Anyone that’s taught for more than 10 minutes in China’s public school system will attest to how craptastic the supplied text books are.
Chinese-produced pablum that bears the name of prominent Western universities in hopes that no one will notice that the content is blander than a bowl of zhou.
A recent Southern Weekend article reveals the dirty underside of the Chinese text book market and the seedy monopolies it has created.
From ESWN’s translation:
The supervisory government department publishes a list of “recommended books” in order to “purify the books used for teaching in elementary and secondary schools and to guarantee that they use excellent, authentic publications. This way, the students do not become harmed by poor-quality contraband books and audiotapes.” This goes against articles 30 and 35 of the anti-monopoly laws. It goes without say that the book list contains only products for which Company A has exclusive rights to distribute. We could not have access to those books from their publishers no matter what our price offer is. The supervisory government department requires all education departments and schools to order from this book list. This eliminates any chance for companies like ours to compete.
In order to prevent “surreptitious behavior,” Company A uses profit incentives to ensure that the education departments and schools will cooperate. Suppose a book costs 10 yuan; they will offer it to the education department at 8.5 yuan; the school will get the book from the education department at 9 yuan; the students will pay 10 yuan. In our industry, it is common knowledge that the cost of the book to the distributor is 2.5 yuan (or 3 yuan for a top quality book). We are able to offer the book to the schools at 5 yuan. Even if the school tags on some additional fees, the students should be paying only 6 yuan. When there is no competition in the market, the consumers suffer the most.
The “Company A” that the author speaks of is a “local powerhouse that belongs to the relevant government department which supervises school textbooks and guides.”
As is easy to see from this example, there’s very little incentive for the company to provide high quality books, but rather just ones with better profit margins, as there is no recourse from the schools, students or education departments if the product is bunk.
The article further explains just how massive the market is. A total of 220 million elementary and secondary school students, each student has seven or eight classes, and each class requires a supplementary guide. That’s a lot of paper.
And should schools or teachers put their student’s education above the profits of these conglomerates they get ratted out by spies (fellow students and teachers) that have been paid to keep an eye on the sweet little racket.
All this time I faulted the relevant departments at the schools I worked for, turns out they’re likely just as frustrated with the system as the foreign teachers are.
H/T to old34 for starting the thread at Raoul’s China Saloon.
Not surprising… but not acceptable either, and extremely short sighted – at least now we can blame officials for much of the crappy English we encounter on a day to day basis.
The most important factor in learning a foreign language is the quality of the textbook used – I strongly believe this from studying several foreign languages with teachers and textbooks of varying ability.
With this kind of situation local and regional governments throughout China are just repeatedly stabbing themselves in the gut, all for a few extra jiao.
This isn’t directed at Jeremy, but when I hear us complaining about textbooks as explanation for a class or the state of things, I can’t help but think:
It’s a poor workman…
I completely disagree. Granted, a teacher is hired to convey knowledge to a group of people, and thus should not need to rely on a book (good or bad) to do so. HOWEVER, a good textbook should support a pre-decided curriculum, while also providing the teacher with a guide by which to pace the material.
This is true for regular teachers, and is more so important for ESL teachers, who don’t have near the teacher training background that is required to be a full-on teacher (a 6 month TESL course hardly substitutes for a university degree and teacher’s college).
Best I remember you work at a university, and that’s a hugely different ball game than working in a primary or middle school where you’re trying to teach and pace the fundamentals of the language.
Of course a teacher is still going to be responsible for presenting the information in an informative, memorable and fun way, but most, if not all, the textbooks I’ve used in primary and middle school classes have often left me staring at several pages of random images with absolutely no grammar points to show the way, scratching my head asking, “WTF are they getting at here?”
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