Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey

I was traveling in China during June and early July, and found a surprising degree of curiosity about and even enthusiasm for homeschooling. As readers of our book may know, several of our children play with the Music from China youth orchestra. Based in New York, the orchestra traveled to Shanghai this year to practice and play with the Shanghai Children’s Palace orchestra. On the way to Shanghai with the children, I stopped for meetings and interviews in several Chinese cities.

In Shanghai, a newspaper editor told me that China could learn from American homeschoolers how to include morality in the curriculum. He talked about Run Run Fan, the teacher who not only left his students in the classroom and ran away during the Sichuan earthquake, but later insisted in blog posts and debates that he had a perfect right to do so. China’s netizens rose to Fan’s defense, and the editor saw in this support evidence that China’s population has lost its traditional moral sense. “China needs homeschooling,” he said. Although homeschooling is now illegal in China, some small private schools are beginning to return to China’s tradition of small classes, close personal relationships, and an emphasis Confucian moral instruction.

In Beijing, another editor said that he would like to homeschool his daughter, so that she would have a chance to read the great books, not only China’s but those of the West, and really engage with them instead of merely preparing for tests.

Tests have long been the focus of China’s educational system — beginning with the Imperial Examination System — and access to higher education, jobs and so forth still depends on success at the gaokao, China’s supremely high-stakes test . Raymond Zhou of the China Daily wrote of the gaokao:

What I mean to say is, this system of selecting the brightest for the institution of “proud sons of heaven” is at best a loophole-ridden sieve that often fails to separate wheat from the chaff and at worst a smothering bag for real talent.

It depends heavily on memorization of cut-and-dried snippets of textbook knowledge that most youngsters tend to gobble up without chewing and tasting. If anything, it is a fertile ground for conformity.

He went on to say:

I want to say to all the gaokao students: if you achieve a high score and get admitted into the school of your choice, my congratulations; but if you don’t live up to your parents’ expectation in a one-size-fits-all test, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure. There are so many things about you that gaokao cannot test, and you may well excel without participating in a flawed educational structure.

Is the time ripe for the birth of a Chinese homeschooling movement? It would take some creative structuring to comply with the laws, of course, and enough people willing to cock a snook at the gaokao and forge their own way.

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