Educational Inequality in China 黄晓娟 1048520 第三次作文

In modern society, education equality consists of three aspects according to a multitude of scholars: equality of right, opportunity and outcome. The equal right to be educated should be given to every one. As for equal opportunities, there are mainly two types of interpretation: equal opportunity into education system and equal opportunity to participate in educational activities. Equality of educational outcomes indicates that people educated by schools or other training programs with the same quality and content may have the same expectations on future development. And education equality is the ultimate goal of national education. It is always easy to say than to do it. This old saying can best summarize the present situation of Chinese education and we are still far from the realization of the three equalities. And education, which was long praised as the great equalizer, no longer seems to be performing as advertised. By analyzing the current educational situation, we are often so surprised to find out how serious the gender and urban-rural educational inequality are!
It is wildly acknowledged that education attainment is not only an indicator of social status itself, it is also linked closely to the employment opportunities and occupational status in today's Chinese society. And one of the encouraging news is that there are indeed some females' fates who have been changed because of their attainment of education. Yet in China's higher education, females are still not in an advantageous position when compared to males. First of all, female students have got to get a higher enrollment scores than male students since that girls usually obtain remarkably high marks in the College Entrance Examination (CEE) especially in the subjects of English and Chinese. In the departments of foreign languages, female students generally do better than male students yet when they graduate from the university; male students are more popular than females despite that they are of a peer-level. Of the applicants for university lecturers, females often have to reach a higher academic level than their male counterparts predominantly in language teaching. For instance, females are required to obtain a doctorate degree while males a master's degree. And those who are in charge of employment of faculty use a famous saying "When a thing is scarce, it is precious." to conceal their ***ism. Another extremely interesting thing is that a girl who has a higher diploma has more difficulties in finding a boyfriend. Say, a boy who only has a bachelor degree will scarcely find a girl with a master or doctoral degree as his girlfriend, not to mention marries her! And males elucidate that highly-educated females may hurt their dignity and give them much pressure! For those females, being well educated and reaching a higher academic achievement means the sacrifice of happiness in marriage and family. Compared with the old days, women's role has not yet changed essentially since they do not enjoy the equality which may be brought by education, and the gender inequality continues to be one of the great problems in Chinese society.
Besides the gender inequality, there exists a great disparity in educational opportunities among rural and urban Chinese students. And this type of unfairness is conspicuously manifested in the serious imbalance of distribution of funding and other educational resources between in urban and rural areas. In recent years, only one third of the national budget expenditure is invested into rural basic education and the greater part of the budget is concentrated in urban areas. The gap is kind of remarkable and the difference is sometimes in the range of 68-225%. There are several factors resulting in the educational inequality between rural and urban areas in China. To begin with, we have to mention that it is the household registration system, the core of China urban-rural dual system, severely restricts population flow into the city, hindering the allocation of human and labor resources. Thus urban areas can obtain more human, financial and other resources than rural areas in the proportion and the total amount of investment as well as education. And this kind of imbalance in resources distribution directly leads to the backwardness of rural basic education conditions, teachers' low benefits and enthusiasm and decline of teaching quality. Generally speaking, teachers in rural schools have a much lower salary than those in the city. Also, the "city-oriented" value for public education contributes to government's over-investments on few "model school" and holding more policy, financial, and human resources to support urban education. In addition, education corruption aggravates education inequality. The amount of money invested to the rural area is originally far less than the amount to the urban areas yet corruption in education obviously adds frost to snow.
Because of the household registration restrictions, children from non-local family or without local "hukou", a strange product of Chinese society which means the registered residence in China, have to pay extra sponsor fee which is many times more than local students' normal tuition fee. For those who come from low-income family and not a city native, the high education fee is absolutely a fundamental difficulty. Having a "hukou" of a big or middle city indicates obtaining a "green card" in China, especially in city like Beijing and Shanghai. According to a survey, senior high school students in Beijing have an easy access to the key universities: Peking University, Qsinghua University, for instance, for a lower score in the College Entrance Examination is required. Thus parents are *** every effort to help their child to obtain a city hukou. So for people in rural areas, once they have made a fortune, they will move to the city whereas the poor keep living in their shabby house and sending their child to a poorly facilitated school or even dropping out of the school. In this sense, the moving hukou phenomenon intensifies the uneven distribution of educational resources between urban and urban areas.
Another serious problem of rural education today is the simplification of teaching method mainly owing to a lack of high quality teachers and necessary teaching facilities. Therefore, rural teaching is in the state of "keeping passable", and rural students always study as a passive acceptance of knowledge. Despite the fact that every year there are a number of college students who act as volunteers walk into mountainous areas and teach kids yet I venture to disagree that this kind of method is not effective in changing the inferior education situation. And what's more, some so-called volunteers just want to experience a different country life in a rural area so as to add some shiny points in their CVs if they are to find a job in the near future, hopefully.
To sum up, if we want to change this awkward situation, there are a few of things needed to be done. For one thing, a legal system of basic education reform should be re-established so as to strengthen the fair and effective compensation system. Thus laws such as "Compulsory Education Act", "Education Act", "Higher Education Act", "School Act", "Test Act", "Education Investment Act" should be quicken to legislate, revise or develop. For another thing, tangible measures should be put into practice. For example, increase the salary of a rural school teacher. Nowadays, provide a teacher with 500RMB or less is definitely not enough. With the support of policy and assistance of material possessions, the educational inequality between Chinese urban and rural areas will be lessened to a certain degree.

1. Topic sentence: we are often so surprised to find out how serious the gender and urban-rural educational inequality are!
This article consists of two main parts: gender inequality and urban-rural inequality. It doesn't make a conclusion in the end but it is easy to follow your thought.

{Since this article is too long, I decide to analyze it paragraph by paragraph}

2. The 1st paragraph
　　Three aspects of education are impressive. Besides, they are actually reflected through the whole article.
　　But where you place them is not proper. I thought you are going to talk about these three aspects in your article at first. So you may put them in the middle and state your topic sentence at the beginning.


3.The 2nd ~3rd paragraph
　　(1) main idea:Yet in China's higher education, females are still not in an advantageous position when compared to males.
　　(2) Your arguments are reasonable and convincing. You use a lot of effective examples, such as grades and job opportunities, success and sacrifice, etc.
　　(3) The disadvantage is that you do not have a clear structure. For example, after "first of all " at the beginning of the
3rd paragraph, I cannot see "second" or other conjunctions in the rest of this part.


4. The 4th ~ 6th paragraph
　　(1) main idea: Besides the gender inequality, there exists a great disparity in educational opportunities among rural and urban Chinese students.
　　(2) You talk about: national budget; urban-rural dual system; teacher's salary; education corruption; "hukou"; a lack of high quality teachers and necessary teaching facilities
　　(3) You have so much to say. you try to use a lot of facts and numbers to support your arguments and finally you succeed in explaining all of these problems clearly, especially "hukou" and "a lack of high quality teachers and necessary teaching facilities".
　　(4) disadvantages:
　　 (a)Between the 4th paragraph and the 5th paragraph, I cannot tell what is your standard to separate them. The boundary is vague.
　　(b)At the beginning of the 6th paragraph, you use the word "another". I don't think that is proper conjunction here. In my opinion, you can replace all your conjunctions of problems in this part with ordinal number(序数词).


5.The 7th paragraph
　　(1) main idea: the solutions of rural-urban problem
　　(2) In this part, your conjunctions are clear and proper.
　　(3) Your suggestions are reasonable and practical.

In modern society, education equality consists of three aspects according to a multitude of scholars: equality of right, opportunity and outcome. The equal right to be educated should be given to every one. As for equal opportunities, there are mainly two types of interpretation: equal opportunity into education system and equal opportunity to participate in educational activities. Equality of educational outcomes indicates that people educated by schools or other training programs with the same quality and content may have the same expectations on future development. And education equality is the ultimate goal of national education. It is always easy to say than to do it. This old saying can best summarize the present situation of Chinese education and we are still far from the realization of the three equalities. And education, which was long praised as the great equalizer, no longer seems to be performing as advertised. By analyzing the current educational situation, we are often so surprised to find out how serious the gender and urban-rural educational inequality are!

It is wildly acknowledged that education attainment is not only an indicator of social status itself, it is also linked closely to the employment opportunities and occupational status in today's Chinese society. And one of the encouraging news is that there are indeed some females' fates who have been changed because of their attainment of education. Yet in China's higher education, females are still not in an advantageous position when compared to males. First of all, female students have got to get a higher enrollment scores than male students since that girls usually obtain remarkably high marks in the College Entrance Examination (CEE) especially in the subjects of English and Chinese. In the departments of foreign languages, female students generally do better than male students yet when they graduate from the university; male students are more popular than females despite that they are of a peer-level. Of the applicants for university lecturers, females often have to reach a higher academic level than their male counterparts predominantly in language teaching. For instance, females are required to obtain a doctorate degree while males a master's degree. And those who are in charge of employment of faculty use a famous saying "When a thing is scarce, it is precious." to conceal their ***ism. Secondly, another extremely interesting thing is that a girl who has a higher diploma has more difficulties in finding a boyfriend. Say, a boy who only has a bachelor degree will scarcely find a girl with a master or doctoral degree as his girlfriend, not to mention marries her! And males elucidate that highly-educated females may hurt their dignity and give them much pressure! For those females, being well educated and reaching a higher academic achievement means the sacrifice of happiness in marriage and family. Compared with the old days, women's role has not yet changed essentially since they do not enjoy the equality which may be brought by education, and the gender inequality continues to be one of the great problems in Chinese society.

Besides the gender inequality, there exists a great disparity in educational opportunities among rural and urban Chinese students. And this type of unfairness is conspicuously manifested in the serious imbalance of distribution of funding and other educational resources between in urban and rural areas. In recent years, only one third of the national budget expenditure is invested into rural basic education and the greater part of the budget is concentrated in urban areas. The gap is kind of remarkable and the difference is sometimes in the range of 68-225%. There are several factors resulting in the educational inequality between rural and urban areas in China. To begin with, we have to mention that it is the household registration system, the core of China urban-rural dual system, severely restricts population flow into the city, hindering the allocation of human and labor resources. Thus urban areas can obtain more human, financial and other resources than rural areas in the proportion and the total amount of investment as well as education. And this kind of imbalance in resources distribution directly leads to the backwardness of rural basic education conditions, teachers' low benefits and enthusiasm and decline of teaching quality. Generally speaking, teachers in rural schools have a much lower salary than those in the city. Also, the "city-oriented" value for public education contributes to government's over-investments on few "model school" and holding more policy, financial, and human resources to support urban education. In addition, education corruption aggravates education inequality. The amount of money invested to the rural area is originally far less than the amount to the urban areas yet corruption in education obviously adds frost to snow.

Because of the household registration restrictions, children from non-local family or without local "hukou", a strange product of Chinese society which means the registered residence in China, have to pay extra sponsor fee which is many times more than local students' normal tuition fee. For those who come from low-income family and not a city native, the high education fee is absolutely a fundamental difficulty. Having a "hukou" of a big or middle city indicates obtaining a "green card" in China, especially in city like Beijing and Shanghai. According to a survey, senior high school students in Beijing have an easy access to the key universities: Peking University, Qsinghua University, for instance, for a lower score in the College Entrance Examination is required. Thus parents are *** every effort to help their child to obtain a city hukou. So for people in rural areas, once they have made a fortune, they will move to the city whereas the poor keep living in their shabby house and sending their child to a poorly facilitated school or even dropping out of the school. In this sense, the moving hukou phenomenon intensifies the uneven distribution of educational resources between urban and urban areas.

One extremely serious problem of rural education today is the simplification of teaching method mainly owing to a lack of high quality teachers and necessary teaching facilities. Therefore, rural teaching is in the state of "keeping passable", and rural students always study as a passive acceptance of knowledge. Despite the fact that every year there are a number of college students who act as volunteers walk into mountainous areas and teach kids yet I venture to disagree that this kind of method is not effective in changing the inferior education situation. And what's more, some so-called volunteers just want to experience a different country life in a rural area so as to add some shiny points in their CVs if they are to find a job in the near future, hopefully.

To sum up, if we want to change this awkward situation, there are a few of things needed to be done. For one thing, a legal system of basic education reform should be re-established so as to strengthen the fair and effective compensation system. Thus laws such as "Compulsory Education Act", "Education Act", "Higher Education Act", "School Act", "Test Act", "Education Investment Act" should be quicken to legislate, revise or develop. For another thing, tangible measures should be put into practice. For example, increase the salary of a rural school teacher. Nowadays, provide a teacher with 500RMB or less is definitely not enough. With the support of policy and assistance of material possessions, the educational inequality between Chinese urban and rural areas will be lessened to a certain degree.


“2. The 1st paragraph
　　Three aspects of education are impressive. Besides, they are actually reflected through the whole article.
　　But where you place them is not proper. I thought you are going to talk about these three aspects in your article at first. So you may put them in the middle and state your topic sentence at the beginning.”

Thank you so much for your conscientious corrections, Nicola. Truly I did put the three aspects of education at the beginning of the text because I want to attract the readers’ attention. By explaining what exactly the three aspects of education are, I pointed out that the present education is on the other way around of realizing these three equalities. So I am afraid that I can not agree with you.

“3.The 2nd ~3rd paragraph
　　(1) main idea:Yet in China's higher education, females are still not in an advantageous position when compared to males.
　　(2) Your arguments are reasonable and convincing. You use a lot of effective examples, such as grades and job opportunities, success and sacrifice, etc.
　　(3) The disadvantage is that you do not have a clear structure. For example, after "first of all " at the beginning of the
3rd paragraph, I cannot see "second" or other conjunctions in the rest of this part.”
yeah~~ actually in the 2nd paragraph I want to use two examples: inequalities of females’ careers and their marriages causing by educational inequality.