However, in contrast to the gaokao students at Bashu, the English, vocational, and etiquette classes taken by migrant workers in Dongguan come from a much more individual and self-reliant mentality. The students work by day and pay for their evening classes themselves; they do this in order to gain qualifications for a promotion, a better job in another factory, or a clerical job; their parents could be hours or days away. And the students who are not so afraid to make mistakes will make money by teaching their own courses to older white collar workers, even if their own English seems terribly ungrammatical.

James Fallows did some entries on his blog (http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/education/, all in May 2009) on the gaokao and education in China, very relevant further reading with comments from students and Western teachers in China.

One reader also notes the memorization approach to learning (and teaching):

“As an example, I work at a medical university with over 100 foreign students. A few of the students told me that they were attending a lecture one time, given by a Chinese student, in English. They noticed very quickly that they were able to read exactly what the student was saying as she said it from their textbook because she had memorized, word for word, her entire lecture. Another example can be seen with students who take the post-graduate entrance examination and memorize, again word for word, all the essays that will be tested in the exam.”

(http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/further_on_the.php#more)

Much of the pressure to succeed comes from the culture and from self-interest. What I know here is pretty superficial, but I think the test-taking thing goes back to the history of Confucian civil service exams that were comparably grueling and egalitarian. Those tests mattered for hundreds of years. One difference is there was a chance to study again and retake the test if you didn’t score high enough. The test, or at least the way of taking tests, carried over into some other Asian countries like Vietnam and Japan. I remember reading about Ho Chi Minh and how his father was a mandarin, but he didn’t pass the exam on his first try. And David Halberstam’s The Reckoning (about Nissan and Ford through the 1980s), I read about either a Nissan engineer or a top government bureaucrat in Japan who spent six months cramming for his country’s test to get into a top college.

The other cultural pressure that seems to mix poorly with this test-taking tradition is the way some parents in this documentary think helicopter parenting is the only kind of parenting. Li Mengjia, the girl whose parents cook her breakfast and do her chores, hilariously is told by her dad not to burn too much energy in the morning, after she said she went running for five minutes. The student whose parents rented a hotel near the exam site coughs, and his dad suggests lozenges, his mom tells him to drink some water, as if his parents still don’t remember that he turned 18. Even the girl whose father is a military official, and who we hear is more independent than her classmates, tells us that her parents worry about every little detail, including whether she has enough blankets when she sleeps.

Something to bear in mind is that young migrant workers who head to the cities face similar pressures. Many of them send money they earn back to their parents in the countryside. There’s another Wide Angle episode, To Have and Have Not, that spends some time on their situation.