Pros And Cons Of Quality Education

Suzhi Jiaoyu, which has often been loosely translated as quality education, was initiated in China in 1993 when it was included in The Compendium of China’s Educational Reform and Development. Quality education advocates that the primary and secondary education in China shift their focus from exam-oriented curricula to whole-person cultivation, maintaining and inspiring students’ passion for learning, keeping students engaged in the leaning process, and fostering in them creative and independent thinking skills. This concept of quality education was repeatedly brought up in national meetings and gained emphatic visibility in the public media, but it was not until 1996 that the national education committee set in gear several regional pilot

whether quality can be educated. Some educators are of the opinion that quality refers to the sum of physical, intellectual and emotional characteristics that an individual is born with. Following this line of reasoning, they maintain that an individual’s quality cannot be educated, or rather that the best education for an individual’s quality is to allow it to develop on its own by leaving it alone. The vague and broad connotations in this term became even more troublesome when the government tried to include more apparently irrelevant agendas in its 1999 Action Plan, such as the realization of the nine-year compulsory education, early childhood education, education for children with disabilities, education for ethnic minorities, and further standardization of the national language. In short, from the every beginning, the implementing agents, educators and teachers, suffered from an absence of concrete directions as to what the expected outcomes should look like. Such a conceptual ambiguity, unfortunately, is further compounded by an insufficient financial and structural

The biggest irony here is that the quality education, a concept that was designed to be an antidote to the exam-oriented system, was interpreted, implemented and integrated into the deep-seated mentality and got undermined at its very root. When the quality education subjects like music theory, instrument playing, art appreciation were introduced into the school curriculum, people naturally came up with a proposal to include those subjects into the Gaokao so as to ensure that the quality education curriculum would be diligently followed through. This proposal, however, changed the essence of quality education once and for all. For one thing, teachers started to teach the subjects the way they are most used to – rote memorization, repeated practices and reviews, and frequent tests and exams. These new subjects that were originally intended to rekindle the students’ interest and passion in study turned out to be more burden for them. The students, on the other hand, deal with the new subjects in the old manner as well; they do everything to get a good score in the Gaokao exam instead of following their interest and exploring their passion. Therefore, they are still staying up to memorize the rules in music theory and art appreciation; they will practice just a few tunes from Mozart or Beethoven for thousands of times because they have been most frequently tested