is to succeed in competitive exams; what appears in exams dictates what needs to be learned; learning takes place through lecture style instruction, repetitive exercises and memorization.

How exactly exam-driven learning plays out, however, differ at the four schools. At the rural and town school, exam-driven learning is intensified. School days run from 7am to 9pm. Learning is equivalent to preparing for exams. Most teachers rely exclusively on lecturing for instruction and on corporal punishment and repetitive copying tasks for discipline.

At the migrant school, exam-driven learning also prevails but is often watered-down and selectively practiced. In line with city regulations, the school day ends by 4:40pm. Though it’s one of the highest achieving migrant schools, only about half of its graduates can enter academic high schools. Teachers often invest in a few exemplary students but regard the rest as having little hope in academic achievement.

Exam-driven learning also dominates many classrooms at the elite urban school, but it receives a lot of open critique and resistance. Many teachers aim for higher-level objectives like critical thinking and invest heavily in cultivating students’ interests. Some students critique their peers’ narrow focus on exams and portray the ideal student as one who is not only high achieving but also interested and talented in other things and good at working with others.

This study reveals the striking commonality in the schooling of rural, small town and migrant children: schools alienate them through exam-driven learning and prepare them for jobs requiring repetitive hard work without providing authentic meaning and purpose. In comparison, the elite urban school valued holistic “suzhi” and afforded its students (mostly middle class) more room for resistance. These findings highlight the limitations of the dualistic conception of rural-urban inequality and the importance of class in rethinking educational inequality in China. It also demonstrates the utility of examining paradigms of learning for educational as well as sociological purposes.

Author

• Xin Xiang, Harvard University