China's graduate education system has come under fire recently for
laying too much emphasis on numbers and publications rather than on
the process of learning and research, impeding valuable national
educational progress, according to the National Library of China's
curator, Ren Jiyu.
In
an interview with the People's Daily, Ren Jiyu has said that
graduate education in China has gone astray by demanding that
students publish more, and that there is an imbalance in the
numbers of tutors to students. This, he says, impairs graduate
students' ability to progress and, in turn, affects the national
educational progress.
According to this view, the current graduate education code over
emphasizes quantified evaluation. For example, a liberal arts
graduate is required to publish two treatises on "core periodicals"
and write a degree dissertation of no less than 100,000 Chinese
characters to obtain a degree. Harsh requirements like this make it
very hard for students to concentrate on their specific study.
Students often start their combination of papers before they get
properly familiar with their subject. Often this means they avoid
primary texts, and inevitably can mean that they plagiarize, the
thesis can ending up a work of some fiction.
Ren Jiyu goes on to say that it is not uncommon for some graduate
students to contract editors of academic publications through tutor
connections in an effort to publish, some even writing anonymous
letters of recommendations or publishing anonymous reviews to
increase their chances. In the past, he points out, masters of an
academic discipline would work and re-work arguments until they
were sure they were good enough for publication. Now, Ren says,
because of the size of each thesis, the quality is likely to be
somewhat watered-down:
"If all of the tens of thousands of master's and doctoral students
are supposed to publish theses on 'core periodicals,' how much
space will be enough? If every doctoral dissertation has around
100,000 Chinese characters, how can its author avoid poor quality
and plagiarism?"
Humanity and social science subjects, such as history and
philosophy, often have lengthy research topics that can turn out to
be very time-consuming and, because of the problem of the
restrictive nature of its empirical research, problematic for the
student in the current educational climate. Ren suggests that
greater flexibility and more effective means should be open to the
students of liberal arts subjects.
"Many renowned professors of the past, such as Fung Yu-Lan, felt
very tired at the end of the academic year, even though they may
have instructed just one student in that period. This style of
personal passing on of knowledge is no doubt outdated, but how can
those tutors manage now to instruct 10 graduate students? Can they
guarantee their students academic standards anymore?"
He
says that today postgrad students, including those taking science
and technology degrees, can be too pragmatic. They don't always
seek a good school for their own interests but for the future it
will afford them, which he understands means money. A lack of
academic ambition and interests, and a love of the subject, has
contributed to the rarity of outstanding scholarship in many
fields, he adds.
According to Ren, the future of academic prosperity, in any
discipline, depends on more than funds and the living standards of
the staff and students of the colleges; it depends on re-thinking
the existing graduate education system in order to build a more
favorable environment for the growth of young researchers.
(人民日報 [People's Daily],
translated for china.org.cn by Chen Chao, February 25, 2003)