New York Times Magazine article "Re-education" by Ann Hulbert is about Tang Meijie, a current sophomore at Harvard from China, and about the changes in education in China. The article ends:
Applications for undergraduate study abroad are rising (six times as many students from the People’s Republic of China, 256, applied to Harvard College in 2005 as in 1999, for example), and more foreign degree holders are now coming back to put their educations to use at home. But perhaps as promising a sign of the momentum behind educational change in China is an Hsylc participant like Neal, master of the wryly raised eyebrow, who said when I spoke with him that he was planning on staying put but who was still thinking big. The most caustic critic of Chinese schooling among those assembled for tea, he had already spent time in Germany. But he was inspired to find that his Chinese schoolmates, “known for diligence, silence and obedience, thick glasses as a symbol,” in his words, could be “most vigorous” in a setting like Hsylc.
As he explained to me in an earlier e-mail message, composed in breaks from gaokao cramming, he said he needed “to watch and feel the system by my personal experience” — endure the burdens at their worst in the third year, the “endless homework, strict discipline, frequent exams and the peer pressure.” If he chose to stay in China, he would know how to push toward a new system in which students’ “curiosity is well protected to learn knowledge.” At the teahouse, Neal was already rallying the troops behind a vision of prodding change along at home. “At Fudan University” — which has just inaugurated a less specialized curriculum for freshmen and a house system modeled on Yale and Harvard — “I can take a lecture, and if I want to be more active, I can ask questions, I can tell my friends to ask questions and then students will change the system,” he said. “When a university is eager to change, the vital power is students.” Neal raised both eyebrows, a boy looking ready to rebel against the bookworm stereotype. “People say, ‘Whoa, you’re from China!’ Yes, I’m from China.”
A generation of more independent-minded students with wider horizons — a generation of Neals and Meijies, busy networking and innovating: it is a prospect that may inspire some trepidation as well as optimism among Chinese leaders. After all, campus unrest has left scars, and vast challenges loom, from the environment to rural discontent. The proof that the recent educational changes go deeper than a proliferation of newfangled curricula and degrees will not be merely how China’s economic future plays out; it will be what kinds of political and cultural repercussions unfold, most immediately among the lucky few who are currently benefiting most from the new opportunities. Will it be enough if a bolder breed of the best and the brightest — as Xu predicted — form a cosmopolitan elite whose roots in China help make them the imaginative hybrids that global enterprises need? Over dinner with his wife and daughter (who was busy doing her homework while she ate), Xu was hopeful. At the same time, in a recent Foreign Affairs article, Xu’s friend John Thornton, a former president of Goldman Sachs, who has been directing a new Global Leadership program at Tsinghua University for several years now (and who also gave a rousing talk at Hsylc), points out a serious problem. In a country whose cutthroat educational system was famous for selecting successful bureaucrats, top talent these days goes just about anywhere but the government, clogged as it is with corrupt insiders. If creative, critical-minded outsiders aren’t given a reason to enter the public realm, the prospects for a world-class, more democratic future for all are only more precarious.
Right now, it’s quite unlikely that Meijie would even think of ending up as a mandarin. She was, though, full of plans as the spring semester of her sophomore year got under way after a somewhat dispiriting fall — her Harvard friends worrying about grades, her Fudan University friends in China panicked about careers. “Now I feel I am back again,” she wrote in a late February e-mail message, sent at — some things never change — 3:55 a.m. “Life is so hectic and overwhelmingly exciting!” With two Harvard friends, Meijie had just founded a company — Strategy Alpha International L.L.C., whose mission is to advise Chinese and American enterprises on carving out niches in the other country’s markets. (She and her team were already talking to a top Chinese financial magazine in search of an American partner.)
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