Feature: China Educates for 21st Century

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, June 26, 2002

Feature: China Educates for 21st Century

Song Jing, a young staff member at a government institution, plans to send her three-year-old toddler to the community kindergarten, which uses a prestigious "Montessori" teaching method.

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Song Jing, a young staff member at a government institution, plans to send her three-year-old toddler to the community kindergarten, which uses a prestigious "Montessori" teaching method.

"I want to give my little son the advantage of an early start," said Song, who will have to pay 10,000 yuan (1,200 U.S. dollars) annually for her child's education -- eight times her monthly income.

China's first Montessori kindergarten was solely for children of foreign diplomatic staffs in Beijing. The method gives prominence to the natural development of a child's ability and intelligence at his or her own pace.

Maria Montessori (1807--1952), who set up the first Montessori School in Italy, developed a series of teaching methods for pre-school children and founded more than 2,000 Montessori schools and kindergartens around the U.S. and a number of other countries worldwide. Her method has been widely practiced in China since 1994.

An increasing number of Chinese intellectuals are choosing a kindergarten education for their children. Currently, innovation and quality are two words frequently heard in Chinese education circles.

A government project aims to make senior high school education widespread in China's urban areas by the end of 2010 and to increase the enrollment rate for higher education institutes to 15percent. Setting up lifelong education for Chinese citizens is also a goal.

Efforts in boosting higher education enrollment

In recent years, China has made persistent efforts to boost higher education enrollment. By 2001, enrollments had risen to 2.6million from 1.08 million in 1999.

In 2001, China abolished restrictions on marital status and the age for college candidates, allowing a 73-year-old man to sit the college entrance examination, and a 63-year-old man to take on full-time college education.

Since then, colleges and universities have gradually become accessible to all.

At a ceremony marking the centenary of the world-famous Beijing University, President Jiang Zemin said that higher education in China, as a new force in invigorating the Chinese nation with the use of science and technology, should be integrated closely with socio-economic development and it will no longer be solely for elite in the country.

Quite a number of prestigious Chinese institutions of higher learning, among them Beijing (formerly called Peking) University and Qinghua (formerly known as Tsinghua) University, have narrowed their differences with some first-rate universities in Europe and America, and even exceeded them in terms of the ratio between graduates and undergraduates.

Qinghua University President Wang Dazhong said that with strenuous efforts in the next two or three decades, the outcome of major scientific researches at his university would reach the standards of the world's top universities, and it would also be possible to win a Nobel Prize.

In fact, higher education is only an epitome of China's dedication to run and popularize education throughout the country.

Apart from higher education, China has made all-round progress in its education strategy, including such projects as boosting compulsory education in poverty-ridden and outlying areas, and applying higher education's research results to industrial production.

Non-government education has also boomed in recent years, with the Ministry of Education approving 1,055 private schools by the end of this month.

As many experts acknowledge, China's education system is undergoing drastic, unprecedented changes.

Source: Xinhua News Agency

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