Textbook Reform: A Battle for Hearts and Minds
Is it “historical regression” to take back full control of humanities and social sciences textbooks? Or is it an ideological struggle the government must not abandon?
When the next intake of elementary school students open their Chinese textbooks, they will see six simple Chinese characters where they would previously have seen pinyin, the Romanized version of the Chinese language commonly used to teach early language learners.
China's Ministry of Education (MOE) says the new textbooks must be used by all first-graders nationwide. It's part of a suite of changes to elementary and junior middle school liberal arts education involving the Chinese, History, and Morality & Law syllabuses.
The Chinese government ordered the standardization of textbooks of the three courses as early as 2009, and work began in 2012 when the MOE invited 140 experts and frontline teachers, writers and professors to contribute. It established a separate expert team for review and approval.
Three new textbooks for the six grades of elementary school and three grades of junior middle school were finally completed and approved in 2016. The MOE says they should be in use in all elementary and junior middle schools by September 2019 – the Chinese school year starts in September.
According to the editors, the new textbooks provide a more “scientific” way of learning and teaching. For example, the experts consulted said child cognition is more suited to learning simple characters before learning pinyin. For the same reason, the new Chinese textbooks for young students feature more images and graphics, and place a lower emphasis on learning to write Chinese characters.
Nevertheless, the Moe's answers to reporters at a press conference held in August this year show one major reason the textbooks were rewritten was to “better strengthen the will of the State, implement the Party's education policy, and practice socialist core values.” The political nature of the textbook revision has once again become a source of controversy.
Textbook Competition
China's earlier move away from unified textbooks can be traced back to the 1980s, when a textbook review team was established to allow publishing houses to compile their own textbooks, so long as they met a series of State-approved guidelines.
In 1991, the Beijing-based People's Education Press (PEP) became the first publisher to create its own textbooks, which proved popular. In the following few years, various other publishing houses in big cities like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai launched their own textbooks, giving more choices to schools. In 1999, the Chinese government implemented a new round of reform of foundation courses, introducing competition into the textbook market and pushing more local publishing houses to release individualized textbooks which they believed better suited local students.
Although the guidelines were continually revized, the publishing houses had plenty of leeway to choose what they put in their textbooks. According to media reports, by the time the standardization commenced, there were 13 versions of the Chinese textbooks alone.
Many experts have said this was a good way to give voice to different academic schools of thought, and to let students broaden their worldviews by coming into contact with a variety of ideas. But they were also a source of tension, as some worried that minors who did not have well-developed critical faculties could be misled by “improper” textbooks.
One such debate took place in 2007 when PEP, which has the largest share of the Beijing textbook market, deleted two readings that were taken from the works of the preeminent 20th Century writer and critic Lu Xun. Lu, whose real name was Zhou Shuren, was known for his sardonic take on the unsettling elements of Chinese culture at the time. In place of the extracts was a chapter from the martial arts novels of 93-year-old Jin Yong, real name Louis Cha Leung-yung, China's most popular Kung Fu novelist. Another Jin Yong piece had been added to the senior Chinese textbook a year before.
Some experts and parents criticized the publisher for shirking traditional Chinese and revolutionary culture, and leading the students to indulge in what was seen as less cerebral wuxia (fantasy martial arts) fiction, while supporters dismissed the criticism, saying Jin was a skilled writer and that textbooks should be more compelling to readers, and keep up with the times.
Despite the controversies, the Chinese textbooks for students of various grades took on a new look. Aside from the wuxia novels, many fresh and modern elements were incorporated, such as Internet catchphrases, a news report about the Chinese star hurdler Liu Xiang, and popular songs from Chinese Taiwan and Hong Kong.
While some suggested publishing houses and local departments had frequently revised their textbooks based on populism and hype, many more believed the new approach had injected Chinese foundation courses with vitality and creativity.
Standardized or Not?
This may be a thing of the past given the current standardization process. The MOE has released a detailed guideline for textbooks. In an interview with Chinese news portal guancha.cn, Wang Xuming, director of leading textbook publisher Chinese Language Press and a former MOE spokesperson, said a lack of ancient Chinese and literature was a primary weakness of the old Chinese textbooks, which should be remedied in the standard version.
The new Chinese textbooks place a great emphasis on ancient Chinese and traditional culture. Ancient poems, for example, make up 30 percent of the texts for pupils, an 80 percent increase on the PEP ones. Lu Xun's works have come back, with those that chief editor of the unified Chinese textbooks Wen Rumin said “do not meet the characteristics of the times” removed.
Wen has claimed that the textbook standardization will spell the end of low-quality, localized textbooks, and Wang Xuming said teachers can and should individualize their teaching methods, as long as they use the same texts.
Others disagree. Tang Sulan, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and a Chinese literature professor at Hunan Normal University, has labeled the unification “historical regression.” In 2012, she submitted a proposal against it to the CPPCC.
“Teaching has its own rules and should be modified to suit the abilities of different students,” the submission reads. “A highly standardized textbook will disable this ‘individualization.' As Morality & Law, History and Chinese all fall into the category of humanities and social sciences, which differ across regions and cultures, differentiated textbooks are more suitable.”
“Standardized textbooks will damage educators' and teachers' creativity and prevent them from thinking and exploring things from different angles,” Tang added, saying she believed effective market competition was enough to naturally weed out low-quality textbooks.
The sentiment is echoed by Xiong Bingqi, a well-known educator and columnist. In his Sina blog, Xiong attributed the uneven quality of old textbooks to a lack of transparency and inadequate competition, which have allowed publishing houses and their editors to ignore the concerns and comments of parents and schools. In his opinion, the best way to raise the quality of textbooks is not to standardize them, but to open them up fully to the market.
Xiong's blog post sparked fierce debate. Some critics said individualized textbooks had created corrupt practices between publishing houses and schools, leading to a fall in quality. Many said quality was the most important aspect for a textbook, and that a standard national version would do a better job of assuring quality.
Ideological Controversies
Yet, “quality” itself is in the eye of the beholder. It is to some extent debatable whether a textbook containing Kung Fu novels is worthy – it depends on the reader's attitude toward such novels being a part of the Chinese courses, and these judgments become more complicated and sensitive when ideology is introduced.
Shanghai, for example, saw quite a fierce argument around a new senior history textbook when it was released in 2006. As a trial
of the then-local government's new round of reform of foundation courses, the new history textbook for the first time discussed the evolution of the world's different civilizations, rather than focusing on the evolution of China's dynasties as the previous textbooks had done.
In the supporters' eyes, the new version had made enormous creative progress by replacing the “class view of history,” which sees history as a product of class struggle and places class at the center of all historical analysis, with the “civilizational view of history,” which views history in terms of natural civilization evolution. Meanwhile, opponents attacked it as rejecting the class reading of history. One of the frequent criticisms in the press was that the textbook supposedly talked more about Microsoft Corporation co-founder Bill Gates than about Chairman Mao Zedong.
In October 2006, at the Moe's invitation, seven esteemed Beijing historians wrote six reports on Shanghai's new senior history textbook. They criticized it for “fragmenting history” and “talking about phenomena while abandoning the essence behind them.” “The textbook has violated our Party's policy of history education and confused the ideology, which will further damage political stability,” they claimed in one of the reports later submitted to the central government.
The dispute finally ended with the Shanghai government pulping the textbook, and its chief editor Su Zhiliang resigning. Some of the textbook's editors and supporters have actually come to defend it, arguing that the historians' criticism was hyperbolic and baseless, and pointing out that the textbook had been compiled and approved according to MOE guidelines. Yet, in the eyes of opponents, this showed the guideline was not powerful enough to control the textbooks' ideological leaning.
The PEP'S Chinese textbooks were another example. In 2016, a post written by a parent under the Internet alias “Baobei Anjing” (“Baby Quiet”) went viral on the Chinese Internet. The post listed a number of examples that it claimed showed the PEP'S Chinese textbooks had misled students by suggesting Westerners are morally superior, using English names for the characters who did good deeds, and Chinese names for those who did wrong. The post also claimed the editors had appropriated the stories of other nations and said they were Western ones.
The PEP quickly dismissed the accusation, arguing that the post had taken only one part of the textbook out of context, and ignored counterexamples. However, as it did not explain the examples the post cited, nor provide evidence to the contrary, the explanation failed to hose off the argument. Many worried that the PEP textbook would convince Chinese children to engage in a kind of foreigner-worship, and even charged that it could lead them ideologically away from socialism and toward capitalism.
New Arguments
The new standard textbooks assuage these fears. The new history textbook is presented from the standpoint of class struggle, and, based on MOE guidelines, increases the content about how the Communist Party of China led the Communist Revolution and founded the People's Republic of China, often referred to as New China. Patriotism is lauded and the “rule of law” and “socialist core values” are well represented in the new Morality & Law textbook. To ensure the standardized textbooks have faithfully followed the MOE guidelines, its review team of 116 experts has reportedly held 24 review meetings.
Even so, the new textbooks fail to satisfy everyone. And among the critics are advocates of Marxism. Lu Ye, a columnist at cwzg. cn, a private political news site and bulletin board, for example, complained that the new textbooks on History and Morality & Law fail to promote Marxism by not denouncing capitalism strongly enough, and by not including enough content about socialist revolutions.
“Although the [Moe's] review team contains many people from [the central government's] Marxist Theory Research and Construction Project, they actually do not believe in Marxism,” Lu claimed. In another article, he criticized the new history textbook for apparently over-praising the Kuomintang, which ruled China before the CPC gained power.
It seems that even standardized textbooks will not end the fight over ideology and education, as different camps all try to influence the government and the next generation with their point of view. Nevertheless, one thing is certain: textbooks are an ideological battleground that the current government will not abandon. The way the MOE sees it is: “Creating textbooks is essentially a State's authority and duty.”