School science curriculum reform in China
Edgar W. Jenkins
Mainland China has a population of the order of 1.2 billion, some 21% of the global figure, living on an area of 9.6m square kilometres. Preschool education is provided for children under the age of six and this is followed by nine-years of compulsory education. This may take the form of a unified nine-year programme or involve five or six years of primary schooling followed by four or three years of junior middle or secondary school education. Senior secondary school education lasts from 15 to 18 years of age. Both junior and senior secondary education includes vocational schools.
In 2004, there were 394,200 primary schools with 112 million students, and 63,800 junior middle schools (of which 679 were junior secondary vocational schools) educating nearly 66 million students. In the same year, over 22 million students were enrolled in 16,000 senior middle schools with another 13.8 million being educated in 14,500 secondary vocational schools. More than 20 million students were studying in a variety of higher education institutions and policies are in place to develop a number of world-class, research-based universities. (Ministry of Education 2005: 4-19).
The rapid development ofChina’s education system is sustained by its booming economy but there are significant economic, social, cultural and educational disparities between the coastal regions in the east and the interior regions of the west. In the less developed and remote areas and those inhabited mainly by minority groups, the enrolment rate is lower and the drop-out rate, especially of girls, relatively high. Illiteracy rates among adults can also be high but the illiteracy rate is falling in response to a number of government initiatives (Cheng 1997: 189).
The school science curriculum in China is intimately linked to the political and social history of the country, a history that has accorded education a pivotal role since ancient times but which, more recently, has been marked by political, social and economic upheaval. As in most other countries, the basic school sciences of physics, chemistry and biology have different curriculum histories, although each has been profoundly affected by major shifts in the wider political landscape. Some biology was taught within the religious and theological environment of missionary schools from about 1840 onwards,but it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that a serious attempt was made to accommodate the subject within the reformed system of schooling introduced by the central government of the Qing dynasty. In 1903, biology was one of twelve subjects taught in five-year secondary schools. Categorised as ‘natural science’, the course consisted of morphological and taxonomic botany and zoology together with physiology and hygiene. The overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911 brought a further attempt at reform of the curriculum, although this appears to have had little impact on the way in which biology was taught despite a requirement to make use of ‘relevant experiments’ (Liu 1996: 13).Teaching and learning centred around the recitation of texts which, from 1903 onwards, were published by the Chinese government. During the 1930s, attention began to be given to topics such as heredity, variation and evolution, developments that were prompted, in part, by curriculum debates in other countries, including Japan, but which were supported by texts authored by Chinese teachers, rather than translated from other languages. It was not until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that it became possible to abandon much of the legacy of the past, although, as always, implementing curriculum reform in a country as vast as China and in the aftermath of a revolution, presented almost insuperable obstacles. During the first few years of the People’s Republic, biological education was strongly influenced by the communism of the Soviet Union. Texts that offended communist ideology by, for example, offering accounts of Mendelian genetics, were revised or withdrawn, leaving school biology seriously weakened. The Soviet influence remained after the Chinese government published a Teaching Program of Biology (draft) in Secondary Schools of New China in 1952 and this, together with subsequent documents, gradually led to greater systematisation and co-ordination of biological education at junior and senior secondary levels. Given the need to build the ‘new China’ in accordance with a communist ideology, the teaching of biology, as of other subjects, was called in aid of dialectical materialism and patriotism.
The Second Five Year Plan introduced in 1958 prompted renewed debate about the form and goals of school biology. Biological education was to be directed towards the improvement of agricultural production and given a more marked technical bias, but the attempt at reform was short-lived. In 1963, the Ministry of Education embarked on a new biology course for junior and senior schools with a greater emphasis on basic biological knowledge but this, like so much else in China, was soon overtaken by the highly damaging ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. Biology teaching in secondary school was abolished in favour of a basic agricultural course.
Students were required to become knowledgeable about three crops (rice, wheat and cotton) and about pig raising, in addition to becoming knowledgeable about political content. Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture and moxibustion, and rescue work in the battlefield replaced the course of physiological hygiene…The specimens and equipment for biology teaching were destroyed. A large number of biology teachers had to change their profession, resulting in a generation…with no knowledge of biology (Liu1996: 18).
It was only after the end of the Cultural Revolution that more orthodox biology courses were resumed in secondary schools. New curricula were introduced in 1978 and revised in 1981. In 1992, biology was offered in the first two years of junior secondary schools for three hours a week for a total course time, over the two years, of 170 hours. In the second year of the senior secondary school, three hours a week was also specified, the total course time available in the year being 120 hours.
During the 1990s and into the new millennium, China became more open and hospitable to western influence and this was not without consequences for school biology and, more generally school science education. The ideological content of textbooks was reduced and their readability greatly improved by the use of colour and other means. The concepts selected for inclusion were determined with reference to students’ levels of cognitive development and the texts also included a range of activities designed to stimulate their interest and enthusiasm and further their knowledge.One particularly noteworthy feature was the incorporation within the texts of pedagogical information intended to unify the textual content and the approach to teaching it. Such a strategy has considerable advantages when a high level of, or even any, qualification among teachers is far from the norm. In broad terms, the narrative approach of the past is giving way to teaching strategies that owe much to ‘constructivist’ ideas about learning, although this is accommodated within what might be called a standardised pedagogy. The goals are to encourage not simply the acquisition of knowledge but also the development of the skills traditionally associated with school science education such as observation, experimentation, and critical thinking.
In the first lesson of the biology textbook, for example, ‘Probing the Mystery of Living Things’ is not only the title of the Foreword but also the guiding principle of the course and the requirement for the teaching of each lesson. ….students are required to put forward their questions after watching the material object or the biological experiment demonstrated by the teacher. Teachers give a specific reference to the text and an [answer] to students’ questions. Biological experiments may be conducted before, after [or] in between the text explanations. Such arrangements set specific expectations for teaching methods in order to teachers to present effective lessons. (Liu op.cit. 22)
The notion of biological curriculum relevance has also been extended beyond industrial or agricultural practice to students’ everyday lives, although the former remains important. The nutritional values of foods, the physiological and anatomical importance of exercise and diet, the causes, treatment and prevention of disease, environmental protection and the harmful effects of alcohol and other drugs are among topics in the school biology curriculum that mirror those found in most other countries. Senior school biology texts have also been revised to accommodate developments in understanding of the gene, together with topics drawn from immunology, animal behaviour and ecology, again mirroring developments elsewhere. Such ‘globalising’ of school biology curricula, however, should not be allowed to mask the overriding political objective within China, namely to modernize the country and develop patriotic ideals within the context of Chinese communist ideology.
At the start of the present century, the Chinese government introduced a number of educational initiatives designed to promote scientific literacy and encourage life long learning. Two developments are of significance in the present context. The first is the emergence of courses of general science, intended to reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of much contemporary science, avoid duplication in the teaching of the individual scientific disciplines and increase the appeal of science to larger numbers of students. The second is the development of courses in Science, Technology and Society (STS) which, like the general science programmes, were first developed on a trial basis in various provinces or cities within China. The STS courses attempt to present scientific knowledge in the context of students’ everyday lives rather than in a conventional academic manner and to relate biological knowledge to its various applications. Issues surrounding agriculture and the use of natural resources retain a degree of prominence.
Following the publication by the State Council in March 2006 of a15 year plan to develop China’s scientific and technological capacity, 50million yuan (about £6.25m US dollars) were allocated to popularise science in the rural areas of the country. The immediate goal is to raise the level of scientific literacy in these areas to that achieved by the industrialised nations by the 1980s (scidev 2006).
The reality of school biology education, however, is much less comforting that the various policies and initiatives referred to above might suggest. Despite the importance of biology for a variety of government concerns, such as those relating to health, family planning and the environment, school biology continues to enjoy a lower status, and is allocated less curriculum time, than either chemistry or physics. Practical work in school biology is, at best patchy. Even in the capital Beijing where schools generally have sufficient equipment and other resources, experimental work in biology can often be ignored, partly because it is not assessed as part of the prestigious national university entrance examinations. Teaching methods, despite attempts at reform, has continued to rely over much on traditional ‘spoon-feeding’ methods, methods that are unlikely to change unless the quality of teacher education is also improved. Like many other countries, China also faces the problem of trying to provide within a single national curriculum a school biology education that will meet the needs of a very range of students.
Although attempts were made towards the end of the nineteenth century to introduce western science into schools in China, the teaching of chemistry initially remained confined to a small number of imperial institutes, arsenals and workshops. The ending of the imperial civil examinations in 1905 and the downfall of the Qing dynasty paved the way for an expansion in chemical education but reform was very limited during the subsequent so-called ‘war lord period’ and the associated civil and political turbulence. It was not until 1932 that a set of national curriculum standards was established for school chemistry and the other basic sciences but implementation was patchy, in part because control by the central government was limited, although the extent of that control beyond the coastal provinces and the cities is a matter for debate among historians. In Liu’s judgement, when the Communist Party assumed power in 1949, there was no national school chemistry curriculum and the party faced a ‘complete ruin’ (Liu op.cit. 35).
The creation of a centralized education system was an important priority for the new Republic of China and in 1952 the Ministry of Education published adraftsecondary school curriculum standard. A People’s Educational Press was established and a standardised series of textbooks developed by translating Russian school chemistry texts. The first national chemistry syllabus published in 1952 also owed much to the then Soviet Union and amounted to little more than a translation with some minor modifications. The curriculum goals were said to be to help students obtain a good grasp of basic chemical knowledge and ‘to foster the views of dialectical materialism and the ideas of patriotism’ (Liu op.cit. 38). Materialism here stands in distinction to Hegelian idealism: it asserts that matter exists independently of thought and that the world is in principle knowable. Both syllabus and textbooks acknowledged the importance and role of practical skills in an experimental science like chemistry.
Perhaps inevitably, there were problems with this first major attempt by a new and impoverished government to create a national chemistry course for schools. The syllabus was overloaded with content and some of it irrelevant or inappropriate to the Chinese context. As a result, a revised syllabus and textbooks were introduced in 1956.This revision placed a heavy emphasis upon industrial and agricultural chemistry, at some cost to basic chemical knowledge. The so-called Great Leap Forward, under which China was organised into 26,400 communes, proved disastrous for school chemistry education, as for much else. The principle of ‘More, Faster, Better, and Economical’ that governed this political upheaval was seen as being undermined by a chemistry curriculum that was criticised as ‘Less, Slower, Worse, and Expensive’. The revised chemistry curriculum was thus abandoned and fundamental chemical ideas were ignored in favour of steel manufacture, iron smelting and agricultural topics. Laboratory-based teaching of chemistry, where it had existed, gave way to society-based programmes and no attempt was made to match chemical ideas with students’ interests and level of conceptual development. The famine and starvation that resulted from the Great Leap Forward, together with the withdrawal of technical and financial assistance from the Soviet Union, eventually led the Chinese government under Mao Zhedong, first to reinstate and then, in 1963, to introduce a new chemistry syllabus. More up-to date than its predecessor, the revised syllabus encouraged experimental work, and gave more attention to quantitative chemistry and to the inter-relation of theory and practice. Regrettably, this reform was short lived as it was swept aside by the Great Proletarian Cultural revolution. Launched officially in Beijing and Shanghai in the summer of 1966, the Revolution quickly spread throughout China. Teachers were scorned as bourgeois intellectuals and systematic class teaching leading to high school graduation collapsed. National curricula gave way to a variety of revolutionary curricula and chemistry was reduced to the fundamentals of industrial or agricultural production.
The Cultural Revolution did not end until the death of Mao in1976 and the downfall of its leading figures, the ‘gang of four’. Yet again, the national education system had to be reconstructed. National examinations were reinstituted in 1978 and a new chemistry syllabus and textbooks introduced in the same year. This syllabus was recognizably modern in seeking to help students to understand the role of structural, energetic and kinetic factors in determining the nature and direction of chemical change, an approach that mirrored that adopted in many western countries a decade earlier. However, the demands of the new syllabus were too great for many teachers, most of whom were poorly qualified. In 1984, only 35% of senior high school teachers had at least four years of university education and the figure was much lower at the level of the junior high school. The syllabus was also inappropriate for the majority of students who were not academically inclined and the new course demanded good laboratory facilities and equipment when such resources were rarely available in the rural areas where some 80% of the population lived. Together, these factors frustrated the goals of the new curriculum and much chemistry teaching involved rote memorization and little or no experimental work.
To alleviate some of these problems, secondary schooling was increased from five to six years anda revised, two-tier syllabus introduced in 1983. A simplified and somewhat narrower general level syllabus was designed for most schools, especially those in rural areas, and a higher tier syllabus for key note schools that sought to maintain the standard of the earlier reform. The People’s Educational Press developed two corresponding types of school textbooks which began to be used throughout China in 1984. However, given the importance of university entrance examinations in Chinese society, the lower level syllabus proved unpopular so that many of the problems associated with the 1978 syllabus remained. The distinction between the two syllabuses was abandoned in the second half of the 1980s.