Education Overload
“I’ve seen three-year-olds using microscopes and reading books without pictures,” exclaims Bai Wei anxiously. “My five-year-old son is still counting on his fingers.” Even before his child has started elementary school, Bai already feels he is falling behind.
A timetable for childhood development has been circulating recently in major Chinese cities. According to the guide, a threeyear-old should have begun learning the piano or dancing. For children aged four, painting and chess lessons are appropriate. At five, parents can add a second musical instrument to the piano, and at seven, kids can start sports training. It also recommends enrolling first and second graders in extracurricular classes in Chinese, English and math to prepare for various school entrance exams. The advice may be debatable, but many Chinese parents today are following the timetable strictly.
“Fun and Games”
This January, seven-year-old Duo Mi continued practicing ice skating past 8 p.m. in Tower 3 of the China World Trade Center in Beijing as her team prepared for a figure skating competition in March. Alongside group competitions, Duo Mi will also perform a solo skate with a newly choreographed dance.
Duo Mi is well-rounded, to say the least. Along with figure skating, she plays the piano and the zheng (a 21-stringed ancient Chinese musical instrument), dances, participates in the math Olympics, attends English class and studies sketching. She now studies at a boarding school, where she sleeps from Monday to Thursday. Juggling all these activities requires practice during lunch breaks and after class. Her busiest days start from Friday. After classes are over at 2:20 p.m., she travels home and is then back in an English class by 6:20 p.m. Her sketching tutor drops in from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays. After that lesson, she finishes her homework and practices the piano in the afternoon. From 10 to 11:30 p.m., Duo Mi practices skating, and doesn’t get home until after midnight. She gets up at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning to make it to the ice rink for more training at 10 a.m. From 3:20 to 5:20 p.m., she attends the math Olympics class. Her weekend activities are usually over by 9 p.m. on Sunday night, after which she goes straight to bed. Mondays start at 5:30 a.m. because of the long drive back to school. During her busy weekend schedule, Duo Mi only has time to rest for a few minutes while traveling from one class to the next.
If you ask her mother, Duo Mi has a strong will and is somewhat stubborn. The girl is quite demanding of herself and always tries her best. Once, when she couldn’t complete a spin during skating practice, Duo Mi began crying in frustration. When she started the piano at age four, Duo Mi cried while practicing almost every day. “She told me it wasn’t because she didn’t want to play,” stresses her mom. “She was simply frustrated that she couldn’t do it well. She cried because she thought she wasn’t good enough. That’s her personality.” Duo Mi’s family, including her mom, feel she has taken on too many activities, but the girl herself refuses to give any up.
Sweat and Tears
Although Xiao Xiao, also seven, doesn’t take as many classes as Duo Mi, she is consumed by pressure to become the pianist her mother wishes she could have been. When she was a child, Xiao Xiao’s mother Ding Lian had to give up playing the piano because her family couldn’t afford one. The piano became a must for her daughter.
More than two decades ago, Ding fell in love with the piano during her school music class, and her talent was quickly recognized. Ding quickly mastered musical notation and developed the ability to play back a song after hearing it only once or twice. After studying for three years, it became apparent that Ding needed her own piano to get sufficient practice time. At that time, the cheapest piano cost more than 10,000 yuan, an enormous figure for an ordinary Chinese working family with a monthly income of less than 100 yuan. Ding had no choice but to give up playing. “Upon hearing the news, my piano teacher visited my home and begged me to continue, promising my mother admission to the best conservatory in China,” Ding reveals. “My teacher sobbed and pleaded with my parents, a scene I remember clearly to this day.” From the moment Xiao Xiao was born, playing the piano was already her destiny.
But Xiao Xiao has no interest in the piano at all. It’s a constant struggle just to get her to practice. The two fight a lot about the piano. Xiao Xiao tried to write “I don’t like playing piano” on some of her sheet music, but because she hadn’t learned the character for “like” yet, she drew a heart. She also drew crying faces on quite a few pages.
“Whether you like playing piano or not, you can’t give it up,” Ding told Xiao Xiao. “Decades later, when you can communicate with music, you will thank me.”
China’s Climbing Middle Class
In recent years, enrollment in supplementary classes has become all the rage in China, especially in large and mediumsized cities. These classes are not confined to academics and cover many different schools of art, kinds of sports and genres of music. According to a 2015 survey by China’s National Institute of Education Sciences in 12 major Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou, and Urumqi, nearly 66 percent of urban kids were enrolled in at least one supplementary class. In more developed cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou, over 90 percent of children take some classes before they even reach formal school age.
Members of China’s middle class attach great importance to educating their children. As defined by Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report, in 2016, those who have wealth between US$28,000 and 280,000 in China are considered “middle class,” a demographic of 109 million. Since the arrival of China’s middle class has been accompanied by rapid economic growth and drastic social change, people in the new middle don’t feel particularly secure there. Their anxiety shows in things like attitudes towards education. They expect children to learn a musical instrument, understand the arts, have perfect social etiquette, master a couple of sports and get admitted to the best schools. Parents insist that their children continue climbing towards higher social and economic status, or maintain the same social status at the very least. The bill for supplementary classes has become a necessarily large chunk of many families’ budgets. Duo Mi is one example. Tuition for her supplementary classes totaled US$20,000 in 2016, excluding additional expenses for things like special costumes and travel.
At the end of November of last year, a headline reading “Finnish schools scrap ‘subjects’ in favor of ‘topics’ in a move to reform the country’s education system” went viral on the Chinese internet. It means the country has introduced a program based around education that is broader than the traditional methods of narrow subjects. They want to replace specific subjects like history and psychology with “perspectives on World War II” and economics and cooking with “daily operation of a café.” Topics closer to reality and meant to help students better understand the world are being introduced. Although many Chinese parents expressed support for such practices online, most Chinese middle class parents are still placing their kids in half a dozen different subject classes.