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.