INTRODUCTION
In China, the public education is run by the Ministry of Education. All people in China must attend primary school for either five or six years and junior high school for either three or four years. These two periods are collectively called “nine-year compulsory education” and no tuition fees are required. However, students have to pay for high school studies. By 1999, primary school education had become generalized in most regions of China and mandatory nine-year compulsory education effectively now covers 85% of the population (Xiaohuan, 2002). For post-secondary studies, as of 2011, there were 2,409 institutions of higher learning in China, along with 1.39 million full-time teachers and 23 million students (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2011). From these statistics, it is easy to see that the Chinese education system affects a large group of people, ranging from students, to teachers, to families. In its enormous quest to educate the masses, the Chinese educational system has developed a system that is rigidly hierarchical and forces every student to take the same educational path. The goal of this path is for students to get into the best school at every stage of their study career, ending with getting into a good university. The definition of “good school” is one with good education resources, like instructors, hardware, etc. If students get into a good school at one stage, they are more likely to get into a good school at the next stage. This successive series of advancement means that those who fail to achieve admission in a reputable
school at the early educational stages will have less of a chance of getting into good schools in the future. This could ultimately translate to reduced career opportunities.
The government developed the current educational system, which is highly unequal. It is the system that is causing all of the problems, so to eliminate the problems, the system must be dealt with.
Many factors contribute to making the Chinese education system hierarchical. The most important of these is the key school system and the entrance examination system. Key schools are those with the best education resources, including the best teachers and students. The purpose of the entrance examination is to select the best students for the key schools. However, the exam system is full of corruption, so that the children of rich and powerful people have a better chance of getting into key schools. Because only a small percentage of students can access these schools in the current educational system, the corruption benefits the wealthy and powerful but disadvantages others. This is unfair. Moreover, under these circumstances, everybody is driven to compete, so not only students but also their families face huge performance pressures.
This leads us to the primary goal here, which is to design a new educational system that can inhibit inequality. Such a system would provide multiple routes for students to follow rather than just one route. However, this is a huge undertaking that cannot be achieved within a short time, so a feasible alternative would be dealing with the pressure. The design process will work around this point. Eight different concepts were generated in order to meet the needs of different scenarios, three of which were selected to generate a compact design. The final goal is to teach students how to manage their time more effectively within a learning environment that stresses health and wellbeing. Through this design, students will not only be motivated but also empowered with the skills to effectively handle all pressure sources (e.g., teachers, parental expectations, workload, etc.) that impact their day-to-day study lives.
In response to these perceived issues of unfairness and stress, the government attempted to end this exam-oriented education by shortening the textbooks and including less information. However, this was essentially useless because it did not fix the problems of inequality and stress that were inherent in the system. Eventually, the contents that had been cut out of textbooks came back in other forms, such as extracurricular exercise books. Clearly, shortening textbooks was not a successful strategy.
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