by Lenora Chu
Children who didn’t sit were admonished. A little girl who wandered over to the water cooler was told: “It’s not time for drinking water yet. Sit down.” Another girl was enticed by a play kitchen and two pieces of plastic fruit in the corner. Teacher Li spotted her and in two flashes bounded over, lifted her by the armpits to standing, and placed her back in her seat. Not a word was said.
By ten a.m. I needed to go to the restroom but I was afraid to cause a disturbance by standing. The teachers hadn’t told the children they could not get water without asking, play with toys in the corner, or speak without being spoken to. Yet when children overstepped boundaries they didn’t know existed, they were corralled back into place. It was learning by trial and error, and I imagined that the one thing that would quickly become clear to a child was that sitting quietly with feet and hands in place was the safest thing to do. So when Pan Li Bao approached me, I was fearful. She was a chubby girl with two spindly black pigtails, and she had something to say.
“My mom still hasn’t come,” Little Pigtails said to me, eyes imploring. I glanced at Wang. She hadn’t seen us yet.
“You cannot come back here,” I said to Little Pigtails as quietly and forcefully as I could.
“My mom still hasn’t come. My mom went to work,” she said, grasping my forearm.
“Your mom will come in the afternoon,” I whispered fervently from my chair. “Now sit down!” Master Wang spotted us at that moment, and in a bound she scooped up Little Pigtails, depositing her back in the U-shaped formation. She’d stepped over my legs to squeeze past, and I thought I detected a glance of disapproval.
In another minute, Little Pigtails was back. This time she put a furry brown stuffed animal in my lap, a moose wearing a T-shirt with a green M&M character on it.
Pigtails pointed at the M&M on the T-shirt, focusing on its oversize white eyes with googly black pupils. “Wo hai pa—I’m scared,” she said. I glanced around the classroom. There were characters with buggy eyes everywhere. Little Pigtails would have a hard time this year.
“There is nothing to be scared of,” I told her. “This is a cartoon character. He is friendly.” But she wasn’t listening.
“I’m scared, I’m scared,” she said.
“Be quiet. Sit down,” I said, handing the moose back to her.
I’m scared, too, I thought. I’m scared Master Wang is going to boot me from this classroom for creating a fracas. Little Pigtails chose that moment to climb into my lap.
“Take it away, take it away,” she said, trying to put the moose in my hands. Oh what the hell, I thought. I grabbed the offending moose and placed it under my chair. I glanced over at Master Wang, who was working on Little Pumpkin. Pop up, push down. Pop up, push down. Soon Wang’s razor-sharp sense for bodies out of place would be drawn to my corner of the classroom.
“Go sit down,” I whispered to Pigtails. She didn’t move. I was desperate and grasping at whatever I could to make her obey. “Go sit down or your mom won’t come get you today!” I said firmly. The moment the words came out, I felt ashamed.
“Mama!” wailed Little Pigtails. I wanted to comfort her, but she was out of place and soon enough Master Wang’s ire would focus in on me. The urgency hit me, rising up from my belly into my throat, and I yelped at the little girl: “Go sit down!” I twisted out of her grasp and gently nudged her off my lap. I pointed toward her chair.
I was no better than the teachers. But order had been restored.
* * *
By day two, it was clear to me that Master Wang and Teacher Li had an implicit good cop–bad cop arrangement. Li would instruct class while Wang would hover over children, eyeing hands and feet to ensure proper placement.
“They’re pretty used to it already,” Li had told me that morning, with a nod of satisfaction toward the children sitting in a U-shaped formation, while Master Wang marched nearby.
On day three, the teachers began to explain to the children what was expected of them. It was the clearest directive yet on the rules of the classroom. The instruction came in the form of a song:
I am a good baby
Little hands always in place
Little feet refined
Little ears listening well
Little eyes looking at the teacher
Before I speak, always raising my hand
The teachers had the children sing along, urging them to keep time with their hands. They reinforced the message with candy. A visiting teacher, Teacher Tang, came in with a plastic vial of Skittles.
“Isn’t it fragrant?” said Tang, marching around the U, just as Wang had the day before. She shook the vial as she walked, and the candy made a jolly, tinkling sound.
“Take a sniff,” she said, pausing before each child. She tipped the container carefully so each of them could get a whiff and a glimpse of the colorful pellets inside.
“Aren’t they colorful?” she asked the group.
“Yes, Teacher!”
“Who’s sitting well? Whoever’s sitting well will get a piece of candy,” Tang said.
Several children piped in. “I am, I am! I am, Teacher!”
Teacher Tang made a show of examining placement of hands, feet, knees, before nodding approval and doling out candy, piece by piece.
The next day, the same exercise was performed with red star stickers. “You can’t go home unless you get a red star,” Master Wang stated clearly while she walked the U, appraising each child. As she pressed star stickers onto foreheads, she made an example of every recipient.
“This student didn’t waste any rice today, so he gets a star.”
“This student fell asleep quickly at nap time, so she gets a star.”
“This student sat nicely today, so he gets a star.” I now better understood the significance of Rainey’s early days in school, when he came home with a star in the middle of his forehead. I wondered what he’d done—or not done—on the days his forehead was clean. I also realized Rainey’s developing habit of bartering and negotiating—“I’ll tell you if you let me watch Thomas the Train”—might spring from the action-reward loop Chinese teachers deployed.
Clear rules began to emerge for Pumpkin and his classmates: Don’t break snack-time biscuits in two. Water can be drunk only during water breaks. No talking while lining up. No talking during lunch. Open your mouths wide “like a lion” to make room for food. Further instruction was given in song:
When the teacher is talking, you cannot talk.
When the teacher is talking, you cannot get your toy and play.
When the teacher is talking, you cannot wander around.
Bathroom trips happened as a class, twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon, with the children forming a single-file line and walking slowly down the hall along double yellow lines. This was what the teachers called “train” formation, with hands placed on the hips of the child in front of you. Children who needed to pee outside of bathroom time could use the chamber pot in the corner of the classroom. At the end of the day you could lift the red plastic lid to see a gallon’s worth of accumulated pee, and possibly even a few floating brown logs, always a source of fascination for the children.
Lunch was eaten in the hallway—there was no space for meals in the classroom—at tiny tables pushed up against the walls. A meal might be a quail egg over steamed broccoli, chicken and rice, or a section of Chinese sausage laid on top of fried noodles. Children were urged to finish their meals, and the consequences were clear: “Do you want to get up from the table? Then eat your rice. If you don’t eat the egg, your mom won’t come to get you today.”
Is that how they got Rainey to eat eggs? I wondered.
The teachers were not without kindness; at times—usually when the children were sitting—Master Wang would flash smiles at her tiny charges. Another time, a little girl had been bitten by another classmate, and Wang held her for a few minutes, stroking her hair. Meanwhile, the biter had been positioned in a chair at the front of the class, ma
de to face his twenty-seven classmates, who stared past him for a half hour while a TV blared behind his head. It was a classic shaming ritual, and indeed the boy didn’t bite or hit again that day. Little Pigtails was still having trouble with her M&M moose and brought it over to me several times. “I’m scared. Take it away, take it away.”
One time Wang came over. “What’s the problem?” she asked Little Pigtails. The child’s voice failed her, and she began to cry. She could only point at the moose, her sobs increasing in intensity. After some time, Wang adjudicated the matter: “No playing with your toy during class. I’ll put the moose here so it can wait for you to finish class. Now sit down!” Wang placed the moose on a shelf six inches from Little Pigtails’s chair, M&M’s google eyes focused right on her face. Pigtails sat there, staring back, still in tears. When Wang wasn’t looking, I kicked the moose under a chair.
By now Little Pumpkin’s name was imprinted in my memory, as the teachers had screamed it so many times. Wang Wu Ze, sit down! Wang Wu Ze, put your two feet side by side! Wang Wu Ze, what is wrong with you? Do you want your mommy to come get you today?
Little Pumpkin was terrible at flying under the radar. First of all, he was a head taller than his classmates and full of energy. I sensed this was the most troublesome combination for a Chinese schoolboy—large and lively. Besides that, I’d seen him four days in a row and he was always wearing a brightly colored shirt. He lacked good camouflage. One time he was particularly offensive to the teachers—he had wandered from his chair toward a few toys in the corner during a lesson while Teacher Wang was talking—and she really lost her temper.
“Wang Wu Ze, you don’t get a chair. YOU WILL STAND!” In three leaps she was over by his side and swatted his chair away. It fell over, clattered against the floor a few times, then lay still. All the children fell silent, watching, and I also froze in my chair at the back of the room. I was keenly aware that an acquaintance had secured my way into the classroom by presenting me as an observer, and although I was disturbed by what I was seeing, I didn’t feel it was my place to intervene in any way. I was gradually becoming captive to this situation.
Little Pumpkin looked at the toppled chair and tears came to his eyes. Suddenly all he wanted was that chair.
“I want to sit, I want to sit.” He grasped for Master Wang’s arms, seeking comfort, but she flung them out of reach. Little Pumpkin then reached for her hips, attempting an awkward hug, but she stepped away.
“Bu bao—I won’t hold you,” she said to the top of his head. “Do you want a chair? Do you want a chair now?”
“Yes, yes, I want a chair.”
“Then you sit in it,” Wang said. “If you don’t sit in it, I won’t give it to you. And your mom won’t come get you after school.”
* * *
The Chinese always have an eye toward efficiency, and sitting accomplishes many goals at once. It imprints the relationship between teacher and student in a physical way, with the master standing tall and the subject relegated to a lower elevation. Sitting is also a convenient way to maintain order in a classroom rammed full of little bodies.
In America, many early educators favor circle time, where children and teachers sit side by side in a giant loop. “Circle up,” they’d say, many times a day. Teachers and children gaze upon each other at eye level.
The Chinese I spoke with consider this arrangement extremely odd.
“The children stand up and come in and out of the circle whenever they wish,” said Little Pumpkin’s Teacher Li, who once stood witness to this phenomenon. “We don’t have that luxury in China. You can’t just get up and get water when you’re in class. There are a lot of kids, and they need to be sitting. You can’t just do whatever you want. There have to be yaoqiu—standards.”
But should three-year-olds be expected to achieve sitting? Aren’t the authoritarian methods required to get there a bit harsh? I dare not ask Little Pumpkin’s teachers, so I sought out the expert Guo Li Ping.
Guo Li Ping educates preschool teachers at one of China’s top universities for early childhood education. His faculty profile states that he specializes in the cognitive development of children, and he has published research reports evaluating the quality of early education in China. I ask him to coffee, my head brimming with questions about disciplinary style.
“The difference between the American and Chinese styles of education has to do with God,” he says.
“God?” I ask Guo, who sits across from me in a Shanghai café, sipping a latte. Westerners have the Church and the authority of God, while the Chinese have their teachers, he explained. In the United States, many children attend church from a young age, so the average kid will learn from Sunday sermons when to speak, when to sit, when to pray, and when to break for a meal, he told me. “Internalization of the rules starts from a very young age.” Chinese children must have rules of behavior impressed upon them externally.
“And that’s where the teachers come in,” Guo says, emphasizing his declaration with a lift of his latte. “The Chinese have no religion, and so there is no one else to teach the rules of behavior. Teachers are the ultimate authority.”
I wasn’t sure about the link between church and schoolhouse behavior, but I found it fascinating that a Chinese researcher accepted such an idea as fact.
“Why do teachers yell in class here?” I ask.
Here, Guo began to make sense. “Speaking loudly is tradition in China,” he said. “China is an agricultural society, and in rural areas speaking loudly makes people feel happy and lively.” I moved on to threat making by teachers as a classroom technique.
“Yes, this is not what we want,” Guo says, shaking his head. “Nowadays we try to teach that threatening children cannot be included in our education system. But in practice, there will be problems. In our traditional culture, teachers are in a higher class than students, which influences the way they treat them. In America, teachers respect children as individuals, but in China the individual is stressed less than society.”
In other words, Confucius and the ideal of social harmony still have an effect on classroom dynamics.
I knew from just a few days of observing at Sinan Kindergarten that such harsh methods might be critical to keeping order in crowded classrooms, especially when students outnumber teachers by large ratios. Guo Li Ping confirmed that “with more than fifty children in a classroom, it’s simply impossible to let children step out of line. Teachers can only criticize and control. Criticize and control.”
Indeed, the numbers for Chinese classroom sizes are legendary. Forty. Sixty. Seventy-five. In the countryside it’s not unheard of to cram more than one hundred students into a single room.
Professor Guo acknowledged this problem. He’d spent a year as a visiting professor at Columbia University and visited schools around the United States. His time abroad had impressed him with one thing: Westerners have the luxury of roominess. “If Chinese children could have as much space as children in the West, they would feel amazing,” he said.
My Chinese friend Amanda offered a more sinister explanation for a teacher’s harsh methods. A student at a top Shanghai high school, she was preparing to apply for colleges in America. We’d been introduced by a mutual friend.
Why, I asked her, are conformity and obeisance so important?
Amanda was fresh from a yearlong exchange at a US high school, which gave her a better understanding of both Chinese and Western education. She’d been reading Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, and a passage leapt out at her. “I think this accurately describes the situation and principle of preschools now in China,” she told me:
The environment in which they are raised tries to make every human being unfree by always keeping the smallest number of possibilities in front of them. . . . We describe a child as having a good character when its narrow adherence to what already exists becomes visible, the child testifies to its awakening sense of community; on the basis of this sense of community, it will late
r become useful to its state or its class.
* * *
At Harmony Kindergarten at the end of the week, the children were sufficiently subdued that Wang and Li attempted an art class. It would be an exercise in drawing rain.
“Rain falls from the sky to the ground and comes in little dots,” Teacher Li said, demonstrating on a piece of paper tacked to a corkboard. She methodically populated a blank white paper with dots that fell from top to bottom, and then filled the page from left to right. The children watched.
Li and Wang immediately fell into good cop–bad cop routine again. Master Wang placed a marker and sheet of paper in front of each child.
“Let’s draw the rain,” Li said. “Begin!”
“Marker moves from top to bottom,” Wang said.
In Li’s classroom, rain does not blow sideways, nor does it hurtle to the earth in sheets. There are no hurricanes or monsoons. There is no figurative rain, such as raining tears, or raining frogs, or raining cats and dogs. There is no purple rain. In this classroom, rain is comprised only of tear-shaped droplets of water that fall from sky to ground.
“This is drawn very well,” Li said, picking up a paper and showing it to the class. “This is very much like rain,” she said of another artwork. “This rain falls nicely from top to bottom,” she effused, remarking on another student’s work.
I glanced over at Little Pumpkin. He was planted in his chair, but his paper showed no such order. Thick purple streaks crisscrossed the page, right to left, left to right, sideways, diagonally, randomly, obliquely. In one corner he’d simply pressed the marker down and moved it in erratic circles. His world looked like a lava lamp gone psychedelic, with blobs of purple floating across the page. I was afraid for him.
Later, on their way back from bathroom break, the teachers stopped the children from coming into the classroom. They stood single file between the double yellow lines in the hallway, as I hung back near the end of the line.
“Who’s standing nicely?” Master Wang asked. Silence.