Distinctions between social classes inevitably lead to class conflict. That did not end in 1789 with the French Revolution or even in 2010 with the Arab Spring.
Class conflict has historically been the heedless playground of politicians. In 2016, we still see U.S. presidential hopefuls like Donald Trump stoking the embers of class division and discontent to their own political benefit.
Even a one-party system such as China’s is not immune. The 1966 Cultural Revolution took years to stabilize, and still its legacy haunts the Chinese government.
This time, China’s latest “revolution” is about access to higher education.
China’s middle-class parents, the city-dwelling “new consumers” who support China’s faltering economy, are denouncing government efforts to expand opportunities for higher education for students from less developed and more impoverished regions. In China’s state-run system of higher education, top schools are concentrated in big cities, while less academically successful, underfunded schools are distributed throughout the nation’s interior.
Parents, members of the emerging middle class, are troubled about their children’s access to education and the life-altering opportunities that enable parents to move their children from poverty to prosperity offered by postsecondary success.
The government reserves a good proportion of spaces in each university for students who live in the same city or province as the school, making it harder for applicants from the rural districts to get into the nation’s best schools.
Chinese government authorities have sought to address the inequity problem in recent years by admitting more students from less-represented regions to the top colleges, but it’s not enough to quell discontent between the city “haves” and the rural “not-have-so-much” social classes.
Increasingly common street demonstrations, many of them organized on social media, appear to have taken the authorities by surprise.
Aggravating the situation is what until now has been China’s unsparing university-admissions process — long a source of animosity between the expanding middle class and policy-makers.
Admission to a university is determined almost exclusively by a single national exam, the gaokao. The test is considered so important to a student’s prospects that many parents begin preparing their children for it before kindergarten. The government has threatened to send cheaters to jail for up to seven years.
Canadian university requirements are fairly straightforward. But some observers claim that social class distinctions do play an indirect part in access to a university education here.
In most cases, admission is based largely on academic marks gained in high school, generally Grade 12, although some schools also consider Grade 11 marks.
A 2015 Statistics Canada report says the reason for the higher performance and increased university access of private-school students is their socio-economic status, which includes a higher family income and better-educated parents.
“No differences in outcomes were attributable to school resources and practices,” the report concludes.
Canadian higher education, according to some observers, has an elitism that often goes unnoticed.
Writing in Maclean’s in 2011, researcher Josh Dehass described how students were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with 600-person theatre lectures where professors were inaccessible to student questions.
Elite universities such as McMaster in Hamilton have responded with the Integrated Science program, which has small classes specifically for students with extremely high marks in high-school math.
Proponents of these programs and courses aren’t calling them elite. But there’s a common theme. Schools are creating space for the academically superior students, and these “boutique” research-intensive programs offer more contact with professors and more academic work.
Not everyone agrees with the elitism implied by “boutique” programs.
In a debate held last year in Ottawa by the MacDonald Laurier Institute, Lloyd Axworthy, former president of the University of Winnipeg and a former federal cabinet minister, explained the importance of access to the opportunities universities offer: “Everybody deserves a chance, a choice, an opportunity. I think if, all of a sudden, we’re talking about substantially reducing enrolment, all we’re talking about is going back to an ivory tower that serves privileged young people and begins to ignore … the enormous creative energy of this diverse country.”
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
