The future depends on education and the Chinese know it

A recent post courtesy of the folks at 2point6billion.com:

First piece from our new contributor, Siddharth Soni whose blog ‘drumming’ http://profss.blogspot.com/, provides some very critical analysis on India’s education imperative. His contribution is an observation and a selfless recognition of an important step that China has made to prioritize development (and improvement???) in education and the emphasis the government has placed on the need for training and producing more teachers. A lesson to be learned for India perhaps but would India be willing and able to replicate such a model?

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Part-1

Chinese teachers’ colleges to offer free education soon

Yes, six of the top universities of China plan to waive all the expenses for students enrolled to become teachers and who’ve agreed to serve as teachers for 10 years after graduation. It is no small measure since it involves enrolling 12000 students and taking taking care of expenses to the tune of $5120 per student at least. And if this measure succeeds in the six universities, it would be implemented in other Chinese universities too. This initiative doesn’t just include imparting education to future teachers but it also ensures suitable employment in middle and primary school once students graduate.

Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, sums it up in these words:

“The measure will demonstrate to the general public the importance of the teaching field, create an atmosphere of respect for teachers and education in society, increase awareness of the value of the educational profession, produce large numbers of outstanding teachers, encourage prominent educators to run schools and spur more outstanding young people to become lifelong educators.”

Another point to note is that most of the students would be from Central and Western China, which are relatively under-developed areas.

Few more lessons for India to learn.

source, People’s Daily article: http://english.people.com.cn/200705/19/eng20070519_376042.html

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and an outlook onto another facet of Chinese influence in the global educational arena…

Part-2

Some time back, in one of his articles ‘Laughing and Crying’, Thomas L. Friedman narrated his experience at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of America’s great science and engineering schools. Here’s an important part of the article:

First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry.

I took part in commencement this year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of America’s great science and engineering schools, so I had a front-row seat as the first grads to receive their diplomas came on stage, all of them Ph.D. students. One by one the announcer read their names and each was handed their doctorate — in biotechnology, computing, physics and engineering — by the school’s president, Shirley Ann Jackson.

The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every one of the newly minted Ph.D.’s at Rensselaer was foreign born. For a moment, as the foreign names kept coming — “Hong Lu, Xu Xie, Tao Yuan, Fu Tang” — I thought that the entire class of doctoral students in physics were going to be Chinese, until “Paul Shane Morrow” saved the day. It was such a caricature of what President Jackson herself calls “the quiet crisis” in high-end science education in this country that you could only laugh.

There you go, the all-conquering swamping Chinese. While the description by Friedman overwhelms the reader and sounds like, “What are these Chinese doing… They are manufacturing PhDs like they manufacture goods”, it’s significant for countries like China and India to get so many countrymen to study and indulge in research at a higher level since that could result in development of indigenous technology and ways and means of doing things. And that to my mind, that would be the real development.

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Thanks for sharing this Sid. Look forward to the next one!