Education blog

Archive for April, 2010

Xia Da, an up-and-coming Chinese comics artist, has suddenly found herself famous in Japan. It’s not for the reasons she wanted, though.

Xia, one of Chinese comics’ biggest young stars and an admirer of Japanese manga (comic books) since her childhood, hoped to be recognized overseas for her bold style and serious topics. But instead, she found legions of drooling fanboys ogling pictures of her in a schoolgirl costume.

The photos show Xia, 29, without any make-up and wearing a student’s outfit, a look always guaranteed to stir up the libidos of Japanese comics fans, among whom the loli style, showing young girls, is disturbingly popular. They describe her as being as pretty as any of her child-like characters. The pictures spread rapidly on the Japanese Internet since first being published in March, and have earned her the name of “China’s cutest young cartoonist.”

A colleague of Xia’s said, “A photographer friend of Xia’s took these for fun a year ago, and put them on her blog. Then they were picked up by the editor of an online game, who photoshopped the pictures into a promotion for the game.”

“Our studio had words with them and stopped that, but when Xia’s work started being published in Japanese magazines, people wanted to know what she looked like. Then somebody found the pictures online and things spread from there, starting in Japan and now back in Chinese forums.”

Urdu and Swahili are among the minority languages that are hot majors.

“Which countries speak Urdu?” That’s a common question people ask Fan Ying, who majored in the language.

The graduate of Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) didn’t want to go through the trouble of explaining that Urdu is Pakistan’s official language again and again, so she just tells people her major was Spanish and that she can speak Urdu.

“People cast envious eyes upon me whenever they hear this,” Fan said. “I think studying a minority language has brought me many benefits. I have met people from different cultures and I can find a job that is relevant to my major.”

Right after her graduation in 2008, she got a job at ZTE Corp, which does business in Pakistan. She was sent to Pakistan a few months after taking the job.

In April, Beijing’s top three language universities will begin interviewing local applicants for instruction in minority languages. Competition to get in will be fierce because some majors won’t enroll new students this year and the total number of students will decline.

Xu Ye, admissions director for BFSU, told METRO that the university will teach 14 minority languages this year, five fewer than last year. Some majors only enroll students once every two years and other majors only once every four years.

BFSU programs in languages such as Burmese, Hausa and Urdu won’t enroll new students at all this year, he said.

Therefore, only 82 students will be admitted this year, 28 fewer than last year.

BFSU, the Beijing Language and Culture University and Beijing International Studies University will enroll 207 Beijing students in their departments of foreign minority languages. The universities estimate that more than 2,500 students will apply.

Minority languages have long been popular majors because they increase the chances to go abroad to experience different cultures and meet people with different backgrounds. It’s relatively easy to find a job, too.

Xu said the employment prospects for students studying minority languages are normally good, but it also depends on China’s foreign relations with the country in which the particular language is spoken.

“If China has sound foreign relations with a country, it is easier for students who study that country’s language to find a job,” he said.

Xu said the students in the Sinhalese program who will graduate in July have all landed a job. The university recruits new students for that major every four years. Sinhalese is the official language of Sri Lanka, which has stable and close economic and cultural exchanges with China.

All of the students majoring in Burmese have also found jobs, according to Xu.

He said institutions and enterprises that embrace students majoring in minority languages include government ministries, foreign joint ventures and the media.

Lin Fang, director of admissions for the Beijing Language and Culture University, said in an interview with the Beijing Times that 95 percent of graduates who studied minority languages could easily find jobs. Many students who study European languages choose to go to Europe to continue their postgraduate studies.

However, Xu said studying foreign minority languages is not easy.

“Most of the students started to learn the subject systematically when they entered university,” he said. “Many minority languages’ grammar is very different from Chinese. So students may have hard times learning it.” He urged students to speak and read a lot to better grasp any language. He also suggested students should also learn English well because it is a universal language and will be very helpful in the job market.

Xu told METRO that the BFSU entrance exam is divided into three parts: Reading a short article in English and answering the interviewer’s questions; creating a brief composition and telling it to interviewers in Chinese; and imitating the pronunciation of the minority language the prospect is seeking to pursue as a major.

He also suggested that applicants should have extroverted personalities, be interested in a new language and be willing to open their mouths to speak it all the time. BFSU launched six new foreign minority languages this year: Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Estonian and Maltese and Hibernian.

Xu said the European Union wants China to teach all languages from EU countries, so the Ministry of Education authorized BFSU to start the six majors.

Many educators believe the language skills students in those programs will acquire will open new doors.

Fan Ying quit her job in Pakistan last year because of the unstable political situation. She is now a civil servant in the culture department of the Jilin provincial government.

“Even though I am not in Pakistan anymore, Urdu is an essential part of my work and life,” Fan said.

 (Source: China Daily)

The Brasilia Confucius Institute on Monday started its first academic year to teach Chinese language and introduce Chinese culture.

It was the second such Chinese school in Brazil.

Both were formed to promote language and cultural exchanges between China and Brazil.

“With the platform installed, we can add many accessories. For example, we can organize cultural events, competitions on knowledge about China and also we can select the best students to do internships in China,” said Shu Jianping, cultural councilor from the Chinese embassy in Brazil.

Brazilian students are expected to take part in this year’s “Chinese Bridge Competition” which they participated in 2008 and 2009 only as observers.

The Chinese Bridge Competition is a speech contest for foreign Chinese-speakers.

“I think the Brazilians deserve the participation, because it is such an important country. And, like China, it is an emerging economy,” the embassy official added.

Local Brazilians also spoke highly of the Confucius institute which they take as a bridge for expanding bilateral cooperation.

“The inauguration of the Confucius Institute in Brasilia is the first major step along a long road of cooperation, which is a reciprocal demand coming from both sides.

“The institute will respond to this demand and will be a milestone in this cooperation not only concerning the language but also contributing to cultural and scientific exchanges,” said Ana Flavia Granja, international affairs advisor for the University of Brasilia, where the Brasilia Confucius Institute is based.

Institute director Chen Jiaying said he believes that making Chinese language better known in Brazil will contribute to improving relations between the two countries in other fields.

“I think mutual understanding is the basis for relations in all other areas. Knowing each other, we will have better results for developing relations in other fields,” he said.

The director has noticed that the number of Brazilian students taking interest in learning Chinese is on the rise, now with two groups of beginners instead of just one for a semester.

An additional small group of students have been removed from school in the Phoebe Prince case, according to a news release issued by Christine Sweklo, assistant superintendent of the Hadley Public Schools, media reported Wednesday.

Prince, 15, a freshman at South Hadley High School in western Massachusetts, was widely acknowledged to have been a victim of bullying.

She took her own life two months ago after enduring ceaseless bullying since the start of school in September.

Nine teenagers were charged Monday with bullying Prince until she committed suicide. The charges include stalking and statutory rape.

District attorney Elizabeth Scheibel described Prince as the target of a “nearly three month campaign of verbally assaultive behavior and threats of physical violence … It appears that (her) death on January 14th followed a tortuous day for her, in which she was subjected to verbal harassment and threatened physical abuse.”

The incident has sparked widespread, heated discussion of the problem of bullying in schools.

Mexico should aim to have 50 percent of its students going on to higher education by 2018, the director of Latin America’s largest educational institution said on Wednesday.

Mexico should have “a plan for a much wider coverage” of higher education, said Jose Narro Robles, director of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He said the coverage could reach 30 percent by 2012.

The Mexican government said in 2006 it wanted 30 percent of citizens at the relevant age enrolled in colleges by 2012.

The current figure is about 26 percent, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

All over the globe, national education systems address contradictory agenda. They must ensure fairness, help the weakest students, provide an environment in which the best students can excel, and encourage all students to learn to the best of their ability. In China, the contradictions faced by education policymakers are exacerbated by the intense competition for a seat in universities.

This competition creates several problems. First, to ensure fairness in selecting the best students, university administrators are forced to rely on examinations. Without exams, many students and their families would lose faith in the university selection process and accuse authorities of corruption. As a result of the reliance on exams, secondary education in China is entirely focused on exam preparations.

Some critics say that since Chinese secondary teachers focus on exam preparations, they do not have the time to encourage students to be creative, to develop their individual interests or to work on analytical skills that are not directly relevant to the exams. Besides, the focus on exam success alienates students who do not do well in exams. These students are likely to drop out of school altogether rather than face repeated failure in classes. The exam-centered nature of Chinese secondary education lets down the most elite as well as the most mediocre of Chinese students.

I have done research on education reform in Shandong province for over a decade and always found the competition intense. In 2006, I conducted a survey of households with a child in year six and found that all parents hoped that their children would attend university. Most were shocked that I could even ask such a question. “Of course” or “Doesn’t everyone want that” were common replies. The intensity of this desire is unlikely to change soon, but there are better and worse ways of dealing with it.

Campus Soccer program kicked off Thursday in Northeast China’s Changchun city, capital of Jilin Province, with 49 elementary schools here to bring soccer courses into their daily education schedules.

The program, which aims to build soccer training systems in schools, is believed to make contribution to popularizing soccer knowledge and skills and cultivating the reserve of this kind for the sport.

“The idea of campus soccer is to make all students participate in the game,” Xue Li, vice chairman of the Chinese Football Association, said at the launching ceremony of the program.

“There used to be few kids constituted football teams, and we are planning to ensure two or three soccer courses each week for all. Competitions between schools may be held on the weekends,” she added.

Authorized by the Chinese Football Association, the Campus Soccer program was jointly run by the Changchun Sports Bureau and Changchun Education Bureau.

China’s most popular magazine, known as the Chinese version of “Reader’s Digest,” will launch its first e-book version in May in a drive to expand its circulation, its publisher announced Wednesday.

The twice-monthly Duzhe (“Readers”), which sold an average 4 million copies of each edition last year, would be available to owners of electronic readers, said Peng Changcheng, general manager of Readers Publishing Media Co. Ltd..

“The launch of an e-book version of our magazine is an innovative attempt to further develop our brand and to appeal to a wider range of consumers,” Peng told Xinhua.

The display price and subscription rate of the e-book version, which would be sightly smaller than the traditional A4 size of the magazine, had yet to be finalized, Peng said.

The magazine, founded in March 1981 in Lanzhou, capital of northwest China’s Gansu Province, is China’s best-selling magazine, carrying articles on culture, life and inspirational topics, similar to “Reader’s Digest” in the United States.

In 2004, “Readers,” which is published only in Chinese, developed its overseas market and began selling in North America, Europe and Australia.

Chinese State Councilor Liu Yandong urged education experts and teachers to pool their wisdom to help revise textbooks for China’s elementary school and junior high school students.

Liu made the remark during a ceremony where experts in the advisory and working committees for textbook reform were officially appointed.

Liu said the two committees should play the role of thinktanks. New textbooks should be in the interest of students’ all-around development and lifelong learning, rather than focusing just on book learning.

The advisory committee is composed of 41 renowned educational experts who will contribute their insights and propose suggestions for the reform.

The working committee is composed of 116 experts in respective disciplines who are mostly teachers.

China’s Tsinghua University will hold a postgraduates’ summer school on construction, which aims to boost exchanges between Chinese and foreign postgraduate students, from June 28 to July 6 in Beijing.

Wu Fan, coordinator of the program, said the program is sponsored by the Department of Construction Management of Tsinghua and has got support from the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction.

The theme of this year’s summer school program is “Construction Practices in China: from the Forbidden City to the 2008 Olympic Venues”, Wu said.

Postgraduate students from Chinese mainland and their peers from universities including the University of Hong Kong, Pennsylvania State University and University of Melbourne will be joined by famous experts and senior business managers in relevant fields to exchange views, Wu said.

The summer school is one of the postgraduate education innovation programs promoted by the Ministry of Education.