Country Driving [112]
Body measurements were taken each term and compared to the national average. The reports listed the boy’s height, weight, chest circumference, eyesight, hearing, and lung capacity. (Fourteen hundred milliliters in fourth grade.) When Wei Jia brought home a report card, his father sometimes got out a tape measure to double-check the stats. Invariably the boy was subpar on everything physical. (A fourth-grade male should have a lung capacity of 2,123 milliliters, according to the report card.)
The terror of this document would have been unmitigated if it weren’t for a final section in which the instructor contributed a personalized evaluation. In second grade Teacher Liu wrote: “Everybody loves you. Your thinking is very nimble and the teacher and the other students all admire you. But only if cleverness is combined with hard work will you have improvement and an even higher score. You shouldn’t wait for others to press you. You have to take the initiative and study diligently, let’s go!”
That’s the saving grace of Chinese education—people sincerely care, and their faith in learning runs deep. Despite low pay, teachers tend to be dedicated, and parents try to do their part, regardless of their own background. In the history of Sancha, only three students had ever made it to college, and neither of Wei Jia’s parents went past the tenth grade. But they recognized that their son might have a chance in a rapidly changing society, and they pushed him to work hard. This mentality is common all across China, where Confucian temples might be long gone but the traditional value of education still remains. Even the poorest people have faith in books—I almost never met a parent without educational aspirations for his child. It’s different from the United States, where people without much schooling have trouble encouraging their children, and some communities become essentially disengaged from formal learning.
But if the strength of Chinese schooling consists of good intentions, the weakness lies in the details. I was amazed at the stuff Wei Jia learned—the most incredible collection of unrelated facts and desystemized knowledge that had ever been crammed into a child with a lung capacity of 1,400 milliliters. A surprising amount of it came from overseas. He had one textbook called The Primary School Olympic Reader, which focused on the Games that Beijing would host in 2008. Here in the Chinese countryside, in the shadow of the Great Wall, children studied pictures of naked Greeks wrestling and learned about a Frenchman named Gu Bai Dan who had reintroduced the Olympics to Europe in 1896. Another text was called Environmental and Sustainable Development. It must have been the product of some well-intentioned foreign NGO; the book taught the theory of “the 5 R’s”—Reduce, Re-evaluate, Reuse, Recycle, Rescue wildlife—which made no sense in translation. Fifth-graders had an entire textbook devoted to learning how to use Microsoft FrontPage XP. One Friday, I picked up Wei Jia from school, and he told me they had just studied Google. “It was started by a brother and a sister in America,” he said. “They started the company together and became rich.” That was the rural Chinese spin on Google—it might not be accurate, but at least it endorsed family values. That same weekend I heard Wei Jia reciting the opening verses of the Dao De Jing:
Dao ke dao, fei chang dao,
Ming ke ming, fei chang ming….
The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;
The names that can be named are not unvarying names….
Ever since the nineteenth century, Chinese educators have struggled to find some balance between old and new, native and foreign, and the battle is still being fought in schools like Wei Jia’s. They’ve found ways to include new subject matter, but they haven’t yet reformed the basic learning