我眼中的“公共说理”-- 2014Co-China夏令营申请论述文章

公共说理是一个能让我们的公共生活更加有序、健康的过程。其基准是建立在个体自由和个体间的平等之上。个体自由意味着个人抉择不受其他人的道德体系的绑架，自由地做出选择。但生活在社会里，人们总是在一定程度上受制于一定的道德原则、政治体制。公共说理的意义就在于从个人的立场出发，通过论证、说理，把个人支持的观点和社会准则统一起来，即完成了一个把限制个人选择的道德原则和政治体制正当化的过程。

公共说理默认的一个前提是说理渠道的多元性。也就是说人们之间的分歧不仅仅是由偏见、以自我利益为中心的非理性辩护导致的。即使生活在同样的社会里、对相同的现象进行辩断，因为不同的人有不同的认知立场和背景，两个理性的人之间产生分歧是很自然的事（Rawls，1996）。当一方向另一方提出道德要求时，必须让对方从他自己的立场上意识到并认可此要求的正当性。参与公共说理的过程便是投身于寻找这种认可的征程。因为没有哪条道德准则或哪个政治系统的正确性是不言自明的，它们统统需要通过公共说理来被正当化。

人的主观性（subjectivity）要求个体不受权威的摆布，个体只需遵从他从理性上认可的原则。社会契约的概念和公共说理都是民主社会不可或缺的一部分。社会契约强调个人融入政治社会，是一个双向的过程：个人同意遵守共同原则的同时接受相应的义务。公共说理的成果在于个人和社会规范达成一致，同时个人自由也得到了充分的尊重。尊重个人自由是公共说理的底线。它意味着在尝试说服他人的时候，不能把自己的价值体系强加在他人身上，而是要站在他人的立场上进行说理（Larmore，1999）。公共说理和辩论不一样。说理时，不能把他人看成是需要被你说服的对象，而是尊重他们作为个体的独立性和能动性。辩论到最后两方总会分个高下胜负，公共说理则是一个过程，是一个并不一定能达到共识或结局的过程。公共说理和发表意见也不一样，前者在表述的同时更重要的是倾听异见，进而理解对方的立场和出发点，再发起共同辨析的过程。

公共说理有其实用性也有其内在的价值。从实用性上来说，公共说理支撑着民主社会里的政治、法律体系的公正性。它是公众视野里的工具和平台，社会中的政治机构时刻都在这个平台上接受参与公共说理的公众的检查。在最理想的情况下，公职人员（政府官员、法官、人大代表等）如要尽其职责，应该用公共说理向公众说明他们的政见和基于此提出的法案、做出的选择。而普通公众也应该具备相等同的公共说理能力，以行使自己的监督权，追究“不讲理”的官员的责任（Rawls,1999）。就公共说理其本身来说，这个过程能够帮助建立公众与政府之间沟通的桥梁。当人们在公共说理的过程中能够互相尊重，即使没有就某一政治原则达成共识，人们也将为彼此间分享的理性精神感到欣慰，而互相欣赏。

有效的公共说理需要多层面的支持。从个体的角度来说，公民需要良好的逻辑、说理训练。社会需要提供好的说理环境、说理文化，要保证言论自由。之外，还需要参与者有基本的共识，比如认同尊重个体自由、平等等原则。在民主社会里，学校应该向公民提供说理训练。一方面，公民学习逻辑、表达技巧；另一方面，提供在学习中实践的机会。讲逻辑是说理的最表层的部分。推理、辨别逻辑谬误并不是一门高深的学问，“讲道理”是人人都具有的能力（徐贲，2014）。但现实中，“不讲理”或者“讲歪理”的例子比比皆是，造成说理困难的原因也有很多。比如，在当代中国的政治生活中，“说套话”是阻碍说理的一大障碍。“说套话”是一种动嘴不动脑的说话方式：“并非所有的词语和套话都有唤起形象的力量，有些词语在一段时间里有这种力量，但在使用过程中，这种力量也会消失，不会再让头脑产生任何反应。这时它们就变成了空话，其主要作用是让使用者免去思考的义务。用我们年轻时学到的少量套话和常识把自己武装起来，我们便拥有了应付生活所需要的一切，再也不必对任何事情进行思考”（勒庞，2005）。民主社会里的公民有必要拆解、质疑套话式的语言：“深化政治体制改革”到底从哪几个方面“深化”了？“深化”的范围有多广、有多深？参与决策的人员有哪些？决策过程又是怎样的？只有放弃套话式的语言习惯，才能开诚布公地进行的公共说理。

在实践公共说理的过程中，参与者需要首先学会包容异见。在这样的前提下，才有可能解决分歧，乃至完善或重建道德准则或政治体制。因为在公共说理的过程中，大家都需要用说得通的、别人能接受的道理来表达自己的观点或看法，所以对于与自身相左的观点和看法要抱有同理心，要用对待自己观点的态度来对待他人的观点，去理解他人的出发点、知识立场和逻辑脉络，再在这个过程中寻找可以协商的空间。公共说理并不一定能带来共识，但是这个过程很多时候能帮助梳理不同的观点、意见，给社会行动者以改革和进步的启迪。比如今年台湾学运反服贸，公众的一个声音就是反对黑箱运作，即反对有关签订贸易协定审核过程的不透明。梁文道在《锵锵三人行：台湾学生反服贸运动透视》节目中提到，审核服贸的程序并不是不透明，而是不健全。即使早在两年前有高级法务人员向马英九提出警示，但并没有被重视。当“逐条审议”的要求被民众以大规模社会运动的方式提出来，马英九政府的窘迫处境反映了相关法律法规亟待改善。公共说理在这里不仅揭示了分歧产生的根源，还起到了敦促立法和行政机构改善政策和体制的作用。

正因为公共说理的结论不是由超然于人的“客观标准”所决定的，当一定要辩个“我对你错”的结论时，需要有外在的程序或权威来决定，如法庭“判决”、投票“表决”或专业人士的“裁决”（徐贲，2014）。这些程序的建立又依赖于更高层次上的说理。网络和新媒体给中国大陆民众打开了前所未见的公共讨论空间。但在威权政治下，民意不如其在民主制度下有力量。网络上的讨论和说理很难被导向更高层次的程序，所以目的性很弱。网民们发表的意见和产生的辩论（即所谓“舆论”）对公共事务的最终决策和公共事件的发展方向所带来的影响很弱。这样的无力感带给人们的是一种“虚无”的情绪，让人难以意识到公共说理、讲道理的必要性。由此可见，要进行有效的公共说理，光有会说理的民众是不够的。公共说理还需和民主政治相辅相成：后者提供给前者空间和保障，前者推动后者的完善和进步。

公共说理提供给社会一个面对分歧的有效渠道，去倾听、理解和尊重异见能够推动社会的进步，而非蔑视、反驳和驱逐异己。公共说理需要不断的实践。在公共讨论中，参与者需要时刻自我对话、不断反思学习，让自己和他人都能更加有效地参与到公共说理的过程中。一个良善的说理环境的形成，需要每个自由、平等的个体承担起自己的一份责任。



参考文献：
Larmore, C., 1996, The Morals of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rawls, 1999, The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, J., 1996, Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press.
徐贲(2014)。《明亮的对话：公共说理十八讲》。中信出版社。


谢谢唐同学的修改意见。

Educating with Love

“I define love as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.”                                                                                                                                                               –bell hooks

I participated in the “Models of Urban Educational Reform” Immersion Project during Spring Break. During our stay in Baltimore, we led an after-school program--the College and Career Institute--at Midtown Academy, a charter school in Baltimore. We worked with 7^th or 8^th graders, aiming to help them to look into options for their futures. Last Thursday, the group of students from Midtown Academy visited Gettysburg. 

Many relationships I built throughout the Baltimore visit have inspired me. But I would like to spend time here talking specifically about one I built with Ellie*, a 7^th grader at Midtown. When I led the after-school program at Midtown, I designed activities that encouraged my students to reflect on their past experiences, their passion and aspirations. In the first session, I asked them about the things they enjoy doing and encouraged them to bring anything that relates to their interests into class for the next session. Some brought drawings. Some showed their poetry pieces. Ellie, who had spoken about her interests in fashion and design, brought a pair of miniature jeans she sewed. I asked her to pass the pair of jeans around so anyone who wants can take a close look at it. I was very impressed by the little piece of work. 

In addition to being artistically talented, Ellie is also mature and reflective. When I asked them to write down three things they expect to do when they would come to visit Gettysburg, she wrote that “I want to meet someone who share my interests and can give me good advice.” Unlike some other goals such as to eat at SERVO, I was not able to guarantee Ellie that her wish would come true. But I take on the responsibility as the teacher and put in my effort to create opportunities that may help her to realize the vision.

One thing I planned for Ellie was visiting our art gallery on campus. After lunch on Thursday, I took Ellie and another student to the art gallery, where some students were working on installing their senior project. It was a very dynamic scene. The moment we stepped into the gallery I heard Ellie gasped: “This is so cool!” with her eyes wide open. The artworks opened up conversations among the three of us. We talked about our feelings, memories and emotions evoked by the artworks. By sharing the emotion and feelings we projected onto the same artworks, we were able to connect with each other emotionally. By the time we walked out of the gallery, I felt our relationships had opened up to a new front. They became more comfortable sharing their ideas and started to ask me questions. Growing up without having this type of cultural enrichment due to the lack of resources, never had I known the power of art in education till this gallery visit with my students.

What was more exciting was the Gettysburg student whose fashion work was displayed in the gallery happened to be in the art class I arranged for Ellie to visit later that day. Ellie had a great conversation with the student, exchanging ideas and asking questions. At the end of her visit, I asked her if she enjoyed the art class. She told me that she really enjoyed talking to the student who had given her some good advice and suggested some books for her to read. In seeing Ellie fulfilling her wishes and they way that the visit had turned out to be a meaningful one to her, I see the purpose of my work in education, aka making human connections with love.

What fascinates me about education has always been this process of connection-making. The loves for knowledge, expansion of experiences, and mindful awareness and compassion, which cannot be quantified but can only be achieved through human connections, are the reason why I want to devote myself to the process to foster such growth within individuals as well as communities. 

*Name changed. 

We Make the Road by Walking

Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one the "Little Rock Nine," who, under the gaze of 1,200 armed soldiers and a worldwide audience faced down an angry mob and helped to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1953, spoke at Gettysburg College last Wednesday.

I was not sure what to expect going into Minnijean Brown’s lecture. Although I have read the excerpt from Warriors Don’t Cry, in which her personal narration vividly recreates the tumult experience of that historical episode, I feel that I know little of her as a person except the couple of days of her life, which have been enshrined in the nation’s history. Coming out of the lecture, I was impressed by her casual demeanor and conversational style of presentation. Despite her humorous way in presenting her points, the lecture provoked me to think about what social change means to her as well as to me.

She opened up the lecture by asking us to imagine ourselves as fifth graders, not only because fifth graders are cute and can say funny things without caring too much of what others think, but also for the sake of rewinding the socialization process we have been engaging in throughout our lives and unlearning the assumptions we have developed consciously or subconsciously. When talking to adults, Minnijean maintained, we are trying to change people’s mind. When talking to children, however, we are trying to help them to learn—not so much “what the world is like” but “how we are able to see the world for ourselves.” But being a fifth grader was not an easy task. It is a constant process and struggle to keep our assumptions in check and navigate the world with a critical and open mind.

Curiosity was another concept she brought up that tied neatly to the idea of being a fifth grader. The state of being curious urges us to pose questions and to interrogate history as well as the status quo. Minnijean Brown used the example of Thomas Jefferson’s view on slavery to enlighten us of prejudice embedded in the nation’s long history and its founding principles. By understanding where we come from, we are able to see a clearer picture of what we believe in and why we do so at present. While it took the oppressed prolonged struggles and a civil war to dismantle the institution of slavery, we are still grappling with the more subtle and engrained means of oppression in our society. The list of issues, Minnijean Brown pointed out to us when answering a student’s question of which contemporary issues she is concerned with, seem daunting. But it served the purpose of keeping us away from complacency, with so many unfinished tasks need to be accomplished. And only with a curious mind, we can start the journey.

To achieve social change involves the process of retrospection, but more importantly, it requires bold action. “We make the road by walking,” the poem of Antonio Machado Minnijean Brown cites, encapsulates the spirit of progress and fearlessness. None of the Little Rock Nine or any of the civil rights activists who fought the hard battle for justice and freedom had the ability to predict future. They walked in darkness without knowing if their work was going to give birth to a better future. They, however, were not deterred; nor did they give up facing all the adversities and frustration. They persisted by charting a terrain that had not been explored. One of the greatest figure in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881-1936), whose work has reflected upon a time of profound social change in China and in the world, has sent similar messages: “I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.” This idea of making the road by walking transcends cultural boundaries and leads the change agents to work towards a more just and free world.

I was greatly inspired by the lessons Minnijean Brown gave at the lecture, in addition to her personal participation in one of the most iconic episodes of the Civil Rights Movement. Her life and continuous involvement in social work have showed us that we are far from arriving at an oppression-free (or post-racial) society. Much work is left to be done by us.

Me, as a Schooled Person 2.0

I was born in 1992, thirteen years after Deng Xiaoping had initiated the “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang) scheme to reassert the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) legitimacy as the ruling party through a restructured, market-oriented economic system that brought us prosperity. It had also been three years after the 1989 unrest when student protesters propelled by patriotism and democratic values were brutally suppressed by the regime. The twelve years (1998-2010) I spent in public schools coincide with an era when cultural institutions, specifically schools, have been widely employed by the state to impose the dominant ideology upon people. Structured to reproduce CCP’s political power and dominance, the education system carries out the task through its authoritarian, centralized, and top-down school mechanisms and culture.

Run by the paralleled apparatus of the ruling party and the state, the National Ministry of Education oversees provincial and lower-level Ministries of Education that have the authority over determining public schools’ calendar, curriculum, enrollment, teacher-training programs, and hiring processes. Subjected under such a centralized system, all Chinese students in public schools, including me, have to take Thought and Values (Sixiang Pinde), a moral education course in elementary school. From third to sixth grade, the large chunk of time my Sixiang Pinde class devoted to study “the War of Patriotic Resistance against Japanese” (the Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945) turned me into an avid patriot. I remember trembling and fuming over the pictures of horrific war-time atrocities Japanese soldiers had done in China and writing essays condemning the inhumane crime of the Empire of Japan. One time when I found out that one of the local schools was hosting a group of Japanese students who were visiting my city, I told my mother that I wanted to seek them out and interrogate them on the issue of Japanese nationalist efforts to whitewash Japan’s invasion of China.  

Devised by the authoritarian ruling party, the patriotism-saturated curriculum was designed to indoctrinate. Painting the image of Japanese as evil and cruel invaders yet the soldiers and leaders of the Eighth Route Army, the group army under the command of CCP during the Second Sino-Japanese War, as the fearless patriots who sacrificed their lives to protect our country’s sovereignty and our people’s lives, the narrative legitimizes CCP’s political dominance that had emerged out of the conflict. Without the guidance and skills to critically explore the complexity of the history and to understand the nature of knowledge (truth) being socially-constructed, culturally-mediated, and historically-situated; twelve-year-old me read the single-sided narrative in my textbook and accepted it as the truth. 

With the curriculum being further bifurcated and fragmented, middle school (seventh to ninth grade) continued to coerce me to categorize knowledge into oppositional cases through the school’s intensified version of banking education and hyper-instrumentalized standardized tests. In seventh grade, the first history test I took taught me a lesson of how to “behave myself” within those constraints. I scored 87 out of 100 on the test, which was not bad. But what baffled me was a zero I got for a short-answer question that worth eight points. The questions asked whether the wars fought during the period of Warring States (475 - 211 B.C.) were for the causes of justice and why. It was supposed to be an open-ended question that both sides would find substantial evidences to back up their arguments. In my answer I posed both sides’ arguments and provided supporting evidences respectively. I was surprised that I did not get any credit for the comprehensive and thoughtful answer. I went up to the teacher asking for an explanation. She looked at my answer and said: “No. That is not how you answer this type of questions. The correct way to do it is to first pick a side and then argue only for that one side you picked.” She threw me a sheet of paper with the "correct answers" on it and looked at me with a satisfied smile, knowing the fact that she just enlightened an ignorant seventh grader. In this dichotomized relationship, the teacher, confusing her professional authority with the authority of knowledge, not only closed the door to let me critically examine a piece of historical knowledge but also dismissed my agency as an active learner who could potentially pursue understandings of the world on my own terms. 
  
The dichotomized interpretation of complicated and controversial issues was not a singular phenomenon. It turned out later to be a reoccurring theme throughout my secondary school years. Endorsed by high-stake standardized tests, authoritarian teaching practices, and the-party-sponsored curriculum, this simplified view of the world dulled students and dismissed the historicity of knowledge. The senior high school’s (ninth to twelfth grade) counterpart of the Thought and Values course, Thought and Politics (Sixiang Zhengzhi), further promulgated the dominant ideology. A major part of the curriculum that deals with philosophy presents us two schools of thoughts—materialism and idealism. Without any context, I was taught those two schools were antagonistic and that materialism, upon which Marxist theories were built, was right and idealism was wrong. Without any chance to explore the historical contexts that gave birth to the different schools of philosophy, neither was I given the freedom to investigate in the boundaries of the historical events that gave rise to the formation of our curriculum and education practice in school. I was forced to memorize the “facts” about materialism and idealism and pen them down in order to score high on tests. While discouraging critical thinking, the education system produces docile rather than active citizens who dare to criticize or, in their words, “pose threats to” the ruling party. When I tried to challenge and raise concerns about the dichotomized worldview, I often heard people saying, “Why do you waste your time over-thinking so much? All I care is getting a good score on the test. You can do that by memorizing the correct answers. I don’t understand why you always make things so complicated.” However frustrated and disheartened I was, onward I charged.  

The awakening moment that has been supplying me the strength and grit to keep questioning and clinging to critical thinking occurred in the summer after eighth grade. When I was hanging out with my best friend, whose father worked for the military and happened to obtain certain sensitive materials through that route, we discovered the documentary on her father’s computer that told the story of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Completely uninformed of the incident before watching the documentary, I was shocked by my own ignorance as the result of the society’s silence on this significant episode of history. Not only were internet sites, media and our textbooks censored, it was also a social taboo that does not enter people’s casual conversations. From that moment on, I began to question the assumptions I had about the world constructed under the patriotic worldview, become aware of the "regime of truth" controlled by the ruling power, and read the world with the with “sociological imaginations” in order to live together with our differences and open spaces for people to reach beyond where they are. It has been a hard, painful, and incessant process. But I will not give up.

China's 9/11

“An attack by knife-wielding men at a railway station in Kunming in south-west China has left at least 29 dead, the state news agency Xinhua says.” –BBC

I was idling away my time browsing aimlessly online yesterday (March 1st, 2014) when the news of the terrorist attack in Kunming swamped my social media news-feeds. Sitting in front of my computer, I had a hard time grappling with the tragedy and react to the assorted voices pouring out of governmental agencies, news outlets, and individual netizens. It was heartbreaking to see pictures of the blood-smeared floor of the deserted train station and people’s faces distorted by agony. 24 hours have passed since the attack, many questions remain unanswered but limited evidences have led the Kunming city government to blame separatists from Xinjiang as being behind the attack.

Xinjiang is a peripheral province in China where minority Uighur Muslims population concentrates. It has always been tricky and “sensitive” when it comes to the policies and treatments ethnic minorities in China receives. (While the Han majority maintains absolute dominance, the combined population of officially recognized minority groups comprised 8.49% of the population.) I have seen Uighur intellectuals compare the hardships they have to endure to those experienced by American Indians. Equipped with little knowledge and understanding of their culture, history, and struggles, I dare not to verify such comparison. Just as with issues related to American Indians, I find myself not able to engage in an informed discussion on the issues facing ethnic minority groups  in China. Not only did I barely have any personal experiences mingling with ethnic minorities in China, I am aware that I have been consuming the distorted and biased images of those groups projected by media and public school curriculum. It is not just me, most of my peers are equally ignorant on the topic.

With little factually information about the attack at hand and no knowledge on the ethnic minority issues, I remained silent and was not sure what kinds of public sentiment and discourses were brewing. After people recovered from the initial shock, trending tweets and blogs voicing opinions surrounding the incident began to emerge. The number-one trending tweet related to the incident on Weibo (the Chinese Twitter, since the ‘real’ Twitter is blocked in mainland China) was re-posted over 300,000 times within 24 hours. It reads: “I abhor any terrorist attack against civilians. No matter how miserable is your life and how noble is your motive, if you attack the innocent and do so as a tool to reach your goal, you are the enemy of human race. I don’t care about your story, your appeals and won’t negotiate or surrender. The only thing we need to do is to annihilate you all if not at the moment we will after we get you. No mercy (shall be shown).”

What shocked me were the masses behind the opinions that refused to examine the purposes of the extremist group and the disinterests people exhibit over ethnic minorities’ appeals and voices. I want to ascribe such sentiment partially to people’s ignorance and their inability or unwillingness to acknowledge it. I know these conversations are hard to have but I wonder if we don’t try to understand where this terrorist group is coming from, why they did what they did, how they were able to do what they did; if we don’t try to grapple with the root causes of the antagonization; if we only see the terrorists as insane fanatics with no history, background, or any social connections; how are we supposed to resolve conflicts and prevent reoccurrence of such incidence? Rather than silencing ourselves, much needed to be discussed, examined, and conversed.

The Troubled International Tests Data

About two years ago, I was first introduced to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), when taking a class on education and globalization. PISA is a worldwide study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading. First carried out in 2000, PISA assessments have been following a triennial cycle, testing students from a growing number of countries (in 2000, 43 countries participated; the number rose to 65 in 2012) and producing reports after a-year-and-a-half analysis period. Last December, educators, policy makers and academics around the world anxiously waited for OECD to release its report on PISA 2012 results. The ranking, once again, ignited heated debates and discussions in the international education community.

I have remained skeptical about PISA since the first encounter. Personally, I have had detrimental experiences with standardized tests. Although I believe that testing could be used as a method to help teachers monitor student learning, I tend to take any standardized tests that go beyond the purpose of understanding individual students’ development with a grain of salt. Test results analyzed and reported in a collective manner (like what OECD is doing) take education systems and the discourses around them out of their social, political and economic contexts and lead to inaccurate and dehumanized understanding and policies talks around education reform. Over the years, I have kept an eye on the PISA data and discussions revolving around it. What I have found is that more and more educators and policy makers have spoken  about the troubling interpretation of international tests data.

In Daniel Koretz’s book, Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, he discussed the trickiness of interpreting international test data. First off, the term “international mean” used by many media outlets and policy makers to compare American students’ performance to a seemingly “objective” standard is a fallacy. “International mean” varies from test to test depending on the participating nations. Secondly, more specific comparison between countries could still be inconsistent. Depending on the test content and ranking system, countries perform differently on different test. It is dangerous to draw conclusions based on an individual source. Koretz warned people not to “treat either one of these assessments as the definitive answer.”

Koretz did however make the point that it is relative safe to conclude that countries like Japan ranking above the U.S. with a large margin consistently perform better. But many people take such conclusions too far by claiming that East Asian countries have a better education system or better math/science curriculum without shedding a critical light on those tests. When the 2012 PISA report came out last December, Shanghai impressed the world with its students ranking number one again (after its initial appearance on PISA 2009 report) in all three areas PISA tests. PISA has turned Shanghai into this magic land whose superb student achievement educators around the world envy. When I was studying abroad in France last spring semester, PISA test was briefly discussed in my Comparative Education class. The professor was absolutely impressed by Shanghai’s scores and commented that “amazing things are happening there.” Not only did I have to disagree with her comment, I was also alarmed by such a misleading impression. Back then, I was not informed enough to explain to my professor why her interpretation of the data was incomprehensive and misguided. A year later, when the new report comes out, I was able to send my professors articles written by educators around the world who are critically examining PISA results and speaking up against the misleading information propelled by PISA report.

Tom Loveless enlightens the public of OECD-PISA’s negligenceof the migrant student population in Shanghai, which makes the Shanghai data a skewed depiction of the reality. Due to China’s kukou system that ties people to their geographic origins, many children of families that have moved to the city from rural areas of China are excluded from Shanghai school system. Loveless claims that those children were abandoned by OECD-PISA assessment. Their plight is brushed under the rug while Shanghai enjoys international praise for its education success.  Benjamin Riley, a Fulbright public policy fellow, also sheds doubt on the PISA data. Coming from a more technical perspective, he questioned the methodology used by PISA to analyze its data. He pointed us to the critique of PISA by Svend Kreiner, one of the world’s leading experts on the Rasch model, who argues that the OECD is using the Rasch model incorrectly. I am incapable of psychometrician analysis, but such critique should not be taken lightly.

I want to close this blog with a quote from Daniel Koretz’s book: “Scores describe some of what students can do, but they don’t describe all they can do, and they don’t explain why they can or cannot do it.” With that said, I believe standardized tests (both international and state-mandated ones) have enjoyed overly-exaggerated validity and attention over the past few decades. It is time to refocus and reframe our discussion on education reform.

Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes

On two separate occasions, I recently watched two documentaries featured Jane Elliott’s famous “blue eyes brown eyes” experiments. It amazed me how non-traditional classroom practices could be employed as powerful tools to challenge students’ assumption about social reality and evoke heated discussions on racial issues.

Although residing in different historical time period and social contexts, Jane Elliott’s third grade classroom, documented in A Class Divided, as well as the workshop she run in Britain, disseminated through British TV program, The Event: How Racist Are You? illustrate how different forces and power relations play out in schools and in the society. The pedagogical practices Jane Elliott employed mean to construct emancipatory knowledge, but they had their limitations due to the constrain of participants' backgrounds.

Jane Elliot’s three-day experiment first conducted in 1970 reproduces society’s black-white racial dynamic in her classroom. It allows her students to understand abstract concepts like prejudice, power and discrimination through their personal participation in the learning experiences. Dividing her students up deliberately according to their eye colors, Jane Elliott first constructed a superior group identity for the blue-eyed students by allocating them institutionalized privileges such as recess time, access to playground equipment, and getting seconds at lunch. By pointing out that a girl belonging to the brown-eye group took a longer period of time to get ready, Jane Elliott modeled the process of prejudice-and-stereotype-generation: when negative prejudgments of individuals were drawn based on unsound evidences, and when individual acts were generalized as a trait shared by everyone in the artificially-assigned group. The experiment revealed the irrational and artificial nature of racial divisions, which were constructed in the same way as the students were divided up by their eye colors, and allowed the students to gain the experience of being subordinated under such divisions.

Students in Jane Elliott’s classroom were exposed to knowledge that transformed their understanding of the social relationships manipulated by power and privilege and had a long-lasting impact on their lives. 15 years after the experiment, at their reunion, the students talked how they learned not to judge people based on their race and expressed frustration when catching themselves or others doing the opposite. Since all the students are in the dominant racial group, although their mentality changed, they did not see the need to pursue actions to change the social structure around them that was still perpetuating the injustice. The experiment has its limitations.

In Jane Elliott’s classroom, the reconstruction of group identities based on eye colors functioned due to her dominance of the class. In the very short amount of time, unlike the hundreds and thousands of years it took for racial, sexual and other biases to emerge and consolidate, Elliott had to make everyone comply to the rules she set and follow her lead to perpetuate the newly-born prejudices. The experiment ran smoothly in Jane Elliott’s third grade classroom due to her role as the teacher who had established authority among her students and owned the resources and skills to manipulate them. In a different setting, when Elliott lacks those resources that help her to manipulate the participants, the experiment might fail to achieve its goals. Elliott has dedicated her life as an anti-racism trainer and has been running “blue eyes brown eyes” workshops all over the world. The recent workshop she conducted in the U.K. saw objections from the participants—adults who questioned the purpose of the experiment, arguing that racism no longer existed in the U.K., and refused to cooperate. When working with sophisticated adults, Elliot’s experiment has the potential to work against its purpose and fails to deal with the more subtle and complicated racial landscape in the 21st century.

Jane Elliott’s experiments showcase the power of experiential learning. Despite their limitations, they have proved that with creativity and dedication, teachers can transform schools from an alienating space where hyper-instrumentalized knowledge is imparted to a hotbed where students’ love for knowledge and passion for justice could be seeded.

When History Repeats Itself

The question was posed in class last week: “Should the government punish public schools that fail to comply with its policies by taking funding away from them?” While the context here was de jure segregation, many of us associated the scenario with NCLB. NCLB notoriously linked students’ academic performance to high-stake standardized tests. Schools failing to meet the intricate, man-made, and rigid standards (AYP, Adequate Yearly Progress, benchmark as it was known) would face funding sanctions or penalties. I found those measures too counter-intuitive to comprehend. In order to help a child who had failed a test, why would the government take the necessary resources away with the hope to “incentivize” him or her to work harder?

I don’t deny the possibility that competition might boost academic performance. But wherever there are competitions, there will also be someone left behind. When a competition was initiated and subsequently materialized, who are going to care for the marginalized, the defeated, and the left behind? In the business world, nobody will. The winners flourish and the losers die out. Such is the potent mechanism of market economy. But wait a second. How about our kids? Are the mechanisms set by NCLB going to provide resources and create opportunities for the ones left-behind to catch up, or weed them out as the market economy punished the not-so-lucky businesses?

Circling back to the federal measures enforced to dismantle de jure segregation, a similar circumstance could be observed. Although the court decision on Brown v. Broad of Education provided legal framework in 1954 for public school desegregation, desegregation was not enforced on a massive bases till a decade later—not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act threatened to take away public school funding from segregated school districts. Against the backdrop of the passage of ESEA, which vastly increased federal funding for public schools, Southern schools found it increasingly difficult to defy the federal mandate. Rather than embracing desegregation measures wholeheartedly, however, some southern school districts, those whose boards were dominated by white supremacist, device ways to maintain status quo while evading the punishment. Take the Drew District in Sunflower County, Mississippi, for instance, the school board proposed a “freedom of choice” law. (Doesn’t this sound familiar? It reminded me of the ongoing choice movement that propelled the development of charter schools, vouchers, and cyber schools.) It allowed the parents to choose which schools to send their children. The lawmakers thought no black parents would dare to send their children to one of the traditionally white schools by choice, so the segregated school system could be upheld “voluntarily” and everyone would “be kept in place.”

Just as the white supremacist had calculated, the law discouraged black students from entering traditionally white schools except the sole instance when Mae Bertha Carter courageously enrolled her children into the traditionally white schools. While the maltreatment and psychological burden the children had to endure deserve the scrutinization of another blog post, meaningful desegregation was not carried out in Drew County until a decade later. The white supremacists’ manipulation of the law counted for the frustrating consequence, but it is safe to conclude that the federal policy (threatening to take away funding) failed to enforce changes it wanted to see effectively.

The percentage of black students attending public schools with white did rise in Drew County in the following decades. But what worth noticing is the re-segregation process came after the meaningful desegregation in the 1960s. “White flight” as it was characterized by locals occurred as private academies were established around the same era. White students began to enroll in private schools and black students gotten once again left behind, this time in “desegregated” public schools. It is such an irony that NCLB was proposed to hold public schools across the board accountable for students’ academic performance, while racial inequalities within public school system remained unaddressed. Schools once again were threatened to lose funding, but this time for failures among competitions against each other.  

Rebel against Traditional Education—Money Games Played by Wealthy Families in China

Mi Meng, a Chinese social critic, columnist, and editor, published this article on her personal blog about two years ago. As China's economy soared in the past few decades, the distribution of the wealth among Chinese people became increasingly polarized and education inequality as a result began to draw attention. This post truthfully reflected on the harsh reality facing today's Chinese students and their parents. Mi Meng, a mother of a five-year-old, offered an unique perspective on such issues, which hopefully will give you a glimpse of the discourses on education in China. Click here to read the original post (in Chinese).

Rebel against Traditional Education—Money Games Played by Wealthy Families in China

By Mi Meng

I don’t want to spend time counting off the drawbacks of our education system. There is nothing new to that. However, over the past few years, I have began to realize that rebelling against traditional education system has become the money game joined exclusively by the upper class.

It is from the very beginning that economic disparity can make a difference in a child’s education. Many wealthy people would try everything they could to have their baby born with a Hong Kong or American  citizenship status, despite that they have to go through the troublesome visa process.  Those “anchor babies” emerge not because the parents want to evade the One Child Policy, but because they want better educational resources for their children, who could then potentially get into foreign schools easily due to their citizenship status. It normally costs from some tens of thousands to several millions Yuan (1 Chinese Yuan = 0.16 U.S. Dollar) to wade through the temporary emigration process and have a child born in Hong Kong or the U.S. In recent years, it has been become increasingly difficult to make such moves, due to policy constrains. However, there are plenty of parents willing to pay big price to send their children away from Chinese traditional education, starting from their births.

When your children reach the age of three, it is time to consider where to send them to kindergarten. Westernized kindergartens have been very attracted, for various reasons. First, they offer English class from early on and allow kids to learn in a relaxing environment. Second, the teachers there are more qualified and caring and could exert more positive influence on the kids. However, those types of kindergartens have a major drawback, which is the high cost. The tuition and fees for those kindergartens range from ￥4,000 ($660) to ￥10,000 ($1,650) per month, whereas traditional kindergartens charge no more than ￥1,000 ($160) per month.

After kindergartens, comes the question where to send your kids to elementary school. Are you thinking about international schools? Alright, wait till you learn about the tuition. In Shenzhen, one of the major economic centers in southern China, the two high-profile international schools, QSI International School of Shenzhen and Sheko International School, which operate under the regulation of U.S. Department of Education, cost more than ￥10,000 ($1,650) per month. Even if you could afford that tuition, you may not able to get your child in. Because, to be eligible, the children have to be non-Chinese citizens and at least one of the parents has to be a non-Chinese citizen. In order to get their children into those schools, some parents even try to get foreign passports through investment immigration, which of course costs a lot.

Even for the children who went to traditional primary and middle schools, going abroad for high school or higher education seems only a matter of when instead of how (particularly those from big cities). The only thing their families are contemplating is whether to send them for high school or college. If they choose to go as early as they reach middle/high school age, strong financial bases are needed to pay for costly private high school tuition and fees. Recently, I have learned that many good friends of mine are thinking about emigrate to the U.S., in order to send their children away from our high-stake standardized-tests-driven education system. I have a friend who himself is a principal of a prestigious high school. He wants to send his child abroad to get away from the hell-like test prep processes especially during the last year of Chinese middle and high school (9^th and 12^th grades). Well, of course, the starting price to make those moves is several million Yuan.

If you don’t have that money, that’s alright. You could just let your child stay in traditional schools. You may come up with some arguments trying to defend our traditional education system. However, one of my friends working in the education system said something quite to an extreme. He said: "most of the children who are taking the college entrance exam (the most critical and rigorous exam, based on the score of which college select students) are from ordinary families. Most of the wealthy ones have gone abroad during their middle/high school years." This sounds horrible. However, most of us would indeed find that the most creative and intelligent students around us are somewhere in the process of applying for schools overseas.

I had a chance to interview a millionaire recently. He wants his son to have broad horizon. His son has traveled with him all over the world, including the Antarctica at the age of four. His son has to be absent from school a lot because of the travelings. I asked his son if he would go study abroad or take the college entrance exam in the future. He retorted innocently: “are there still people taking the college entrance exam nowadays?” Those wealthy people really got on my nerves.

It is not that we parents don’t know about the drawbacks of our traditional education system. It is not that we don’t want our children to grow up happily and freely. It is not that we don’t understand test score does not measure growth. It is not that we don’t hate cramming and testing. It is not that we don’t despise those philistine teachers and nasty hidden rules within schools. If money is not an issue, everyone wants their children to have access to progressive, student-centered, and multicultural education. However, parents without that financial background can’t afford the risk of rebelling against traditional education. Because once you lose, the child is going to be the one who suffers. Therefore, the only choice left with those parents and children is trying to fit in with the traditional education hoping to get a good-enough test score.

… the author went on commenting on her personal commitment towards her son’s education. She ends the article by stating that nowadays if parents want their children to be happy (by “be happy” she means not to be subjected under the pressure of traditional value and societal judgment), parents have to work harder (to elevate themselves both monetarily and social-status-wise).

Me, as An Schooled Person

I grew up in a small city in southern China. Static, provincial, and impoverished, my hometown lags behind most of major cities in economic developments and has little to offer in terms of cultural enrichment and educational resources. I spent the first eighteen years of my life without ever making a trip to a public library or going to a concert, simply because those resources were not available. The schooling I had was neither the best one could imagine. The teacher/student ratio in my class (K-12) fluctuated around 1:50 with a very small standard deviation. Lessons followed rigid national standards, and high-stake standardized tests dominated both teachers' teaching practices and students' learning processes. As you can imagine, curiosity was stifled and creativity was never encouraged. I learned early on in my schooling that be the one who stands out could only get me into trouble and going off-script would be punished with low test scores. 

I remembered taking my first history test at the mid-point of my first semester in 7th grade. I got a 87 out of 100 on the test, which did not look so nice compared to all the As I got on other subjects. What dragged my score down was a zero I got for a short answer question that worth eight points. I recorded that the questions asked me weather the wars fought during the period of Warring States (475 - 211 b.c.) were just ones and why. I argued for both sides in my answer: I thought they were just because of reason 1, 2, and 3; meanwhile, one could argue that they were unjust because of reason A, B, and C. The reasons I provided made sense, but I did not get any credit for it. The teacher later explained to me: "No! That is not how you answer this type of questions. You should first pick a side and argue only for that side." She threw me a sheet with the "correct answers" on it provided by the test maker and asked me to memorize it. I complied. When a similar question came up on the next test, I followed her direction and got a perfect score for the it. That experience did not sit well with me. While I was too young to know that there was an honorable term for the kind of intellectual activity I was engaging--critical thinking, I did not appreciate my teacher's tyranny that took away my freedom to think for myself. 

Since then, I functioned on a dual identity. I conformed by memorizing all the correct answers for the tests and maintained my status as an A-student. Meanwhile, I rebelled, trying to read outside of classroom and think for myself, even though those thoughts were never taken serious by schools. My experience has shaped me as a fervent follower of progressive pedagogy and hater for high-stake standardized testing. Before I had come to the United States, I dreamed of this land of the free as an education paradise where educational practices (unattainable for me) that foster critical thinking, creativity and democratic citizenship were not only endorsed by the teachers and schools but also by the society as a whole. Now a senior at a liberal art college in the United States and having studied education in the academic setting for over two years, I found the reality on this side of the earth much more complicated than I thought. The American education system, according to my observation, is undergoing a overhauling reform period. Policy makers, teacher unionists, and public intellectuals are at each other's throat, for the ownership of the panacea for a presumably broken education system. This mess with current American education reform has greatly confounded me. At the same time, the intricacy and complication with regard to the topic excites me as someone who enjoys intellectual debates and learning about social innovations. 

Through the two education classes I am taking this semester, I hope to take a systematic look at issues relating to school systems (primarily in the U.S.), education reform efforts, and  their social and political backdrops and implications. I also intend to take the opportunity to enhance my analytic writing skills and find ways to integrate what I learned in classes into my pursuit for a career in the field of education. 

Why Am I Doing This?

I'm an introvert and a perfectionist.

I have to make this clear in the first place, so you may be able to understand what does maintaining a public blog mean to me. It means sweat, anxiety and endless revisions behind each post. Although I have been keeping a diary since 5^th grade and relied heavily on writing to organize my thoughts and my life; for a person as introverted as me, writing for oneself is vastly different from writing for an unknown audience. Therefore, this blog foreseeably would be a challenging and time-consuming project. But why am I doing this? The short answer is that this is a required assignment for one of the education classes I am taking this semester. In fact, I have wanted to set up a personal blog/site for a long time. I enjoy reading, writing, and engaging in intellectually challenging conversations and debates. I have things to say about the world around me that might be worthwhile sharing. Although I am a very humble person (in other words, not very confident) when it comes to my writing and intellectual abilities, I want to take advantage of this opportunity to start something that might evolve into a challenging but rewarding project. So here I am.