Class Struggles: China Tackles Vocational School Reform
Social stigma and lack of resources keep vocational schools from giving students the opportunities they need
职业教育之困：1600多万中专生的教育与就业困境
On paper, Xiaoxin’s schedule looks like that of any other overburdened teenager in China’s education system: crammed full of English, math, Chinese, and political theory courses from 6:40 a.m. to 8 p.m., with additional courses on railway signaling, service standards, and x-ray machine usage for her major, railway hospitality.
In reality, though, most of her schoolmates barely get a chance to pick up their x-ray wands in class, so busy are they chitchatting, reading novels, getting into shouting matches with teachers, and catching up on sleep after a night of video-gaming in the dorms—that is, the 50 percent of the class that hasn’t already dropped out of school to find work, or simply stopped showing up to lectures.
And after class, when millions of Xiaoxin’s fellow 18-year-olds around China are hunkering down to cram for the national college entrance exams (gaokao), her descriptions of dorm life consist of tales of burst pipes, hairdryers catching fire, broken washing machines, and classmates brawling over trivial matters like who can borrow a rechargeable card for showering. “Every day, I feel like I’m trying to survive in the wilderness,” she tells TWOC.
Xiaoxin, who asked not to use her real name in this story, is one of the 16.6 million teenagers enrolled in over 10,000 vocational secondary schools around China, making up around 40 percent of all students at high-school level education in the country.
Officially known as “Secondary Professional Schools (中等专业学校),” or zhongzhuan (中专) for short, these institutions teach technical or occupational skills for employment rather than prepare students for university, and have lately come under the public’s scrutiny for underfunding, out-of-date equipment and teaching materials, student apathy and misbehavior, and poor teaching standards.
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