University Life

One of the questions I asked my Oral English students in their one-on-one interviews this week was "How is university different from high school?" Every student said that they have more freedom now than they did in high school.

Everything is relative. To an outsider like me, their university lives appear tightly controlled. University students here are very different from home. For one thing, despite being 18 to 22 years old, they are still treated like children by their parents and other authority figures. The maturity level is a good 3 to 4 years younger than it is as home - sometimes I feel like I'm teaching at the grade 9 or 10 level, rather than university. Say anything at all about dating or getting married and invariably they erupt into giggles. I had a good discussion going in one class about when someone was considered an adult in China. I had only a couple of students say 18. Most said that you're an adult when you graduate college, and a few went even farther, saying you're not an adult until you get married! (Which really should happen by your late 20s at the latest - I'm definitely approaching "old maid" territory.)

While college life in the west is often marked by parties and drinking, you can forget that here. The school gate closes at 10 pm and it's lights out by 11 pm. Try to go back to your dorm after 11 pm and you'll find the doors locked. Yes, they lock the students in. This disturbs me more than any other aspect of college life here. There are no fire escapes. The doors are locked. Apparently the threat posed by some student sneaking out to meet a boyfriend or girlfriend outweighs the risk of students dying in a fire. Students aren't allowed to have any appliances in their dorms, but still.... you can't control for everything.

Walking around campus on Friday and Saturday nights, you can look in classroom windows and see many heads bent over books. It doesn't seem like a lot of fun, but then again - it's not like I can't relate. In many ways, I feel like I inhabit some middle ground between the students and the foreign teachers here. In me, my students have probably met one of the few foreigners who rivalled their ratio of studying to socializing! Or at least until I got to business school, when the value of practice (over theory) and relationship building went up dramatically.

The students here don't appear to have much freedom, but as I said - everything is relative. University is a bastion of freedom compared to their grade school lives. They can go home on weekends. They can leave the school on weekdays as long as they're back by 10 pm. One senior student describes how her grade school life was basically lived in the classroom. Every minute was strictly controlled. She was either studying, eating, exercising (mandatory) or sleeping. After lights out, the teachers would listen at the dorms to make sure no one was talking. She was only allowed to go home to see her parents for what amounted to a few hours every month. This sounds a lot like prison to me.

A recent commentary in The Economist bemoans the "underworked" American child. Here is an excerpt:

"American parents have led grass-root protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs."

Yes, there is room for reform. The amount of time American kids (i.e., North American kids) spend in school should be increased - to an extent. But not for one second would I trade our system for the one here. For one thing, "beavering away at their books" is not equal to engaging in discussion or creative thought. The school I teach at isn't considered great by Chinese standards, so perhaps my experience isn't reflective of China as a whole. I can just speak to what I see. The studying at this school appears to be mostly memorization. I've been told that even at the thesis level, most papers are copied from the Internet. For the most part, students have the same opinion on social issues and trot out the same lines (e.g., "Every coin has two sides"). I'm in the process of correcting culture exams and it is amazing how many answers (to opinion questions!) sound eerily the same. There may be a model system somewhere, but the Chinese educational system certainly isn't it.