Vor drei Jahrzehnten begann China, ländliche Regionen in Industrieparks zu verwandeln, um ausländische Investoren anzuziehen. Heute erblüht eine neue Art von Bauprojekt in ländlichen Regionen: der Berufsbildungs-Park.
China's latest building binge: the education factory
Three decades ago, Chinese cities began turning rural land into industrial
parks to attract foreign investors. Today, a new kind of project is blooming in
China's countryside: the vocational education park.
Cities around China
are carving out tracts of land for school parks - dubbed "education factories" -
designed to train hundreds of thousands of students.
Fuelling their
drive are generous government subsidies and targets to increase the number of
skilled workers, part of Beijing's push to redirect China's economy away from
its investment-led past toward a more innovative, high-tech future.
But
the expansion comes even as many existing vocational schools are struggling to
live up to their promise.
"You can build as much as you want, but unless
you get good teachers, good curriculum and a system that assesses and rewards
high performing schools with more resources, it's just going to be a waste of
money," says Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program at
Stanford University and the author of many papers on vocational education in
China.
There is no question China needs to raise skill levels. Wayne
Zhang, who runs a home decor products factory in northeastern China, says that
finding skilled workers - in order to increase capacity or make more complex
products - is increasingly hard. Of the 100 such staff he set out to hire last
year, he has only been able to find 60.
As of 2010, just 24 percent of
China's workforce had attended at least some upper secondary school, compared
with an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of
74 percent, according to a study published by the Freeman Spogli Institute
for International Studies at Stanford University in February.
As the
labor force shrinks and ages, China also needs to coax more productivity out of
each worker. Worker training could help avoid the so-called "middle-income trap"
and, in theory, narrow a widening income gap that threatens social
stability.
Out of step
Lanzhou, capital of central Gansu province, reportedly expects to attract
more than 30 schools and 150,000 students to its vocational school park opening
in 2017. Ganzhou, in southern Jiangxi province, has been reported to be building
a vocational school district which hopes to have at least 10 vocational schools
and more than 100,000 students when it opens in 2018. Yunnan, Shandong and Hunan
provinces all have vocational school parks.
And yet, many Chinese
vocational schools already struggle to attract students. Vocational schools,
almost all state-run, are usually high schools, although China is pushing to
create more vocational universities.
But vocational education lacks the
prestige of conventional high school. Many teachers have never worked in the
industries they are preparing students to join.
One study of computing
schools found that only 10 percent of teachers had actually worked in the
sector. And too often, their critics say, the courses and teaching methods
vocational schools offer are out of step with the demands of the
economy.
Yu Zhongwen, former head of two vocational schools and the vice
chairman of the Chinese Society of Vocational and Technical Education, blames a
historic lack of government funding compared with the subsidies for traditional
education and insufficient corporate involvement in the vocational education
system.
The Ministry of Education declined a request for comment, saying
only that "relevant documents were still being researched and drafted".
Education factory town
In a rural area of Guiyang, the capital city of southwestern Guizhou
province, tree-covered hills are being razed to make room for the Qingzhen
Vocational Education City.
Seventeen schools have already agreed to be
part of the zone, including agricultural engineering, transportation,
construction and automotive schools. The zone has capacity for 35 schools and
300,000 students.
At the Guizhou Machinery Industry School, where
enrolment is expected to increase from about 7,000 students this year to 10,000
next year, vice president Xu Guoqing says that grouping schools together in a
new district will help dispel parents' concerns about the quality of vocational
education and lessen overlap in course offerings.
State subsidies
sweeten the deal. All of the students at Guizhou Machinery are on full
scholarships funded by the provincial government. Because they come from poor
areas, more than 80 percent of students receive a 2,000 yuan (315 dollar) annual
living expenses stipend from the central government.
Students said they
appreciated the schools' focus on practical skills, rather than the theory
taught in conventional high school or university.
"Going to class feels
like going to work in a factory," said Wu Wei, a student at the construction
school.
Indeed, one of the criticisms of China's vocational schools is
that rather than educating their students, some have simply shipped them off to
work at factories as interns under conditions that violate Chinese labor
law.
Guizhou Machinery Industry School's Xu says that what matters in
vocational education is not how big a school is, but how it is run. The stakes
are rising for China's vocational schools. Says Xu: "If we run things the old
way, we'll be left behind."