Example research essay topic: Search For Meaning Chinese Society - 1,756 words

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Chinese Education There are many different approaches to studying education as whole as well as studying political education, which used to be a permanent part of education in China, each of which yields interesting insights into the changes in thought and consciousness arising in the process of rapid social and economic change over the last decade. Stanley Rosen's work has opened up to us the world of Chinese surveys, with all their revealing details on changing youth attitudes towards the party, the state and a range of moral issues. In spite of limitations in survey design and concerns about how forthright young people are in answering survey questions, this research probably gives us the most profound understanding of youth attitudes and values in the contemporary period. (Price, 1992: 57). Approaching the question from the opposite end, the teaching of moral-political education in Chinese schools, Ronald Price has analyzed the textbooks being used, bringing to light a series of emerging contradictions between traditional socialist values of serving the collective and new concerns about productivity, profit and the socialist commodity economy. While Price believes school textbooks have far less influence on moral-political behavior than other social influences, he makes the important point that students learn the vocabulary for thinking about moral political questions at school. (Kruze, 1991: 19 - 22).

This point was underlined for me by a lengthy conversation between a young Chinese university teacher and a socialist colleague of mine from Canada over some of the dilemmas of China's modernization. In replying to probing questions from the Canadian socialist, this teacher was able to articulate China's dilemma around the concept of a dichotomy between values of equity and efficiency. In my later reading of recent Chinese political texts, it was interesting to find this same discussion, suggesting how he had come to think in these terms. (Hayhoe, 1991: 109 - 114). A third very fruitful approach to studying education has been Gay Reed's analysis of the "Lei Feng" movement among Chinese youth. She suggests that it is not merely a tool for shaping youth values towards unquestioning political loyalty, as is often assumed from the Western perspective, but a more multidimensional phenomenon. The Lei Feng spirit has a humanistic appeal which parallels certain religious symbols in other societies and which has proven to be quite resilient in spite of rapidly changing youth values.

This research reveals the ongoing search for meaning in the lives of young people that belies more cynical dismissals of political education as a kind of shackle on the progress of modernization. (Reed, 1991: 34 - 5). At a deeper level than the use of education for explicit purposes of socialization, there is the issue of cultural meaning, and of the language available to young people for reflecting on and articulating the search for meaning. An interesting literature has appeared recently around the problem of political culture in China, which interprets political change processes in relation to both continuity and change within the patterns of Chinese culture. (6) Another approach focuses on popular culture, and sees it as originating in the tension between state and society, (7) a definition clearly linked to widespread recent interest in the possibilities of an emerging civil society in China. (8) This approach would probably see political education and political texts as part of official culture, yet these texts, in the pre-Tiananmen period at least, reflect some similar struggles for a sense of meaning to those found in the unofficial media. (Kruze, 1991: 19 - 22). As a framework for reflecting on the whole question of cultural meaning in the modernization process, I draw upon the work of Juergen Habermas. His profound reflections on the distortions of Western modernity yield a helpful way of thinking about the ideas of meaning and freedom, and their link to what Habermas defines as the "cultural life-world. " Habermas' framework for understanding education systems and social changes brings the issue of normative direction to the forefront, in contrast to the value neutral approaches of systems theory, and this makes it particularly provocative for reflecting on the change process in China. Further, we will take a look at the reforms of political education in Chinese universities in the period between 1985 and 1989, drawing on newspaper articles, textbooks and the research literature, to see how far they might be construed as a process of cultural rationalization.

We will also compare Chinese education with the US education system. (Perry, 1992: 1 - 13). The dynamic of change comes from autonomous economic and political forces, and there is little possibility for meaningful individual action. This macro factor has a significant influence on the education in China. In the rationalization of the life-world, which Habermas defines as a move from "normatively ascribed agreement to communicatively achieved understanding, " (10) there would be a re-linking of life-world and system, a restoration of moral debate to the realm of modern law and a place made for individual action within the ongoing dynamics of a system regulated by near-autonomous forces of instrumental reason. Thus freedom is seen in terms of the possibility of a human contribution to shaping ongoing social forces and meaning in terms of an ongoing dialogue that reinterprets traditional moral values in relation to an integrated understanding of change processes in the natural and social world. (11) It both arises from and shapes social change in a dialectical way. It is this process that offers a potential avenue of escape from the iron cage of modernity, towards a more humane vision of the future, rooted in a reintegration of aesthetic, moral and scientific knowledge. (Perry, 1992: 1 - 13).

This brief and highly simplified review of Habermas' key concepts may be helpful for reflecting on China's modernization process and particularly the issue of meaning within Chinese society. Perhaps the question of the survival of socialism in the Chinese context could be phrased in cultural rather than political terms. At a deeper level than the present regime's search for legitimacy, it may depend on how far and how effectively a process of cultural rationalization is allowed to unfold. In looking at the history of post-Liberation China it is interesting to note that development was seen in terms of socialist construction, not modernization, over the period from 1949 to the 1960 s. The Soviet patterns of higher education adopted in the fifties were to produce specialists to serve each of the sectors of the planned product economy. Knowledge in higher education was specifically linked to the "production" of socialist construction in all of the major sectors of the economy and polity.

I have argued elsewhere that this knowledge system made possible the persistence of patterns of political control and social order deeply rooted in the Confucian tradition. (12) In revolt against these patterns of control, Cultural Revolution activists sought to integrate all fields of knowledge in a unified revolutionary understanding of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong thought, yet in the end produced no viable alternative to the Soviet patterns. These were restored in 1978 and gradually reformed under the influences of older academics educated in the West before Liberation and of wide-ranging academic cooperation with North America and Europe. The highly specialized and compartmentalized knowledge patterns of an earlier era were gradually broadened with a notable opening up of the social and human sciences, also with greater integration of theoretical and practical fields in the natural sciences. These changes in the universities, which were largely academically inspired, led to tensions within the political system, as a new generation of students, educated in broader and more critical ways, began to make demands for political structure reform in the student movement of autumn 1986. (Hayhoe, 1991: 109 - 114). In 1978, with the revival of Soviet-derived academic patterns, the old political education courses were reinstated.

Party history, political economy and dialectical / historical materialism were required courses for all students, taking up 10 percent of their time, with the addition of courses in the history of the international Communist movement and scientific socialism for humanities students, who were to have 20 percent of their time devoted to formal political education courses. (15) Once again the role of political education was to maintain stability and order, as a kind of cultural subsystem, while all attention was focused on the economic challenge of the modernization program. Price's analysis of political textbooks at all levels of schooling confirms this, showing the strong emphasis on discipline that pervades the content of texts at every level. (16) Political education was to carry out the function of pattern maintenance, as the steering mechanisms of power and subsequently money provided the impetus for rapid social change. (Price, 1992: 57). However, the opening up of the higher education system to new areas of knowledge, the fostering of some interdisciplinary studies and the beginnings of greater freedom for the pursuit of individual aspirations led to a questioning of authoritative ideas and classical texts that were no longer so easily accepted as staple categories of cultural meaning. To use Habermas' terminology, the life-world, which consisted of a blend of Confucian and Marxist orthodoxy, was drawn into a process of rationalization in these new circumstances. "The cultural tradition must permit a reflective relation to itself; it must be so far stripped of its dogmatism as to permit in principle that interpretations stored in tradition be placed in question and subject to critical review. " (17) It was a process of this kind, I would suggest, that characterized the revisions and innovations made to political education texts and teaching in the 1980 s and that stimulated the education of a new generation of political instructors. (Hayhoe, 1991: 109 - 114).

Hardly had this process begun than a further challenge was thrown at political education, with the rapid burgeoning of the commodity economy and the new powers attached to money in Chinese society. Probably the most difficult issue of all in this new and more flexible attempt at meaning making was how to deal with the notion of a commodity economy, and the fascination money was exerting over people under the new conditions. While there was a genuine sense of some increased freedom in the reform process, the pressure on traditional patterns of meaning in the face of the money economy created a new sense of crisis. Coupled with this were the particular links between money and power in Chinese society. (Lawson, 1980). From about 1985, efforts were made to reform the standard education courses, which had been reinstated after 1978, to develop new courses...

Research essay sample on Search For Meaning Chinese Society