A Liberal Arts Education, Made in China

BEIJING — No one, it seems, is pleased with China’s educational system.

Chinese nationalists fret that students are graduating without the critical and creative skills necessary to compete globally. Foreign observers worry that heavy political indoctrination in schools is producing a new generation of Chinese nationalists. Chinese parents tear their hair out over the grueling exams that will largely determine their children’s futures. And those children, as they graduate into the workplace and struggle to find jobs, grieve for entire childhoods largely sacrificed to preparing for exams.

Nearly everyone agrees on the problems: overemphasis on rote memorization, a top-down instructional style that crushes individuality and a near-total reliance on exams to evaluate progress. But educational reform is a fraught process in any country, China perhaps more than elsewhere.

A new 10-year reform program that went into effect in 2010 acknowledges these problems and advocates the loosening of state controls over education. The heavy lifting of educational reform, however, looks like it will be done by private entities: experimental middle schools or colleges with ties to foreign universities.

One particularly encouraging entrant into this field is Xing Wei College, established outside of Shanghai by Chen Weiming, an investor and graduate of the Harvard Business School.

Modeled explicitly after U.S.-style liberal arts colleges, Xing Wei aims to address many of the immediate shortcomings of Chinese higher education. Admission is based on essays and interviews as well as the almighty college entrance exam, and students are allowed to choose their own major rather than having one assigned to them.

When the college opens this autumn the student body is expected to comprise 30 percent foreign students and 70 percent local ones (instruction will be in English). The faculty is largely hired from American universities, and the curriculum reflects a liberal arts agenda, with courses on “Intercultural Communication” and “Social Problems in Global and Comparative Perspective,” as well as critical thinking and debate.

Chen notes that he founded the school specifically to create an educational environment where students’ creativity and individuality could flourish. And the $1,575 yearly tuition fee is within financial reach of many degree candidates.

Even these impressive goals, however, reveal some of the contradictions at the heart of Chinese educational reform. One major obstacle to progress is the old Soviet-borrowed concept of education as a means of producing workers for a socialist-style economy. Everyone, from reformers to educators, seems inclined to leave this concept behind, but old habits die hard. Present reforms are largely a more sophisticated restatement of the same old goal: encouraging creativity and individuality as a means of producing more effective workers.

Xing Wei, too, embodies this utilitarian attitude: Chen cites Steve Jobs’s biography and Kazuo Inamori’s “A Compass To Fulfillment: Passion and Spirituality in Life and Business” as inspirations for the school. The college’s stated aim in borrowing Western educational models is to create students who can compete in a global employment marketplace.

Idealistic as it may sound, it would be nicer to think that students might someday be nurtured for their own sake, rather than as a means to achieving some social goal.

A second obstacle to reform, less often articulated, is the anxiety that stronger individuality will result in a weakening of social control — traditionally another crucial role of education in China. Again, a college like Xing Wei can only scratch the surface: liberal it may be, but Marxist philosophy is still a required course. More important, individuality suffers from a young age: by the time a student is entering college, much of the damage has been done.

Xing Wei College is a great start. But if China’s education system is really going to be transformed, the changes will have to go deeper, and start earlier. Instead of borrowing photographs of smiling Ivy League students, China will have to develop its own arguments for why strengthening the individual spirit is desirable. Then it will have to put those ideas into practice starting where they matter most: year one of primary school.