United,Divided

Six-year-old Tommy sidles up to his teacher with a partially-drawn steel tape measure in his hand.“You want to see what is inside?” asks Tian Zhiming, or Uncle Xiaoming as he is called by his students at the Magic School, a tiny, independent educational cooperative in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. “I can help you,” he continues. “Just remember to put everything back where it belongs after seeing what’s inside.”

Tian snaps open the tape measure’s casing, and talks Tommy through some of the basic mechanical principles behind the function of this everyday object.

The Magic School is but one of the “mutual-aid” schools that have been springing up across China in recent years, which claim to offer children a nurturing learning environment free from the “coercion” and rote learning mandated in the country’s public schools. Tian Zhiming is the school’s sole full-time faculty member.

Niche

Independent schooling is a controversial topic in China, where State-approved standardized testing is often viewed as the sole litmus test for individual ability. However, many parents who have chosen to homeschool their children have discovered that, particularly in China’s ubiquitous singlechild families, the oppression of a competitive public schoolroom was simply replaced with the oppression of learning in isolation, with their offspring deprived of social contact with their peers.

In response to this perceived problem, like-minded parents have formed educational collectives like the Magic School, which currently has a roll of five students: Tommy and Lao Lao, two six-year-old boys, Qing Ru and You You, two 13-yearold girls, and Tian Zhiming’s two-year-old daughter.

The curriculum includes a number of activities unlikely to have ever been witnessed in a State schoolroom, including dismantling complex objects, playing video games and painting T-shirts.

Every school day begins with a morning of Chinese and English lessons, though the students are encouraged to study on their own with a teacher on hand to provide assistance, rather than simply copy a recited lesson out verbatim as is common in Chinese public schools. The afternoon is given over to activities organized by Tian Xiaoming, including field botany and zoology, theater, documentary film analysis, computing and Internet classes, gardening and baking.

Magic School was founded in May 2012 and has just moved into an apartment near Nanjing’s Olympic Sports Center. Each student’s family paid 10,000 yuan (US$1,563) as an initial investment, as well as sharing the school’s monthly operating costs of 3,500 yuan. The children themselves took part in decorating their new school, measuring the area of the rooms and even laying carpet. Books, stationery and other additional expenses are also paid for by the students’families.

Tian Zhiming, who holds a Master’s degree in technology as well as being a passion- ate lover of the liberal arts, is paid a modest salary of 3,000 yuan (US$470) each month.“The parents are helping me financially so that I can pursue what I love to do,” Tian told NewsChina.

The Magic School, and other initiatives like it, is now a feature of life in China’s big, affluent cities and other areas with a concentration of higher-income families. Beijing has its Ririxin School; Foshan, Guangzhou has its June Elementary School, and the tourist haven of Dali, Yunnan Province recently saw the opening of the Cangshan School.

According to estimates from China’s fledgling Learning At Home Alliance, founded by two Nanjing mothers whose website currently has 7,000 members, roughly 1,000 children in China are homeschooled. There are no current figures on the number of educational collectives currently active in China, but it is generally believed to be small.

Parents choosing to home-school their children have, however, struggled to cooper- ate with one another due to the distances between them and, more frequently, divergent educational priorities. Some insist that their children are taught English through Bible study. Others want a return to the learning of Chinese literary classics by rote. Securing a consensus on what students should learn was one of the greatest achievements of the Magic School’s founders. Now, however, they face a new challenge whether or not to enroll more students.

Expansion

Tian and the parents in charge of the collective hope more children will join the school. “[The school] has a very unstable structure,” Tommy’s mother told our reporter, explaining that, currently, the two 13-year-old girls pair up for learning and play, as do the two six-year-old boys. This fine balance would be disrupted if a child were to leave.

On the other hand, however, expanded enrollment would increase the burden on the parents who currently shoulder some operational duties at the school. More students would necessitate more faculty and possibly additional support staff, and possibly a larger building and a comprehensive ethical code. The parents question how far they could pursue expansion without compromising the school’s founding principles of academic and operational freedom.

Blame the Parents?

Tian Zhiming is in no doubt as to what is the main obstacle to creating a successful independent school system in China it’s the parents. “Except for caring about their children’s education and being disillusioned with the traditional school system, these people have virtually nothing in common,”he told NewsChina. Conflict between parents are a major reason why some educational collectives shut down once they attempt to expand.

Liberal parents familiar with Summerhill, Montessori, Sudbury Valley or Waldorf schools often wish to replicate these environments in their own home, and then subsequently attempt to impose them on any collective institution involving their child. Similarly, parents wedded to the perceived universal wisdom of the Chinese classics, which were the central canon of Chinese education for 3,000 years, may push for a return to pre-Revolutionary curricula, complete with the rote learning other parents believe has ruined the existing State system. Some want to turn home-schooling into a process of hot-housing geniuses, while others wish to allow their children complete creative freedom. Some parents prioritize teaching science and mathematics, others computing and technology, others music and art. All the while, children are pulled this way and that, from one curriculum to another, without settling into an educational routine.

It is impossible to predict the impact this well-meaning but often haphazard education will have upon home-schooled children. But it seems unlikely that China’s independent school system, in its present state at least, is likely to offer up a challenge to the country’s much-maligned but almost universally accepted State system.