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Glad to see this thread in D&D. I majored in Chinese in undergrad, and am currently teaching English in a rural area. If anyone is interested about Chinese pre-college education, rural life, or the true penetration of standard Mandarin, I'd be happy to contribute. Also, Classical Chinese Poetry. Quick book rec: "Governing Educational Desire" by Andrew Kipnis. More academic, but a great look at Chinese attitudes towards education.
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Feb 19, 2012 02:53
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:26 |
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french lies posted:Your contributions would be welcome. I'm interested in your take on characters. Do you feel that they suppress rural literacy, like Victor Mair argues, or is this more a problem of education standards and economic distress? The PRC literacy standards are unhelpful in this respect, so I'd appreciate a view on the ground. It depends what area of the population you're looking at, the young students still in school, or those who have already left the school system and are employed as some part of the rural economy. Rural China is in many ways a completely seperate world from even the poorest urban setting, and many of the people living in my village can't even speak standard mandarin (including some teachers). Despite this, it's an incredibly self-reliant community with little need for literacy. So even if there were some sort of alphabetized Chinese, the same farmers who can't write characters now would have little more use for another writing system. Two small anecdotes: I was eating at a restaurant, and the fuwuyuan asked me to write down what I had ordered because she didn't know the character. The waitress who usually wrote the orders for record keeping purposes wasn't there, and this woman usually cooked. She simply had no need to know how to write usually. The second instance are my students, who will often substitute characters for their homophones. This is particularly problematic with de, as well as a few other common characters. They once asked me how to write zuobi, after I caught one cheating, and many confuse the difference between the zuos.
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Feb 21, 2012 09:24
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I think one of the biggest unanswered questions for me regarding a potential switch to pinyin is: how would the increased literacy, if any, help those who are currently illiterate? Right now, there are so many systematic and institutional hindrances in class mobility that a limited knowledge of characters isn't the real problem. The economic costs associated with a switch could better be applied to any number of areas which would eliminate the need for a switch in the first place. I also think that there have been a number of Chinese academics and researchers who have successfully taught rural Chinese large numbers of characters, only to find that a year later they've forgotten them because of lack of use. Anecdotally I've found that very educated Chinese also have trouble writing characters at time, mostly due to their reliance on computers. Not that that's and endorsement one way or the other, rather just highlighting the importance of regularly using characters to remember them.
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Feb 24, 2012 12:09
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Out in the countryside we just have Fire Safety stuff on the back boards, mostly because of Qingming Jie. This is a middle school, not sure where you guys are.
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Apr 8, 2012 03:00
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The update at the end of this article seems to make more sense to me: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/chinese-activist-very-disappointed-in-the-us-says-officials-lied-to-him/256675/ From State's point of view.
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May 3, 2012 07:38
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In another piece of just weird news, apparently "we all know that the Philippines were historically a part of Chinese territory..." http://tv.sohu.com/20120508/n342659555.shtml This is an odd turn to take with the water rights arguments that have been taking place recently. I feel like the Chinese won't react too negatively to this, but the Philippines are not going to be happy (if it ever gets to them).
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May 8, 2012 11:45
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One of the more interesting thing I found out recently was the extent of the propaganda in Middle School Geography textbooks. I thought they would be about earth science, etc., which they mostly are, but when it comes to Taiwan and other geographical areas of interest, out comes the most nebulous language. Even things like island disputes with Russia in the Northeast. Nothing is safe!
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May 10, 2012 04:31
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Don't want to interrupt you guys, but does anyone here have a smartphone in China? I'm able to access facebook and twitter through their mobile clients on my Nokia right now. It's really throwing me off.
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Jun 15, 2012 10:37
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Does anyone have thoughts on the NYTimes reporting on anything even vaguely Asian related? I feel like they tend way too close to the "inscrutable Oriental" far too often. Hell, their top-emailed piece today was something written by David Brooks about some Chinese academic living in the United States writing on the differences between American and Chinese students. The whole time it felt like a "Americans study like this and Chinese students study like this" sketch piece. I've been teaching in a Chinese middle school for two years now and it all just smacks of bullshit to me. Honestly, all students are 99% the same in my experience, with the biggest difference being class-related. Poverty and wealth are similar across all cultures more or less. I bet any student in Beijing would have more in common with some private school brat in Bethesda than a Chinese student in the middle of Hunan or Sichuan.
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Mar 2, 2013 15:11
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:26 |
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You might be interested in this book: Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population . The county I live in has something like a 1.3 m/f birth ratio but schooling is about even by middle school given the number of boys who drop out to do manual labor.
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Mar 22, 2013 03:45
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