Education and Indoctrination: Evidence from the 8th Curriculum Reform in China

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Opinion & Ideas, Knowledge and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: The Shaping of Political Ideas

Abstract

It is widely believed that public education can serve as a system of political indoctrination. During the founding of modern states, rulers often assimilated the people through state-controlled mass education, prompting them to speak the same language, and more importantly, upholding monolithic ideology and disciplining them to obey. Under totalitarianism where state recognizes no limits to its authority, or authoritarianism where legitimacy cannot be reaped from democratic elections, political elites usually have stronger incentives to indoctrinate and often adopt more drastic measures in public education.
A longstanding literature in political science has sought to understand the sources of political attitudes and determinants of political behaviors, with scholars’ extra attention paid to the early years of life during which humans are more susceptible to socialization and indoctrination. However, existing research on the role of education focuses primarily on civic competence, suggesting that public schooling spreads political knowledge, promotes civic consciousness, increases political participation, and therefore is crucial for the well-functioning of democratic institutions. Regarding the indoctrinating effects, although a growing literature has examined how regimes inculcate people with attitudes and preferences in public education to maintain the status quo, the empirical findings are unsystematic and mixed, yielding little conclusive evidence to the efficiency of “brainwashing” in public schooling.
This paper examines the effect of public education on youth indoctrination by studying how China’s recent curriculum reform shaped students’ attitudes and behaviors. As an essential step to build socialist mass education, the Ministry of Education of China explicitly stated the goal of recent curriculum reform to be political persuasion, to “make students patriotic, collectivist, and love socialism, inheriting and carrying forward the historical and revolutionary traditions of the Chinese nation”. To accomplish this aim, the reform extensively revised the state-assigned textbooks for basic public education. The new high school curriculum was experimentally implemented in 2004 in Shandong, Ningxia, Guangdong and Hainan, before a long period of progressive expansion until 2012, since when the new textbooks have been adopted in the entire country. The gradual extension of the reform creates sharp variations in state-assigned curricula across provinces and the entering cohorts of high school students, offering crucial advantages for studying the causal relationship between education and indoctrination.
The empirical analysis of this paper is based on the data from Beijing College Students Panel Survey (BCSPS) conducted in 2009. By investigating undergraduates enrolled in the fall of 2006 (juniors) and 2008 (freshmen) respectively, the survey strategically covers both cohorts entering high schools in 2003, when the curriculum reform had not been introduced yet, and 2005 when the new textbooks bad been experimented in some provinces already. This novel survey design enables us to identify the indoctrinating effects of curriculum using a difference-in-difference (DID) approach: we compare the attitudes and behaviors of college juniors and freshmen, namely the high school entering cohorts of 2003 and 2005, between the provinces that had introduced the new curriculum and those that had not. Using province and cohort fixed effects, this DID strategy can control for all the province specific characteristics that are constant over time, as well as all changes over cohorts that are similar across provinces, yielding causal evidence to the impact of high school education on students’ attitudes and behaviors.
Our investigation of the curriculum reform provides compelling evidence to the indoctrination in public education, that the undergraduates who studied the new high school curriculum are more allegiant and obedient to the state and the CCP. Specifically, i) they are more likely to be adherents to the central leadership; ii) they have both higher intention and probability to apply for the CCP membership; iii) they are more willing to pursue a career in the state sector than non-state sector; and iv) they are less inclined to protest for their own interests. Interestingly, they are also more likely to consider that “foreign hostile forces” are against the rise of China. Further investigations show that these empirical findings are robust to: i) the inclusion of a long list of control variables; ii) matching techniques that reassure the validity of the common trend assumption; and iii) various robustness checks and placebo tests. We also find that this indoctrinating effect persists, even after college graduation.
We conclude that high school education, in particular, high school curriculum, profoundly shapes students’ attitudes and (intended) behaviors.

Author

• Zheng Bingdao, Fudan University