Comment

Money is simply textbook answer to education woes

By Meng Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-04 11:22

Immediately after the arrival of the Lunar New Year, the Ministry of Education announced its "New Year's resolution" devoting as much as 4 percent of the country's gross domestic product to education in 2010.

In fact, the "resolution" is hardly new. The goal of 4 percent of GDP has been on the ministry's agenda since 1993. Originally, officials expected to reach the target by the end of 2000. Unfortunately, nine years later, the goal is just that: a goal.

For a long time, critics have debated the reasons for the failure to meet the target. Some people even suggest that 4 percent is definitely not enough to support a growing education system in a big developing country such as China. Countries all over the world have managed to invest 4.9 percent of their GDP, on average, in education. The record percentage of GDP was reached in 1998.

Few Chinese worship material wealth. But we still believe that although money is not everything, without it, we are nothing. So we pin our hopes on money, hoping that one day with enough cash the country will establish its status as an education giant. But is money the only thing we lack to make our dream come true?

In 2008 the country spent a record 3.48 percent of its GDP on education. I am no economist and I can't predict China's GDP in 2010. But as one of the biggest emerging economies in the world, China, with or without the extra 0.52 percentage point spending rise, is still making a huge investment in schooling young people.

It is universally acknowledged that Beijing has the best educational "resources" in China. Take Tsinghua University and Peking University for example, the former received 3.59 billion yuan and the latter received 2.41 billion yuan in research funds from the government in 2008.

From the financial support they received in 2008, it is not difficult to extrapolate how much money those institutions may have garnered from the government over the years. But how come a country with such a large population is still waiting for its first Nobel laureate?

After spending 16 years as a student in the Chinese educational system, I couldn't figure out the answer until I went to the United Kingdom to pursue a master's degree.

One of my university lecturers there required students to generate our own interviews for a newspaper. He asked for big interviewees and I was in real panic. As an international student who only conducted the interview to finish homework, I didn't expect anyone to treat me seriously.

But through e-mails, I got replies from professors at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Harvard University and an economist at the International Monetary Fund. They answered my questions in details and offered lots of useful information. Even those who were not specialists in the area replied to my request. I also sent e-mails to several professors and lecturers at the top two universities in China and got no response.

The differences are not just in academia. During my yearlong study in the UK, I found that even though I told people that I was conducting interviews for journalism practice, they treated me no less than a professional journalist. It is hard to remember how many times I called local governments and asked silly questions. In China, as a student journalist, if you say you want to interview some governors for your school newspaper, most people believe you are daydreaming.