OVERVIEW
Commercialization of education has been a fairly recent trend in China resulting from the educational reform in the last two decades. It mainly materializes itself in mushrooming private schools at different levels and public and private universities at high education level. In a sense, it has added a financial element to the qualifications of attending private schools and public and private universities. Undoubtedly, it affects millions of families. As a result, it also changes the traditional concepts of education in Chinese society, including student-teacher relationship, educational purposes, and attitudes towards knowledge. While it is difficult to predict its future, we would certainly benefit from examining the current status of commercialization of education in China. Theoretical probing into it should also shed light on various factors involved in education commercialization. ¹

ISSUES FOR EXPLORATION
A Traditional Perspective

Commercialization of education comes at a time when China is experiencing fast economic development over the recent two decades. Undoubtedly, education commercialization requires structural adjustments, organizational reshuffling, accountability shifts, reconceptualization of whom education is serving, and market oriented running mechanisms.² This should not be in any substantive way different from commercialization in other areas such as entertainment and service institutions. However, unlike commercialization in other aspects of social life, education commercialization is running against two fundamental concepts in China. First, education in its Confucian and therefore Chinese cultural tradition has never been for profit and profit only. Second, education in China is designed to create opportunities for upward social mobility for those who aspire. Simply put, the first would involve re-thinking of the traditional roles of teachers, students, and purposes of education. The second pertains directly to the role money plays in getting into education in the first place, which may block opportunities for many aspiring poor to start with.

Availability and Accessibility of Education

China has required compulsory/voluntary education of 9 years, though it is yet to be realized, particularly in the vast countryside. Institutions of higher education in China are still limited in number. Access to high education used to be based on various standards such as political trustworthiness in the latter part of the Cultural Revolution, academic excellence (immediately following the initial restoration of entrance examinations in 1977), and a combination of both during the period between 1949 and 1966. Now the ability to pay also figures into the equation of access in addition to academic acceptability. Tuition costs have skyrocketed, resulting in tuitions as high as dozens of years of annual salary of a city dweller and several dozen years of annual work of a peasant or migrant worker.^{3, 4, 8}. Availability of higher education may not turn into accessibility for many poor youngsters if they and their families don't have the ability to pay for it in the first place.

Stake-Holders Involded

Teachers, students, administrators, parents, and taxpayers are traditionally the highest stake-holders when it comes to education. The relationship among them was not as highlighted in traditional education, when the focus was on student learning. However, commercialization of education may change the relationship among these players through a cost-effect process and product evaluation re-structuring. In a simplistic sense, it changes a vertical relationship to a horizontal or more flexible relationship with profit as the focus. For example, the roles of teachers and students change into those of business and clients.

Two Levels of Commercialization

Commercialization of education can and will happen at two different levels: administrative and instructional. The administrative level would require running the institute like an enterprise, focusing on budgetary cost-effect, seeking resources, product evaluation and corresponding adjustment, new hiring policy, and new relationship between teachers and students. Instructional level commercialization would treat the whole process of teaching and learning as cost-effect driven, focusing on learning/teaching as a necessary step for producing a product, re-adjusting the purposes of learning and teaching, depersonalization in the whole process of learning/teaching, and utility oriented curricular objectives.^{3, 5}

ON THE HORIZON
It is usually unwise to predict the future. However, if history is of any use, we know that the future is created through what we do and are doing today. It is a continuum of the present. The commercialization of education in China faces a similar future in the sense that we are shaping it through our participation and non-participation today. While this commercialization is more than an educational phenomenon, it certainly is going to affect generations to come as far as their education is concerned. To be both responsive to this relatively recent phenomenon in education and responsible for our future generations’ education, we are obligated to explore the issue from both an immediate and distal perspectives. An immediate perspective would focus on what it means to us now and to education. Distal perspective would allow us to consider beyond ourselves into the future and beyond education into its ramification in other related and affected fields such as economy, sociology, politics, etc.

Instead of offering impossible answers, we ask some questions that could be both immediate and distal in perspective.

• Why was the photographer in the video so vehemently against the commercialization of education? As a stake-holder, what might be his reason for criticizing it? How will a sociologist and an economist respond to his criticism?
• If you were a student in a Chinese high school (as is the photographer’s daughter), what would be the biggest concerns you would have in continuing your pursuit of education in universities? Are these concerns related to any issues beyond education?
• As a teacher caught in this commercialization of education, what has changed in your relationship with your students? Their parents? Your administrators? What kind of ramifications would this have on your instructional practice and ideals? Why?
• Who would benefit most from the commercialization of education? Who would suffer most? How can these problems be solved within the framework of commercialization of education? Or should they be resolved in other larger framework of reference?
• Is there an issue of equity regarding access to education in this commercialization of education development? If so, how can this be resolved? Or could it be ever resolved when today’s limited resources in China put constraints on the number of youths who can be educated?
• What are some of the Western experiences that China can learn about running education? Can they serve as points of reference for China’s education? Or should China’s education only be understood and run within its distinctive social and organizational structures?
• What’s the role of knowledge in education commercialization? If we can put a price tag on learning and knowledge, how are the market values of education decided across disciplines and over time? What are the implications of such practice for teaching and learning?
• Examining the past of education in China, we would notice the strong tendency of utilitarianism in obtaining education. Is that the same as commercialism? Why or why not?

Continue to 'Media and Culture' »

REFERENCE LINKS
1. Historical overview of Utilitarian vs. commercialization:

Education in China has always received extensive attention from the society. While education is always morally conceived in Confucian tradition, particularly from Zhu Xi’s (1130-1200) time onward, China’s education has a strong utilitarian value attached to it from its very beginning. We don’t have to trace it back to the Warring Periods (BC 476-221) when scholars and strategists used their learning to knock open the door to high positions. About a thousand and four hundred years ago, Sui Dynasty (581-618) started the practice of selecting civil servants based on their academic achievements. The examination system was called Civil Service Examination. It gradually improved in Tang Dynasty (618-907) and came to its maturity in Song Dynasty (960-1279). The main function of it was to select officials for various levels. However, the examination system brought out the practical value of learning: A spring board to officialdom. Generations of Chinese students and scholars went through various channels of learning to get themselves educated in order to compete for the officialdom through the examination.

This utilitarian understanding of education was pervasive even after the examination was abolished in 1905. Take the famous May 4th Movement as an example. Humiliation suffered at the hands of foreign powers turned into a new push to empower China through curricular revolution. Confucian style education was condemned and abandoned. Yet the motive behind all this was to utilize education for a new and powerful China. Today’s world also witnesses a strong wave of Chinese students studying abroad under the slogan of modernizing China.

Yet, utilitarianism is not equal to commercialization, though commercialization implies and highlights strong utilitarian objectives. In fact, commerce or business used to have an unbelievably low status in ancient China. Aside from all the restrictions they were subject to, businessmen in most dynasties could not obtain education to become officials through participating in the examinations. One of the superficial reasons for this restriction might come from a popular traditional distrust of business transactions: strategy they used for obtaining profits. But in a fundamental sense, it may come more from Confucian core of land-based society order. Therefore, in the core of China’s educational tradition there may exist strong utilitarian values yet it was culturally accommercialized. It should be noted that this is not to say there have not been educational institutions run for the purpose of making money. All teachers do because they have to survive even in the profession of education. Yet, education in its most organized format has never been run on business models. Commercialization has been a relatively recent and new phenomenon in China’s education.

2. Epoch Times – Paper published in Epoch Times, outlining the problems commercialization of education in China runs into

3. PEN Chinese – Paper bringing out an opposing position for the trend of commercialization of education in China

4. BJ Review – anonymous paper summarizing several experts’ opinions on commercialization of high education in China

5. China Daily – China Daily’s paper on the commercialization of education in China, citing education minister’s talk, various main newspaper outlets on the issue

Links 6 and 7 are provided for those who are interested in looking further into the issue of privatization of education in the context of education commercialization.

6. OYCF – paper on the privatization of education in China (.pdf)

7. ICFDN – details of the government spending on education, cost of education in China and other educational resources (.doc)

8. Asian Research – Epoch Time report on high cost of education in China

This Companion was written by The College of Staten Island's Modern China Studies Group, an interdisciplinary program involving several departments, including Business, English, History, Modern Languages, Media Culture, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work.