China sojourn reflections

In end April, I was in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a G-20 delegate together with the heads of well-known schools such as Marlborough and Wellington (UK), Kings and Geelong (Australia) and Appleby (Canada). During our week-long visit to Beijing and Hangzhou, we interacted with numerous people guiding the phenomenal progress being made in K-12 education worldwide. The biggest takeaway from my China visit is the high quality of government schools and respect accorded to teachers by Chinese society. Andrea Pasanetti, CEO of Teach for China, which started as a charity and is now a teacher training enterprise, outlined the enormity of the challenge confronting the PRC government. The school-going population of China is equal to the entire population of the USA. Despite this, the government has enacted legislation under which it is obliged to provide free and compulsory school education for nine years to 300 million children. Inevitably, this required a massive teacher training effort. By 2016, the PRC government successfully trained millions of teachers with the result that single-teacher schools, still a feature of rural India, is a thing of the past. According to Pasanetti, although 90 percent of PRC’s schools are government-owned, they are air-conditioned and equipped with labs, libraries and hostels. Each building is earthquake resistant and in remote villages, the school building is the largest community centre. The Chinese have also introduced technology on a massive scale in K-12 education and it’s compulsory for every school to have a broadband connection. China will soon inaugurate its first charter school and government school teachers are now better paid than ever before, with salaries ranging between Rs.50,000-1.5 lakh per month. During my sojourn in the world’s most populous country whose GDP is five multiples of India’s, I also visited China’s biggest flagship primary-secondary government school — RDFZ in Beijing. With 6,000 students and 800 teachers on its muster rolls, apart from regular academic programmes it offers 200 optional ‘beyond’ programmes and 100 research areas. ‘Beyond’ signifies beyond the curriculum and is similar to the special interest clubs of Daly College. RDFZ also offers students a choice of 15 foreign languages. Sited in the middle of an innovation hub comprising over 100 colleges, RDFZ is able to draw on them for specialist teachers for ‘beyond’ programmes. In RDFZ, we witnessed educational technology which would be the envy of any American university. The laboratories are very busy and staffed with highly qualified and respected teachers with the more accomplished students designated as mentors to guide other students. However, students — and all young people — in China are still unfamiliar with English. Awareness that English is the universal language of business and diplomacy dawned very late in China and Indian industry and academia have an advantage before China closes the gap. The advantage of a single-party political system became apparent when we were addressed for over an hour by Hao Ping, vice minister of education of PRC. In India, the compulsions of politics seldom allow the right…