文化概论

Higher Education In China 韩昆玉 专升本132班 130321056 Higher Education In China China has a long history, and so is on education. In ancient China, there were two kinds of schools the official institutions and the private schools. This system remained almost unchanged for 2000 years in China. Entrance examinations and admission criteria of students is civil service examination, which selected students to be officials. As a result, many tragedies arose from this educational system. Some of the scholars went mad after their failures in the exam. After the founding of the people’s Republic of China in 1949,great changes has taken place in China’s educational system. The brief account of the present state of the educational system in China is as follows: Pre-school education, Nine-year compulsory education, Hign school and secondary vocational school, High education. The present system has witnessed, especially in recent years, an unprecedented prosperity in the country’s educational history. Especially under the modernization program, higher education was to be the cornerstone for training and research. Chinese people realized the importance of higher education and put it in the significant position. While the quality of Higher education at various times in modern China has changed at various times, reflecting the changes in political policies implemented by the central government. Following the founding of the PRC, in 1949, the Chinese government's educational focus was largely on political “re-educat ion”. In periods of political upheaval, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, ideology was stressed over professional or technical competence. During the early stages of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), tens of thousands of college students joined Red Guard organizations, which persecuted many university faculty members as “counter-revolutionaries” and effectively closed China's universities. When universities reopened in the early 1970s, enrollments were reduced from pre-Cultural Revolution levels, and admission was restricted to individuals who had been recommended by their work unit (danwei), possessed good political credentials, and had distinguished themselves in manual labor. In the absence of stringent and reasonably objective entrance examinations, political connections became increasingly important in securing the recommendations and political dossiers necessary to qualify for university admission. As a result, the decline in educational quality was profound. Deng Xiaoping reportedly wrote Mao Zedong in 1975 that university graduates were “not even capable of reading a book” in their own fields when they left the university. University faculty and administrators were demoralized by the political aspects of the university system. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, steps were taken to improve educational quality by establishing order and stability, calling for an end to political contention on university campuses, and expanding university enrollments. This rapid expansion of mass higher education has resulted in not only a strain in teaching resources but also in higher unemployment rates among graduates. The creation of private universities, not under governmental control, remains slow and its future uncertain. The restructuring of higher education, in the words of one academic “has created a clearly escalating social stratification pattern among institutions, stratified by geography, source of funding, administrative unit, as well as by functional category (e.g., comprehensive, law, medical, etc.).” Thus, although recent reform has arguably improved over-all educational quality, they have created new, different issues of equity and efficiency that will need to be addressed as the century proceeds. Reformers realized, however, that the higher education system was far from meeting modernization goals and that additional changes were needed. In the spring 2007 China planned to conduct a national evaluation of its universities. The results of this evaluation are used to support the next major planned policy initiative. The last substantial national evaluation of universities, which was undertaken in 1994, resulted in the 'massification' of higher education as well as a renewed emphasis on elite institutions.Academics praised the fin du siècle reforms for budging China's higher education from a unified, centralized, closed and static system into one characterized by more diversification, decentralization, openness and dynamism, stimulating the involvement of local governments and other non-state sectors. Chinese policies on College Entrance Examination have been influenced by the recruitment systems of western countries and the traditional culture of imperial examinations. Since Fudan University and Shanghai Communications University started independent enrolment before College Entrance Examination in 2007, some of the top Chinese colleges began to follow them using a new method to choose students besides unified examination system. In accordance with university regulations, those colleges appoint their own staff and are responsible for