Prof Barbara Schulte has urged me to post this paper to Academia.edu. It is an unpublished chapter of my dissertation about the aesthetics of language teaching and learning in suzhi jiaoyu (Education for Quality) in Beijing in 1999-2001. It references language ideology, nationalism, and aesthetics. The reference list is likely incomplete; I’m happy to provide a more complete list if requested. Please enjoy this ethnographic discussion of how young children (years 1-6) in three elementary schools in Beijing (University, an elite school; East Avenue, a working-class school, and Bright Day, a school for migrant children) learned to read and write in the first years of the suzhi jiaoyu reforms (1999-). Please cite the material in this essay as: Woronov, T.E. 2003. Transforming the Future: “Quality” Children and the Chinese Nation. PhD Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. 1 AESTHETIC EDUCATION (MEIYU): LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND THE MORAL COMMUNITY I spent the first two weeks of my fieldwork research at University School trailing at the heels of the fourth grade yuwen (Chinese language) teachers, trying a variety of strategies – pleading, badgering, begging, even threatening – to get one of them to allow me to observe her teaching a class.1 Finally, sheer persistence paid off and Teacher Liu, sighing in annoyance, agreed to let me attend her yuwen class with the caveat that “nothing much” would be going on. We entered the classroom and waited for the children to settle down from the excitement of having a foreign observer in their midst. Teacher Liu then began the class, which was an introduction to a new lesson in their Chinese textbook. After some introductory remarks about the content of the material, she stood up straight and very formally in the front of the room, held her copy of the textbook in one hand at arm’s length in front of her, and began to read the text aloud. To my astonishment, her reading looked and sounded to me like an aria from a Peking Opera: pitched high enough to sound almost falsetto, with huge dynamic range, her free hand gesturing broadly as she spoke. I looked around the classroom, expecting the children to burst out laughing at what seemed to me to be an excessively dramatic reading of a textbook, but instead they were watching Teacher Liu with rapt attention, eyes shining, leaning forward in excitement. When she finished reading, Teacher Liu dropped her arms, returned to a less formal stance and regular speaking tone, and asked the students: “Class, did you like that story?” The children roared back: “Yes! We liked it!” “Was it beautiful? (Haobuhao ting?) “Yes!” they yelled, “It was beautiful!” I had assumed that this heavily dramatized reading was for my benefit as an outside observer in her class, but learned over the course of my fieldwork that this kind of oral performance was standard for all the elementary yuwen teachers I observed. When I asked why lessons were introduced to students in this manner, the teachers looked at me 1 See chapter 1 for a description of my relationship with the teachers at University School. 2 quizzically, surprised that I could not perceive the obvious. “Of course,” they explained to me, “we read this way because it’s beautiful.” Within the ideology of the “fully developed” child, the concept of aesthetic education (meiyu) has been far less elaborated than the other kinds of development (moral, intellectual and physical); teachers and parents agree that it is the least important of the four developmental categories in producing a high suzhi child, and it is frequently left out of lists of tasks necessary to raise children’s quality. In this respect, the parents and teachers I spoke with were working with a concept of aesthetic education defined as that form of family- and school-based education that inculcates the appreciation of, and ability to produce beauty. This form of aesthetic ability was assumed to be taught specifically in art and music classes across Beijing’s elementary schools; part of the suzhi jiaoyu movement was designed to increase the number of art and music classes offered weekly, so as to make children more fully developed. I had assumed that aesthetic education would occur within the realm of traditional Chinese fine arts, particularly painting (guohua) and calligraphy (shufa). Training in these art forms has traditionally been initiated among young children as they begin to learn to read and write, and children in contemporary Beijing do receive a rather elaborate education in arts-related material. All school children take music and both art (yishu) and crafts (shougong) classes every week. The art classes I observed at East Avenue and University Schools largely consisted of teaching children to draw through copying models provided in textbooks. This time-honored Chinese method is designed to inculcate familiarity with “commendable models”; students are expected to produce original work only after mastering basic forms (c.f. Unger 1982:68). The students I knew were generally allowed to color their drawings as they chose, but only after they had produced a reasonable facsimile of the model image. As a result, by sixth grade most students were quite competent draftsmen, able to draw close likenesses of people and objects. The shougong classes, taught in the younger grades, were designed to help develop small children’s fine motor skills. At the beginning of the semester, each child purchased an inexpensive booklet of paper projects to be completed during shougong class. These projects ranged from using scissors to cut out and then glue together small cartoon characters, to 3 elaborate paper-folding projects to create large origami objects.2 In neither class – yishu nor shougong – were students expected to produce any of their own original work. This does not mean that there were no aesthetic principles taught to children; even if not explicit, through their copying of appropriate models children learned a mimetic approach to art and the aesthetic. What I observed, however, is that the concept of “beauty” – how to recognize, appreciate, and copy it – was not taught only in the realm of the plastic or formal arts. In fact, the most explicit discussions about “the beautiful” took place daily around the question of literacy and language: how a character should be written to look beautiful, how language should be used to describe scenes of natural or architectural beauty, how a passage sounds when read aloud beautifully. Thus in my experience, in children’s daily practice in Beijing the realm of aesthetics was largely expressed through the practices and performances of the Chinese language. In fact, over the course of my observations it became clear that far from being an optional and barely relevant developmental category for raising children’s suzhi, aesthetic education, particularly around the question of language, is essential to incorporating and inscribing (Connerton 1989) children into the Chinese national, moral, and aesthetic communities. Previous chapters have discussed the various projects of suzhi jiaoyu to raise the quality of China’s children and hence the nation. Yet before the nation’s quality can be raised, a nation is required; in other words, suzhi jiaoyu first requires a national community as its condition of possibility. This chapter is an inquiry into how the poetics and performance (Bauman and Briggs 1990, Jakobson 1960) of beautiful language in elementary classrooms in Beijing work to produce the moral community that suzhi jiaoyu presupposes. Through prescriptive language use and pedagogies based on particular language ideologies, children’s language practices produce the presumed nation as a unified moral community – or, more specifically, language practices produce the ideology of a unified community. This chapter looks at these language practices, the ideology of a unified speech community and its connection with suzhi, and where, in practice, this community is in fact far from unified. The following material outlines three axes of prescriptive language: children’s writing, reading and speaking. Each of these axes of practice presupposes intersecting 2 While most North Americans would consider these classes to be a form of art training, the Chinese I spoke with were adamant that these classes were intended for to aid the children’s physical, not aesthetic, development. 4 ideological bases: what language is, what the language learning child is, and what the goals of education should be. The following sections of this chapter elucidate these ideologies through discussions of classroom practices that are designed to teach children to write, read, and speak beautifully. The goal will be to illuminate literacy as a both a sociopolitical and an aesthetic practice, which intersects other dimensions of authority (Collins 1995). To briefly anticipate my argument, at the heart of literacy pedagogy in Beijing there is an ideology of transformation: that learning to write, read, and speak standard language in the correct ways transforms children. These transformations are different in each axis of practice; the sections below elucidate how each kind of literacy practice produces a better child. Language thus produces the writing (and reading and speaking) subject, rather than the other way around. This chapter looks at how the production of language concomitantly produces a community of speakers, readers, and writers, and the ideologies that presume that this language community forms a national and moral one as well. This is a broad topic, and some disclaimers are in order. While I am interested in “...the cross-generational production and reproduction of knowledge and power, and... the complex fabric of texts and discourses through which social representation and reproduction is effected” (Luke 1992:108), this chapter is neither a survey of Chinese language ideology nor a history of the philosophy of language in China; these topics are beyond the scope of this thesis. Nor is it a history of textual authority in China (Connery 1998; Lewis 1999), an inquiry into the nature of representation of the Chinese character (Saussy 1997), nor a history of Chinese aesthetics (see Saussy 1993). Instead, this is an inquiry into how language ideology works in the teaching of beautiful language, and how this contributes both to the notion of a “high suzhi” child and the Chinese nation. My main point is that while there is a strong ideology of standardization – that all Beijing children can and do learn to speak, read, and write in the same ways – that this ideology erases significant differences among children. Like the other aspects of suzhi jiaoyu (moral, intellectual, and physical) development, aesthetic development differentiates children, dividing high and low suzhi children beneath a guise of national unity. 5 HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS: LITERACY, LEARNING, AND MORAL SUBJECTS It might be said that no other people in the world hold as deep a regard for their writing system as do the Chinese...that no other people on earth resemble the Chinese in the depth of their fascination with the captivating charm of their own writing system.3 In all literate societies, the development and historical applications of writing systems have had a tremendous influence on culture and society (see e.g., Goody, Ong, Street). Yet perhaps more than any other place in the world, imperial China was constituted socially, politically, and ritually through its written language. For more than two thousand years China was, in Connery’s (1998) words, an empire of text. A detailed exegesis of the history of Chinese literacy is far beyond the scope of this thesis, but I would like to highlight two historical aspects of language in China that I believe are relevant to contemporary practice. First, Connery asserts that the written language was always more than a form of representation, for, in ancient China, “entextualization is how government is done” (1998:21). In other words, texts both constituted political authority, and performed it (ibid.:22). Or, as Lewis (1999) adds: Such worlds created in writing provided the models for the unprecedented enterprise of founding a world empire, and they underwrote the claims of authority of those who composed, sponsored or interpreted them. One version of these texts ultimately became the first state canon of imperial China, and in this capacity it served to perpetuate the dream and reality of the imperial system across the centuries (1999:4). In her study of Late Imperial China, Zito extends these insights by theorizing that imperial ritual was both a “performance of texts and a textualizing performance” (1997:4). She bases her discussion of Qing-era China on an ancient and literal definition of wen 文 (writing, language): “Wen is usually taken to mean ‘writing’ or ‘literature.’ More literally and precisely it is text-pattern, signs of cosmic order accessible to those who can discern them” (ibid.:23). She continues, claiming that: “The written records of the imperial formation...partook of a sacred quality that the written word in general possessed. This sacred quality... provided a peculiar power to move and persuade that extended to writing an active role in ritual performance, beyond that of mere representation” (ibid.:5). She notes that for this reason, writing itself was an essential 3 Hamlish 1995:239, quoting Chuang Bohe, 1987. 6 aspect of the ritual reproduction of the imperial realm via the literati; literate citizens, trained in the Confucian classics, planned, directed, and theorized the imperial rituals that were cosmologically essential for the Chinese polity. Text preserved ritual in the medium of written language; ritual performance took place through writing: “Thus the production of a set of sensuous signs through action [which was] designed to situate the human within the cosmic began with editing and writing” (ibid.:4). Literally central to these annual rituals was the body of the emperor, which mediated the textual performances that symbolically reproduced the moral force of the imperium and cosmologically reconstituted the realm. While I do not claim that children’s writing today is a form of imperial ritual, I do suggest that similar kinds of “sensuous signs” operate in contemporary classrooms, and look at how writing is still a way of situating the bodies of literate subject within the moral force of the national community. The second point is that historically, just as Chinese concepts of the political have been indivisible from morality (see Chapter 2), so too has morality been closely linked to theories of language learning. To state very briefly, the Confucian system posited that social and political morality was made possible through education. In this schema, all children were considered equally educable, and it was assumed that even a cursory familiarity with the Confucian classics could “humanize” even the most ignorant within the life course, learning to write signaled the end of carefree “childhood” and indicated the beginning of a child’s transformation into adult morality. The associations between literacy, politics, morality, and adult responsibility meant that basic, popular literacy rates in late Imperial China were quite high (Rawski 1979). In addition, because most Chinese children learn this basic literacy through the same primers, these texts had a remarkable ability to connect the disparate corners of the empire through known texts (Woodside). The moral qualities associated with language learning also encompass a pedagogical theory: everyone can learn. Dating from Mencius, Chinese philosophy has assumed there is no one who cannot be changed through education (Leung 1994). Extended into pedagogical practice, this has led to the wide-spread understanding that all children can learn if only they are diligent enough. In contemporary education, children who are not learning are not working hard enough; in theory, any and all academic failures can be solved by a child’s additional effort. Absolutely everyone I spoke with in Beijing agrees on this in theory, and it explains the tremendous focus in children’s 7 textbooks on the values of persistence, hard work, a good attitude, and diligence (see Chapter 2). At one level, Chinese education is thus philosophically profoundly egalitarian: all children within a classroom are potentially the same in that with hard work and focused effort, they can – and should – all achieve identical abilities in standard and aesthetic literacy. This theory then produces a paradox at the level of daily educational practice. All teachers I knew confirmed that in fact, the children in their classroom were not all the same; they differed in abilities, interests, background, and skills. But I observed countless times in which low-scoring children – individually and in small groups – were hauled into the teachers’ room and harangued at length for their lack of diligence and willpower. Several times at both University and East Avenue schools, sixth-grade students who were failing their English class were dragged before me for “special training,” in the hopes that their close proximity to a “native speaker” would prod them to work harder and be more diligent and thus produce better test results. Instead, upon talking with them, I discovered immediately that these children were failing English because they had never learned to read the English alphabet; to them, the English books were only a mysterious collection of odd symbols. Their teachers, however, were not sympathetic in the least to this problem, created, they asserted, by the children’s failure to work hard back in third and fourth grade, when the alphabet was taught. They chided the students for poor working habits, lack of focus, and unwillingness to study. Once the children left the room, however, (some of) the teachers would shrug and confess to me that, even with more effort, many of the students would fail anyway. As Teacher Xie – who always spoke her mind - reminded me, “some of them aren’t that bright, and some of the parents just don’t care.” Thus did the question of children’s suzhi enter the language-learning classroom, in a kind of double paradox. An overarching moral theory of language presupposes that everyone can learn with the right effort, and that learning to read can equally transform all children into equivalently moral subjects. At the same time, children obviously come into classrooms with different levels of suzhi; all teachers and parents readily admitted that not all children have the same capabilities. And, while the pedagogic imperative of moral equivalency and raising the suzhi of all children pressured teachers to in turn pressure all their students towards ever-greater effort and diligence, the same suzhi jiaoyu 8 materials - and the jianfu policy – also urged teachers and parents to see each child as a unique individual, with different kinds of talents and skills. As I explicate below, I believe that these paradoxes at the heart of suzhi-raising efforts were what led both to the astonishing ideological effort put into erasing children’s differences, while at the same time educational practices continue to differentiate children by social class, grades, and ability. MORALITY AND THE LITERATE CHILD The beauty or ugliness of calligraphy is in the heart-mind (xin) and the hand.4 Any discussion of the relationship between aesthetics and literacy in Beijing must begin with calligraphy, one of the oldest and most venerated arts in China. In the schools where I conducted research, calligraphy (shufa) was not taught as a subject; any child (or parent) who wanted calligraphic training had to enroll in extracurricular classes at one of the many weekend arts schools across the city. Teachers described the character writing they teach in elementary classrooms with a separate term – xiezi, or “writing words,” which they saw as a different and much more basic skill than that of calligraphy. Yet although children were taught to write Chinese characters with pens and pencils rather than the brushes traditionally used for calligraphy, many of the principles, values, and aesthetics of calligraphic art informed the teaching of writing skills in elementary schools.5 The most fundamental aspect of calligraphic art that pervades the teaching of writing to children is that handwriting – the quality and beauty of characters written - is much more than a means of communication. The value of studying calligraphy can be summarized by an advertisement for a Taiwanese calligraphy school targeted towards children: “Through the teaching of calligraphy, the inner character slowly and imperceptibly changes, making one happy and optimistic, promoting and maintaining uprightness, diligence, sincerity and practicality...” (Hamlish 1995:9). While none of the teachers I knew in Beijing would have expressed so directly the connection between 4 Hay 1983:87, citing Zhao Yi, Eastern Han dynasty (ca. 2-220 A.D.) There’s a large literature in English on the history, practice, and ideology of shufa. See Hamlish 1995; Kraus 1991, and Hay 1983 for extensive bibliographies. 5 9 learning to write beautifully and the moral changes effected in the child, they all would agree that writing is more than simply a useful or aesthetic communication tool, but a way of producing a better – or specifically, a more moral - child. Hamlish notes: “mastery of the technical elements of writing is not an end in itself by rather a ‘method’ (fa) of proper moral conduct via the medium of the written sign” (1995:13). Writing effects this transformation not because of the cognitive changes literacy produces in the child,6 but because of the relationship between the form of the characters and the body of the writing child: writing is a form of moral improvement through the physical metonymy between characters and the students who write them. Art historian John Hay has studied the connection between theories of calligraphy and those of traditional Chinese medicine, looking at the relations between the energy (qi), bones (gu) and arteries (xue) of brush-writing and the body (Hay 1983:74).7 Like the people who write them, characters have “skeletons” and “sinews,” “bones” and “breath.” As summarized by the Chinese expression shu ru qi ren (the calligraphy is the man) the bones, breath and bodies of the characters are metonymic of the writer’s: “The body is a vehicle that transmits the calligrapher’s inner spirit to paper...” (Kraus 1991:46). Learning how to produce words with the correct form is a dialogic process: it trains the body of the writer until they are a reflection of each other. As a result, written words are moral objects, produced by humans through proper training and discipline. Good handwriting is not simply attractive, but is a window into the character of the writer, while the moral qualities of the calligrapher, directly reflected in his calligraphy, are produced through the practice of writing. Although articulated as theory in the formal practice of shufa, this moral connection between the beautiful written word and body of the writer forms the basis for elementary education in Chinese writing. In first-grade classrooms, I watched teachers repeatedly take a pen away from a young child, then reposition his or her hand and body relative to the pen, the paper, the desk. When they begin to write, teachers then supervise how children grasp their pencils, the angle of their wrists and arms, the angle of their bodies and distance from the surface of the desk, the placement and angle of their feet on the floor (see Figure i). No part of the body is exempt from surveillance and correction, 6 Note Goody’s work here, then Street.... I do not have space here to detail Hay’s (1993) fascinating argument about medicine, art, and Chinese cosmology. 7 10 and the first grade textbook includes several pictures about how to sit and write appropriately, as well as several morality tales about the ill effects of slouching, holding books or pens improperly, or standing the wrong way to read aloud. In fact, the effort this required was regularly seen by teachers assigned to the older grades as one of the hardships (xinku) of teaching first grade: the care and attention necessary to teach the young children how to begin to write characters was understood as overwhelming. Handwriting is one of the many embodied disciplines Foucault talks about in schools’ production of docile bodies; he notes the meticulous control over the slightest movements of the child’s body as s/he learns to write (1977:152). But the disciplines of handwriting in Chinese classrooms go far beyond the production of docile and conformist bodies, for the ability to write beautifully is seen as a key to a particularly Chinese moral development. To this end, teachers put tremendous effort into helping children not only learn to write characters properly, but beautifully as well. Teacher Sun, for example, had a large grid painted onto one corner of the blackboard in her classroom, which she used to introduce new characters to her first graders. She began by drawing a character badly – poorly proportioned, slanted, or the wrong size for the grid lines. “Is this beautiful?” she would demand. “NO!” the children yelled back, “IT ISN’T!” Teacher Sun would then re-write the character properly – well-balanced and proportioned, with strong and straight lines. “It’s beautiful!” the children cheered, sometimes even applauding a character they particularly liked. Writing Chinese, even for the edification of 7-year-olds, thus has a performance aspect; Hamlish and Kraus both describe the social and cultural importance of public performances of calligraphic skills. These disciplines of performances required children’s entire bodies, which are implicated not just in the mimetic relationship between the bones of the characters and the bodies of the writing child, but in other embodied disciplines produced through literacy training. When children learn to write, they are taught the names of the different kinds of strokes that combine to form characters. Each kind of stroke (for example, a horizontal or vertical line) has a name, and each character must be written in a fixed sequence of strokes. In several of the first and second grade classes I visited, teachers would conduct the following drill. The teacher would call out a character, then the students would use their fingers to draw the character in the air, simultaneously calling out the name of each of the strokes. Being 11 seven years old, the children tended to shout their answers, and use their entire bodies – not just their fingers – to draw the characters. It made a powerful impression on visitors to classrooms to watch fifty young children yelling names of character strokes while jumping up and down and flinging their arms in the air. Teacher Zhang, in particular, used this as a way of diverting her students when they had reached the end of their attention spans. She would take breaks in between other tasks, to have the children stand and draw characters with their arms while shouting the names of the strokes. It was a brilliant pedagogic move, allowing a release of energy and a way for the children to refocus; in this way, also, writing characters correctly was drilled as a bodily discipline, far beyond cognitively-based memory. Yet even beyond this way of training children to use their entire bodies to learn to write characters, teaching was a also mimetic process of transforming the child’s body into the form of a character. Many forms of pedagogy in China actually exhort children to become particular characters – to use the shapes of the different strokes as models for correct behavior, deportment, and morality. For example, during school announcements period in the early morning, East Avenue’s Principal Dai often used the school’s loudspeaker system to urge students to become like certain characters. During one week towards the end of the 2001 school year, she spent several mornings explaining how the character qing in its various forms (请, 情, 清, 青) should be a model for their personal, intra-familial, and social behaviors. Similarly, in an article in the popular magazine Must-Reads for Mothers and Fathers (Fumu Bi Du), Beijing Normal University psychologist Zheng Richang described to parents how the two strokes in the character ren 人 (human, person) exemplify the components necessary to raise a high suzhi child. He stated that the left side of the character represents the intellectual/emotional side of the child’s suzhi, while the right side represents the physical. Professor Zheng points out that each side supports the other; both are necessary to make a complete “person”; all the various aspects of suzhi (moral, creative, intellectual, height) are important so that the strokes are the correct length to form a well-proportioned character. This kind of “character pedagogy” is not confined to schoolrooms; Rofel notes that the factory she studied used a similar technique to discipline workers’ bodies into the appropriate forms of efficient, and high-quality, production (1999:265). She says of this discipline: 12 “writing... is not simply a transparent medium of communication in which signs represent or mirror reality. Signifiers here rather outline the body’s actions, a display of action that both imitates and constitutes the form it signifies” (ibid.). There is thus a dialogical quality to writing characters: children use their bodies and minds to produce the written language, while at the same time the characters delineate a kind of design for living, a pattern to model that produces high quality subjects. Zito (1997:23) reminds us of the literal definition of wen 文 (writing, language): “Wen is usually taken to mean ‘writing’ or ‘literature.’ More literally and precisely it is text-pattern, signs of cosmic order accessible to those who can discern them.” The written language – as form, not only as denotation – provides a model for embodied social action. The performative aspect of writing, described above, extends into all aspects of a child’s being, as beautiful, well-written characters become the model not just for writing, but for being itself. This perhaps explains a phenomenon I regularly noticed in the elementary schools where I worked. Many times as I walked through the corridors of University and East Avenue Schools, I would find visiting parents or grandparents huddled around the small windows in each classroom door, cooing in delight as they peered at the children inside hunched over their desks, practicing characters. Of the many activities in which I saw children participate (including sports, drama, dance, music, and patriotic performances – see chapter 2) I never saw adults melt with pleasure in the same way they did as when they watched children writing. This same image – the writing child, in the identical pose - was ubiquitous in China, endlessly reproduced in ads, on television programs, in various government public service campaigns. This image (re)produces the composition of the correct social world, in a very traditional/imperial sense, just as Zito tells us the writing, studying of, and commentary on the classics continuously (re)produced the traditional cosmos and its associated polity. The writing child is a site of transformation – from ignorance to knowledge, from a child’s unruly chaos into disciplined control, from play to work, from “raw humanity” into Chinese moral humanism. If, as Zito contends, writing brings the moral/political/cosmological world into existence, then this image of the writing child may be more than just a picture of diligent and disciplined learning. Instead, I suggest 13 that it indexes the ritualized reproduction of Chinese society as condensed in the written character and the child’s body. ***** Because of the moral imperative behind writing well, teachers, too, were required to practice their characters so that they could write beautifully. I learned this as Spring Festival8 holidays approached in winter, 2000. Classes were over, and the students had finished their end-of-semester exams, but teachers were still required to report for work for several days before their vacation began. To my astonishment, the teachers’ rooms at both East Avenue and University School were filled with teachers copying characters into notebooks. In both schools, the principals had assigned homework to the teachers, requiring them to fill a specified number of pages with characters to practice their handwriting. All of the teachers had some kind of text propped in front of them – a magazine, newspaper, or educational journal, and were copying out entire paragraphs. A few used brushes, but most used pens; the assignment took each of them several hours. There was some grumbling about the task from the older teachers; because they were planning to retire soon, they did not see the need to continue to practice their handwriting. But everyone agreed it was a useful assignment for the younger teachers, for they had the essential duty of modeling good writing for the children. Like all moral action, good writing required good models, and the teachers took seriously the important task of writing beautifully so that their students could learn to do so as well. Good handwriting has thus always been a form of cultural capital. Interestingly, many people see a direct conversion of good handwriting into economic capital, as countless people I spoke with in China repeated stories to me of how well-written characters have the power to open doors in the new market economy. Faced with the mysterious project of “preparing a résumé” and “finding a job,” all new tasks in China’s newly commodified labor market, (see Hoffman, 2000) many of my informants told me they personally knew people who got jobs on the strength of the beauty of their characters on their hand-written résumés. Perhaps to help their children prepare for such an event, families devote an astonishing amount of time, energy and money to selecting, purchasing, and preparing the technologies of literacy children use as they learn to write. Along with their 8 Chinese New Year 14 textbooks, which parents purchased every semester, each child (even the children from impoverished families attending the migrant school) had a book bag, a pencil case, a set of pens, pencils and erasers, pencil sharpeners, a set of notebooks containing different kinds of ruled paper, and crayons and colored markers. In recent years these tools – especially the book bags and pencil cases - were the object of some competitive consumption among the children, who vied to display book bags with the pictures of the most up-to-date television stars, cartoon images, or Disney characters. Pencil boxes were even more elaborate, and were one of the very few items I saw in elementary schools that were gender-coded, with boys preferring images of racing cars, airplanes, and rocket ships, while girls gravitated to Chinese pop singers. Many of the pencil boxes included astonishing design and engineering; some opened into a series of levels or miniature compartments, and were quite expensive. Davis (2000) notes that parents in Shanghai spend heavily on such literacy tools for children. Through disciplines designed to control the ways the tools are used, stored, and displayed, children’s bodies are fastened to these technologies. Foucault calls these disciplines the “body-tool complex,” which link children with the apparatuses that produce normative literacy (1997:153). These disciplines begin even before the child’s leaves home in the morning, for properly packing the book bag is a parent’s chore. Upon arrival in the classroom children must produce the books, notebooks, pens, and other supplies required for the classes scheduled that day; the suzhi of the child and his or her parent is judged according to whether or not everything necessary for the day was included. Book bags, once unpacked, are stored either on special hooks in the classroom or across the back of the child’s chair; books are stacked in the corner of the desk at perfect angles and a specified distance to the edge, in the correct order. If the teacher specifies that the writing for the class will be in pencil, all the children remove their pencils and sharpeners simultaneously, and the teacher supervises their preparing their pencils to identical points. Writing is thus a presumed to be a project of the entire student body, performed in the same way, at the same time, with the goal of producing a unified moral community of writing children. Of course, this is belied in practice. Children do not have identical literacy tools, nor do they wield them identically. Some children write more beautifully 15 than others, and their characters are chosen as models, hung on the classroom bulletin boards for all to admire and copy. Even speed is an issue, as teachers criticize some children for writing too quickly, and not paying requisite attention to what they are doing, and others for writing too slowly, holding up the work of the class. The unity that is presumed is thus in constant need of production, which, in turn, is never as complete as the ideology intends. BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE, BEAUTIFUL PLACES Teacher Ren’s fifth grade yuwen (Chinese) class was just beginning a new chapter in their textbooks on the beauties of Beihai Park, located immediately northwest of the Forbidden City in the center of Beijing. The class proceeded in the usual way, with Teacher Ren first reading the lesson with feeling, then the students reading silently for comprehension and new vocabulary, and then splitting into small groups to discuss the content. The class was almost half over when a student near the back of the room interrupted the teacher by raising her hand. “Teacher Ren,” the student asked with a puzzled frown, “haven’t we already done this lesson?” “No, not in this book,” Ren replied. “You did have a lesson about Beihai Park in your third grade textbook, but not in this one.” The student, mollified, sat back down with some relief. Class continued as usual. But I was perplexed: how many lessons could the children have learned about one park? What was it about Beihai Park that warranted repeated lessons in the students’ textbooks? Literacy teaching in Beijing was highly formulaic. As in North American classrooms, teachers tended to present, review, and drill lessons in very similar ways from day to day. Yet beyond the question of pedagogic form, lesson content was also highly formulaic, as textbooks in Beijing presented similar themes, topics and exercises across the entire elementary curriculum. An important aspect of this formulaic content was the descriptive language taught to children. Almost all the yuwen (Chinese language) lessons in Grades 2 and higher require students to complete fill-in-the-blank exercises, virtually all of which consist of locating, memorizing, and completing adjectival or adverbial phrases in the text. In the earlier 16 grades, these phrases largely consist of what we would call clichés – children are required to memorize that Gobi Desert sand is “burning hot” and that the Manchurian (Dongbei) forest resembles “a sea of trees.” More commonly, however, students are required to memorize details of famous locations, many of which are in Beijing: Beihai Park, the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, The Great Hall of the People. According to the text, these places are all beautiful – and they are beautiful in very specific ways, each of which requires a set descriptive phrase. The beauty of these places also evokes specific emotions in those who view them (and, by extension, the children who read these beautiful descriptions); these emotions are also described in equally rigid and formulaic language. Children must memorize and reproduce these descriptive terms on endless quizzes and tests. By the end of sixth grade all children are proficient in describing places correctly by using formulaic beautiful language to represent the beauty of the spaces and the emotions they evoke in viewers and readers. For example, the second grade textbook includes a description of Tiananmen Square which exemplifies the way the texts teach the poetics of language as embedded in the experience of space.9 The text opens with statistics which provide objective, numeric proof of the importance of the space; in the case of Tiananmen, children are taught the size in square meters, the number of people who can fit there, and its status as the largest square in the world. This is followed by a descriptive walk through the Square, pointing out each of its notable attributes. The textual tour in this lesson starts with the Gate itself, where Chairman Mao announced the establishment of the PRC in 1949. Directly beneath the Gate is a moat, spanned by seven “beautiful, pure white” (jiebai meili de) stone bridges. In front of the bridges are a pair of “lofty and exquisite” (gaoda jingmei de) ornamental towers and two “mighty” (weiwu de) stone lions. In the center of the Square is a towering flagpole, where the red flag of China flutters in the wind (yingfeng piaoyang). At the southern part of the Square, the Monument of the People’s Heroes stands majestically and firm (weiran yili). South of that is the solemn, dignified, and respectful (zhuangyan sumu de) Memorial Hall for Mao Zedong. Along the sides of the Square are the particularly grand (gewai zhuangguan) and magnificent (gaoda xiongwei) Museums of Chinese History and of the Revolution. The text concludes by noting that 9 Textbook volume 4:20-22. 17 Tiananmen Square is a place of tremendous importance that all Chinese people long to visit. After reading this lesson, students are drilled and tested on using appropriate language to describe the grandeurs of Tiananmen. They are graded on their ability to restate how the flag “flutters in the wind,” how the Monument of the People’s Heroes stands majestically and firm, and how particularly grand the two Museum buildings are. It is not acceptable to describe the Museums as “dignified and solemn,” nor to describe Mao’s tomb as “magnificent”; any student who does so on a test will be marked wrong. And, if any of the students have not yet visited Tiananmen Square, by the time they finish this lesson they will surely long to do so. There is some grammatical basis for this pedagogic focus; Chinese has slightly less flexibility than English as to which adjectives can be paired with which nouns, or which objects can be paired with which verbs.10 But these lessons were much more rigid in their word choice than what would be warranted simply by grammar; there is nothing grammatically or semantically intrinsic in the term “dignified and solemn” that requires it to be used to describe Mao’s Mausoleum. This same pattern holds throughout the curriculum, so that students walk through and learn to describe Beihai Park (“rising like a mountain in the sea, the pagoda shines like white jade”), the Summer Palace (“the lake is as clear as a mirror; the bridges curve like rainbows”), even the CCTV Tower (“as high as the sky, touching the clouds”). By the time they have completed sixth grade, Beijing’s elementary students will have been on a kind of literary tour of the city, learning the size, special attributes, and how to define the particular beauties of famous spots across the capital – some of them more than once. Graduating twelve-year-olds will have been tested repeatedly during their education on their ability to use the correct language to describe the appearance of the city and the pride they experience in living there. Thus the content of the textbooks positions students in the physical world, specifically the Chinese landscape, and the poetics of language cannot be separated from the aesthetic experience of place. 10 I need to note for the Sinological folks that these children are not memorizing chengyu – idiomatic expressions, generally four characters long, which are usually derived from classical Chinese. Correct use of chengyu is an essential indicator of every Chinese person’s educational attainment and is an important form of linguistic capital. Students begin to study these idiomatic expressions in junior high school, at which point they are repeatedly tested on their ability to manipulate chengyu correctly. Elementary students, however, do not begin to learn any chengyu in their textbooks until 6th grade. 18 Requiring students to memorize ways to describe and experience places in the physical world at first struck me as a kind of aesthetic totalitarianism. The goal of these lessons was clearly to teach children how to linguistically and emotionally reproduce predetermined experiences of places. But what about children who genuinely think that the Monument to People’s Heroes is solemn and dignified, or who, after fainting from sunstroke on the Square (see Chapter 4) do not long to see it again? In actuality, however, this pedagogy was less a form of aesthetic totalitarianism than a reflection of a radically different language ideology than that which operates in the West. As Collins (1995) and Luke (1992) point out, all literacy training is based on local ideologies about the nature and function of language. For example, in his research in Australia, Luke found that all teachers interviewed believed that the most important reason for teaching literacy is to give children tools to express themselves. In China, however, this is not at all the goal of language learning. The child at the center of this ideology is not a bourgeois, individual language learner who needs vocabulary to learn to express his or her own feelings and experiences. Literacy requires not only proficiency in a highly distinctive (and difficult) orthographic system, but membership in a moral community that does not presuppose bourgeois individualism. Requiring children to memorize set phrases about specific places is resolutely not a phenomenological approach to language or landscape; instead, the Chinese child is being taught the tools necessary to become a member of a national community that uses aesthetics to position children within the social, physical, and moral landscape. The child’s relationship to that landscape is fixed proxemically, emotionally, and cognitively through literacy training. In this way, the content of these lessons sutures Beijing children to a map of the capital’s sites that they experience linguistically and emotionally as well as physically. As discussed in Chapter 4, they become geometers in Bourdieu’s (1977) sense, fixed within the city as a symbolically organized environment, and continuously recreating both national space and their own subjectivity through their movements through and descriptions of Beijing; in this way, beautiful, formulaic language produces the next generation of children as the people-as-one (Lefort 1986). POLITICS, IDEOLOGY, LITERACY 19 Standardized and formulaic language in yuwen classrooms is not confined to descriptions of place, nor is the aesthetics of language the only language ideology operating in language teaching. Along with the lessons that mandate poetry memorization and language to describe the physical landscape, elementary textbooks in Beijing are also pervaded with content that American observers would consider “political.” Many chapters include descriptions of the Chinese Communist Party and its glorious role in Chinese history, using language as formulaic as that used to describe famous places. For example, children learn not to say the “People’s Liberation Army,” but “the glorious and honorable” PLA, while CCP martyrs lived “great” lives and died “glorious” deaths (5:60). The textbooks are full of descriptions of heroes of the AntiJapanese War, revolutionary martyrs, and the brilliant accomplishments of the CCP. As with the formulaic language used to describe places, students are assessed on their ability to remember precisely why they love the Communist Party, who died in glory for the revolution, and how the Chinese leadership is developing the nation. In the younger grades, these formulae carry down to the level of compound (ci).11 For example, I observed a class where first-grade students were tested on their use of the character jie 解 . While this character forms part of the common word liaojie 了解 or “understand,” the children were required to use it as part of the word jiefang 解放 or “liberation.” The same held true for characters such as zu 祖(founders), which was tested as part of the word zuguo 祖国 (Motherland), not zuxian 祖先 (ancestors). By the time they are past second or third grade, however, on tests children are allowed to produce the characters as part of any (correct) two-character compound, and assessment focuses instead on the level of the phrase. The question this raises is whether these curricular and pedagogic practices are merely the earliest examples in Chinese people’s life course of what Schoenhals (1992) describes as the top-down determination of language that the CCP has mandated since its inception. In his book, Schoenhals notes the political perlocutionary force of what he calls “formulations”: standardized words and phrases that carry political meaning, power, 11 While each Chinese character carries specific meaning, characters are generally combined as morphemes in two- (or more) character words knows as compounds. 20 intent, and feeling. Indeed, several writers on Chinese politics note the “monophonic” character of Party-generated vocabulary and the rigid forms of official discourse (see Yang 1994, Anagnost 1997). Yet while it is tempting to see the politics and formulaic language of the elementary curriculum as a prime example of early education in Communist language use, I suggest instead that this kind of language training reflects a different kind of language ideology at work. I discussed this aspect of the curriculum with many different people in Beijing. In general, all agreed that the rationale behind these lessons is that language is not transparent. Language must convey content, therefore, children might as well be taught the political and historical lessons that they need to be good future citizens of the state. This is in direct contrast with the language ideology at the center of American literacy teaching, which James Collins calls textualism: an understanding of language based upon notions of “the fixity of text, the transparency of language, and the universality of shared, available meaning” (1996:204). In the U.S., language is considered a contextindependent medium for forming and expressing individual thoughts; children’s literacy is thus tested through context-independent assessments of error (1996:211). Elementary school teachers in Beijing would surely agree that language is based on shared, available meanings; this underlies the requirement for exact memorization of fixed phrases, to which all children are supposed to have equal access. Yet there is no concept of transparency of meaning within Chinese language ideology, as in the textualism Collins describes. In China, there is no such thing as language per se, without any content or referent. Whenever language is taught something must be taught along with it, for language is never morally neutral. Describing Chinese language theories, Connery cites Harvey Graff: “a view that literacy is best understood not as an achieved capacity, like the ability to swim, but as an activity with a specific, politically and culturally determined object: Literacy is always literacy of something.” (Connery 1998:26). Most of the teachers I interviewed believed that the political content presented in grades one-six was essential for each child to learn, and, since language lessons have to teach something, they might as well teach this necessary content. But others I spoke with had different attitudes about the politicization of the curriculum. Some of the parents I interviewed, for example, were surprised when I asked their opinions about political 21 content. Dr. Yang, laughing, said “You should have seen the textbooks I used in elementary school. Every single lesson was about the greatness of Mao Zedong Thought. Now that was politics. What they teach today is nothing in comparison.” Others, however, were not so sanguine about it. Another parent expressed frustration at the extent to which politics pervades the curriculum. Children, he told me, should be learning literature in Chinese class; propaganda could be adequately covered in the Society or Morality classes. Although I only heard rumors to this effect, one informant I spoke with, a highlyranked Party cadre, told me that this very question was being debated at the highest levels of the central government. My friend told me that some members of the Politburo had quizzed their own children and grandchildren about the content of their textbooks, and were upset at what they found: “That’s not Chinese language, that’s just politics!” was the reaction my friend reported. She claimed that this issue was being battled out between more liberal-minded members of the highest reaches of the government, and the very conservative Ministry of Education, which produces (or has oversight over) all of the textbooks books used nationally. I have no way to confirm this story, but believe that it is plausible: language ideologies are neither monolithic nor immutable, and it is reasonable to expect that as other kinds of ideologies are rapidly changing in China, ideas about language would too; language, logically, should be part of the constitution of new political subjectivities. For example, just as part of the ideology driving China’s new market economy promotes the production of children as individuals with particular skills and interests (see Chapter 3), this move could well be represented by a move towards thinking of language more in the way Collins says Americans do: as a transparent medium for carrying individual thoughts. At the same time, changing ideologies about the constitution of a “public sphere” for business development could also indicate an increasing bracketing off of politics as a separate realm from that of children, literature, or aesthetics. As rugged individualism becomes more a part of the economy, why not more of language as well? “READ WITH FEELING”: VOICE, STYLE AND STANDARDIZATION 22 Lesson content that prescribed a poetics of politics and place was an important aspect of language standardization in Beijing. This section looks at several other aspects of language standardization, noting how these practices work in Beijing, and differ from the west. Theorists of language standardization generally concur on several points. One is that standard language, rather than occurring “naturally” within speech communities, is codified, presented, and assessed in formal, state-sponsored institutions such as, in this case, elementary schools (Bourdieu 1991). Another is that literacy is one place where standardization is achieved; training in orthography, pronunciation of written forms, and composition are essential sites where standard language is presented and learned (Collins 1989). Standardization is based on local ideologies of language, which are based on notions of what language is and what kinds of subjects language speakers are (Silverstein 1996). Finally, language standards generally have gate keeping functions; standards are often employed to judge speakers in order to create and reproduce social divisions (Bourdieu 1991; Milroy and Milroy 1999; Balibar 1991; Joseph 1987). Class, regional, racial and gender differences are expressed and reproduced through language differentiation (Irvine and Gal 2000), frequently expressed as deviations from the standard. Collins’ work (1996) is an ethnographic inquiry into the specificities of language differentiation in through literacy training in American classrooms, as children are “objectively” divided into skill-level reading groups based on dialect. In the U.S., “like the larger educational apparatus of which it is a part, schooled literacy assumes differential achievement. It is a stratified literacy, with achievement calibrated by technical (standardized) measures of skill, and with hierarchy and segregation as basic principles” (1996:205). Stratification takes place through a variety of segregating literacy practices: reading groups assigned by skill and ability, differing pedagogies for children assessed at different levels, and a bureaucratic/ideological complex for assessing and ranking students and “curing” those who “fail.” To summarize his complex argument, teachers’ strongly prescriptive attitudes focused on correcting “stereotyped features of vernacular speech.” While teachers believed these corrections would lead to children’s social betterment by enabling them to approach standard pronunciation, their practices actually reinforced and reproduced classroom divisions based on race and class. 23 When I first began observing Chinese classes in Beijing, I had expected to find similar practices. After all, standard (biaozhun) pronunciation in Mandarin (putong hua) is codified and precise, and speaking with correct, standard pronunciation is an important source of symbolic capital in contemporary China. For this reason, children’s textbooks through third grade have the standard, romanized pinyin pronunciation printed above each character in the text. Indeed, the Ministry of Education was so worried about the quality of teachers’ pronunciation that it ran a series of nationally-televised programs that aired while I lived in Beijing. Teachers from across China were brought into television studios and asked to read different text passages aloud. The program hosts then analyzed and corrected any deviations from standard pronunciation for the edification of viewers. To my astonishment, however, I did not observe a single example of teachers correcting students’ pronunciation during my visits to East Avenue or University schools.12 In retrospect, I assume that this was because I was observing education in Beijing, residents of which are tremendously confident in their ability to speak perfect Mandarin; why, pace Collins, correct the pronunciation of children who are assumed to already speak according to the standard? In reality this confidence was often misplaced; many of the children (especially at working-class East Avenue School) actually spoke Beijing dialect rather than standard Mandarin, but their pronunciations were neither challenged nor corrected in class. Nor were teachers exempt. While all of the teachers I met at upscale University School spoke perfect standard Mandarin, several teachers at East Avenue, especially the older ones, were far less standard in their pronunciation. At one point during my first year of observations there, I confessed to my friend Teacher Meng that sometimes I had terrible trouble understanding Teacher Xie, both during our conversations in the teachers’ room and when I observed her teaching class. Meng roared with laughter at my distress, which I had attributed to weaknesses in my Chinese language skills. “Of course you can’t understand her Mandarin (putong hua)!” she replied. “That’s because she’s not speaking it! She’s speaking Beijing dialect! (Beijing hua).” I presume that outside Beijing, teachers elsewhere in urban China would be under strong pressure not to conduct classes in their local dialect. 12Although, if a student mispronounced a character (i.e., by mixing it up with another one, or by not knowing how it was supposed to be read and guessing at it), s/he was immediately corrected. But, students who read the character with an “accent” other than standard Mandarin – particularly the accent associated with Beijing dialect – were never corrected. 24 This is not to say, however, that students were never corrected when they spoke. They were, and teachers paid very close attention to even slight details in how students read aloud. Their focus, however, was not on pronunciation, but rather on prosody and the quality of their speaking voice. As I observed classes, I noticed tremendous amounts of effort put into getting students to read the text aloud with the right inflection, tone, and emotional resonance. I later learned that this focus on prosody was explicitly specified in the textbooks, which invariably instructed students to practice reading aloud. Many of the chapters added the specific direction to read the text “with feeling” (you ganqing de langdu kewen); in my experience, whether “with feeling” was specified or not, the teachers and students always worked hard on producing appropriately emotional oral readings of their texts. Thus from first grade on, children performed literacy by reading aloud in the correct voice. Reading aloud with feeling was part of the regular, structured flow of each language lesson, for in all classrooms, learning to read tended to follow a set pattern. As each new lesson in the textbooks was introduced, the teacher would first read the lesson aloud, as described above, with heavy emphasis on reading with appropriate feeling. The students then read the text silently, underlining any characters they did not know. In younger grades, the teachers would introduce these new characters, while students in the older grades were directed to look up new vocabulary in their dictionaries. New vocabulary and grammatical patterns were reviewed next, with different pedagogies depending on the children’s grade level and the teachers’ preferences. But in all classrooms the next step in learning was for students to read aloud. Reading aloud was first done collectively as chanting, a practice originating in classical Confucian education and which dates back at least to the Song Dynasty (9601280 C.E.) (De Bary and Chaffee 1989). Before beginning to chant, teachers corrected students’ postures, to assure they were sitting up straight, holding their books at the correct distance and angles, and were breathing properly. Then the children would chant the text together, focusing on pausing in the right places. The goal of chanting was strict uniformity in pauses, timing, tones, and breathing. If the textbook specified that all or part of the text was to be memorized, the students would chant the material repeatedly. In fact, the sound of lesson chanting could be heard not only in the corridors of all the 25 schools I ever visited, but in parks, playgrounds, and the alleyways between apartment buildings, as children chanted their lessons in order to memorize the text.13 But memorizing the text and chanting the characters accurately were only one part of reading aloud. After the teacher modeled reading the text beautifully, the students, collectively and individually, repeated the prosody of their teachers’ performance: high pitched, very wide dynamic range, cadence marked by strategically-placed dramatic pauses. The teachers then critiqued the children’s readings. “Speak up!” Teacher Zhang chastised her first graders. “Speak loudly and clearly. Read like a kid, not like an old man!” Sometimes, to the children’s joy, she mimicked her students’ reading, which always brought on howls of laughter and immediate identification of weaknesses in a reader’s performance. “Mmrrpphh,” Teacher Zhang would mumble, looking down at her feet in imitation of a hapless student. She then raised her head and demanded: “Is that beautiful?” “No!” the class shouted back, laughing at the unfortunate child’s performance, “Speak more clearly!” When a child imitated Zhang’s reading well, performing with feeling and passion, she led the class in a chant of praise: “you’re just great!” (ni zhen bang!). One child in Teacher Zhang’s first grade class was so good at reading with feeling that she would occasionally take him around to the different teachers’ rooms at lunch time so that he could perform his lessons for the other teachers. At her prompting, this seven-year-old boy would stand up perfectly straight, then swivel his head and raise his right hand dramatically in what looked to me to be an uncanny imitation of the Peking Opera performances that were broadcast daily on television. Clearing his throat, he would declaim the text loudly, slowly, and with the exaggerated tones and physical gestures associated with opera. The observing teachers would howl with laughter, then applaud and hug him with delight when he was done. When I asked how he had learned to read in this way, Teacher Zhang, chuckling, explained that the child lived with his grandparents, who were, in fact, avid Peking Opera fans. A gifted mimic, he had picked up the gestures and prosody he used from watching TV. This child was an exception, however, in that his somewhat idiosyncratic reading style was singled out for teachers’ praise and attention. For the most part, the teachers 13 Several of the chapters in Elman and Woodside (1994) note that chanting has long been considered the best possible means of internalizing and memorizing text; early textbooks for children were written in short, rhyming form to aid in chanting and memorizing. 26 agreed that there was a relatively clear definition of what a “good” reading done with feeling should sound like, and that children who were good readers should all sound alike. When I asked fourth-grade Teacher Wang what standard she used to judge a child’s reading performance, she answered without hesitation: speak clearly, have a good attitude, put stress in the right places, and use the voice properly. A beautiful reading includes the right tone or manner (yuqi), expresses the right feelings (biaoqing), is loud and clear (hongliang). She then noted that these qualities should differ – not according to the individual child’s interpretation of the text – but according to the content. For example, reading a passage about children would require a different kind of emotional expression (biaoqing) than one about scientists. She and the other teachers all assumed that the text was emotionally transparent: the content would specify an emotional response, which would be clear to and consistent across all readers. I observed teachers allude to this emotional transparency many times. Zhang, for example, helped her students analyze a first-grade lesson about a mother cat that scolds her kittens for not diligently catching mice and fish. “How does the mother cat feel?” she asked the class. “Angry!” the children responded. “Right. Now, what does angry sound like? Read more angrily!” Teacher Meng tried to explain to me why reading with feeling is so important. “It’s a way of experiencing the characters’ feelings and experiences,” she said. “When we read with feeling we can understand the text better because we experience the same emotions (ganqing) as in the story. You can imagine you are the main character, and you are doing whatever it is that the character is doing.” She used the example of Tang poetry to demonstrate how important it is to read with the right feeling. “Tang poems are the highest literary achievement in our cultural history. But since we can’t go back to ancient times to experience the glory of these poems, all we can do is try to experience the feelings of the authors and the characters and events they write about.” She and other teachers I discussed this with all used the term tihui as the goal of reading aloud with feeling. Defined as “to know or learn from experience,” or “to know/understand well,” the character ti 体 in tihui means “body” (shenti). I interpret this to mean that the knowledge of the text is not only internalized cognitively, but embodied; the process of 27 performing the appropriate emotions expressed in the text by reading out loud enables students to literally incorporate the lessons of the text.14 “Reading with feeling” is thus part of children’s habitus (Bourdieu 1977), a way of linking what Western educators would see as the analytically separate realms of the cognitive, emotional, and physical. Just as there is no real distinction in China between knowledge and morality (see Chapter 2), or between literature and politics (see above), so too is there a seamless continuum between the child’s body, thoughts, and feelings. Reading aloud is not only a way of assessing students’ achievement of standard language, but a discipline of the eyes, mouths, lungs, and a performance of exquisite control over the voice (Luke 1992). Bodily discipline thus goes far beyond surveillance of how children sit, stand, and hold books, extending to appropriate pitch, cadence, and tone. At the same time, these practices point to an interesting distinction between the language ideologies that structure reading aloud in the Western classrooms that Collins and Luke describe, and literacy in Beijing. “Reading with feeling” is an explicit pedagogic technique for children to access and correctly express emotions that are represented in the text. There is no sense that children should locate and express any individual, private emotions which may be evoked by their readings. Instead, they are expected to correctly mimic whatever emotional response the teacher has told them to have. Thus while this reading is described as “with feeling,” it is not based in a bourgeois, individualistic concept of private emotions. These disciplined performances of the voice thus “collapse [children] into a unitary, collective entity of literate subjectivity” (Luke 1992:126). As with their descriptions of beautiful places, the students are merged in “the people-as-one,” erasing differences and forging a unified, literate subject around the aesthetics of reading beautifully. I suggest that these performances by students can be thus understood as a kind of genre (Briggs and Bauman 1992). Understanding these readings means not only analyzing the content of the texts the children read, but the intertextuality of the performances. In Briggs and Bauman’s terms, these textbook readings “attempt to achieve generic transparency by minimizing intertextual gaps, the distance between texts and genres... thus rendering the discourse maximally interpretable through the use of generic precedents” (1992:149). They cite as an example of this type of generic 14 For more on Tang poetry, see Woronov, T.E., 2008. Raising Quality, Fostering “Creativity”: Ideologies and Practices of Education Reform in Beijing, Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39(4): 401-422. 28 performance Lenten rituals and prayers, which are “contingent upon the progressive displacement of any perceived separation between the words uttered by Christ and the Virgin Mary in the course of the crucifixion, their inscription in sacred texts, and their utterance in performance.” In these liturgies, unison recitation suppresses intertextual variation within performance by regulating the volume, pitch, rate, breath, syntax, lexicon, and rhetorical structure of each worshipper’s discourse production to such a point that differences between individual voices are nearly erased.... In attempting to achieve symbolic unification with Christ and the Virgin, participants deny the intertextual gap to such an extent that they seek to overcome the opposition between signifier and signified itself, merging the experience of the worshipper and that of Christ and the Virgin (as textually constructed) (1992:150). Of course, I am not suggesting that children’s performances of reading aloud are a kind of sacred act. Instead, liturgical discourse provides a conceptual model for a process of minimizing intertextual gaps – and the distance between signifier and signified – which is similar to the pedagogic processes in Beijing classrooms. Children who correctly read textbook passages “with feeling” erase individual differences – not only in prosody and pronunciation, but in emotional response. The goal is to transform the children, making them one with the text by transposing a supposedly perfectly transparent emotional state out of the text and into children’s bodies; this process, more than the actual content of the text, produces the classroom – and the students - as a collectivity. Intertextual resonances with Peking Opera, Tang poetry, and the long history of chanting produce an aesthetic collectivity, which mediates the ways children’s literacy is producing them as Chinese national subjects. TANG POETRY: MEMORY, MORALITY, CLASS The use of text and prosody to produce an aesthetic community reached its apotheosis in the teaching of Tang poetry in elementary classrooms. When teachers, parents and even children considered the aesthetics of the Chinese language, they unanimously pointed to Tang poems as the pinnacle of beautiful language. For centuries of Chinese education, memorizing at least part of a canonical collection of these poems, mostly written between 600-900 C.E., was an essential prerequisite for being considered an educated person. Every yuwen textbook in Beijing included Tang poetry (or poems 29 from the subsequent Song Dynasty) for students to memorize beginning in second grade. Precocious children are taught Tang poems even before they begin formal schooling. I cannot count the number of times during twenty years of traveling in China and Taiwan that a beaming parent coaxed (or dragged) a 4-7 year-old child to recite a Tang poem for me, the visiting foreigner – in much the same way proud American parents might persuade their son or daughter sing a song for a guest to demonstrate their child’s precocity. The large bookstores and children’s department stores in Beijing all carried a set of colorful posters, designed for hanging near a child’s bed, titled “Mommy’s Teaching Me Tang Poetry” (Mama jiao wo Tang shi). Each poster included the text of a well-known short poem in characters and pinyin, decorated with attractive, watercolor scenes of traditionally-garbed children frolicking in nature.15 I saw these posters in people’s homes and in some of the Bright Day School classrooms; presumably these children’s parents could not afford such decorative materials (nor have space to hang them). What I found most surprising in contemporary poetry memorization was not only how the practice had endured through history, but the theory behind it. Although the poems, as published in the students’ textbooks, were annotated so that archaic or unusual characters were defined and explained, neither teachers nor parents expected that children understood the meaning or content of the poems they memorized. When I inquired as to why children were to memorize text they did not understand, absolutely everyone I asked responded that at some time in the future, the poems, resident in the child’s body, would make sense. The same analogy was frequently used: at some time in their eventual adult life, each of these children would be sitting around on the Chinese equivalent of a park bench, and suddenly the meaning of one of the poems they had memorized would be clear. Once achieved, however, this clarity will not be merely cognitive, for these poems were seen as moral blueprints. The meaning of the poem, once understood, had the ability to transform the moral fiber of the memorizer, guiding that person’s thoughts and actions. This was the main reason I heard for continuing to teach Tang poems: they were performative in a very specific way, for the content, even if not cognitively understood, 15 Woodside (1983) notes that such teaching and memory aids date back at least to the Yuan Dynasty. Yuan educational theorist Cheng Duanli, for example, assumed that young boys would enter school already able to read and write basic neo-Confucian texts, which “were supposedly pasted on the walls of their family abodes” (1983:17). 30 resides in the heart/mind (xin) of the child, dormant, until at some point later in life it effects a moral transformation and guides behavior. Children thus memorize these poems to become members of a moral and aesthetic community in potentia; the poetry is assumed to produce an equivalent transformation in all readers, thus forming a community of the future. Several teachers and parents recounted a story to me that they believed illustrated this point. A professor left China to study and teach abroad. His son was educated in American schools, in English. The only Chinese the child learned was a set of Tang poems his father made him memorize. Of course (the story goes), because American education is less rigorous than in China, the boy had terrible trouble adapting to the Chinese system when his family returned home; he was far behind his classmates in his math and Chinese abilities, and he was poorly disciplined. Then he and his classmates began to study Tang poems in class. Suddenly, the meaning of the poems he had memorized in the U.S. became clear to the child, who was then transformed into an excellent student: diligent, hard-working, disciplined, and on the same level with his classmates. The father credited Tang poetry with effecting this transformation, and urged all other Chinese parents to enforce memorization. This kind of language theorizing has a very long history in China – the entire Imperial civil service exam system, from the Song dynasty on, was predicated on a similar understanding of the nature of texts. Memorizing the classics began when boys were relatively young; parents, instructors and political theorists all assumed that they were incapable of actually understanding the material. Yet the content produced a moral subject, who would then model morality in government. All the students I knew – the migrant children at Bright Day, the working-class children at East Avenue, and the professors’ children at University School – were required to learn at least some Tang poetry as part of their education. But the University School took Tang poetry – and its potential effect on children – much more seriously. For International Children’s Day in 2000, each grade at University School memorized several of these poems to perform for their schoolmates and teachers. Tremendous logistic effort when into practicing this poetry, because finding a time slot and a location where several hundred children could meet to practice was a challenge. For most of the month of May leading up to the Children’s Day performance scheduled for May 31st, the 31 courtyards of the campus were filled with children learning the text and correct intonation of the poetry assigned to their grade level (see Figure ii). I was struck by the amount of effort put into phrasing, intonation, pitch and resonance; the teachers in charge of directing the memorization for each grade did not seem to put much effort into the children’s mastery of the actual text of the poems as they did into prosody. On the day of the performance I helped Teacher Sun and the other first-grade teachers lead over three hundred 7-year-olds through the twisting alleys (hutong) that separated their school from the main campus of National University. There, we piled the children by grade level into the shiny, new campus performance center; younger children in the balconies, older children on the main level. The children filled the hall; there was no room for any parents or other outside observers to attend the performance. Other than the ubiquitous panel of dignitaries at the front of the hall, all the student performances were conducted by the children themselves, for each other. The teachers in each grade handed out short lengths of tinsel to each child, colorcoordinated by grade. Every grade level had the children do something different with their tinsel; the first graders wrapped it around their wrists, while other grades waved theirs in the air, tied it around their collars, or put it in the children’s hair (see Figure iii). Then, in between the performances on stage, each grade took turns performing their Tang poems for the rest of the student body. When it was time for the first graders to perform, they stood up, waved their tinsel-wrapped arms in the air, and screamed their poems at the top of their lungs, while Teacher Sun and one other first grade teacher stood before them at the front of the balcony, conducting as if for an orchestra. The audience, composed entirely of the other students, applauded wildly. Each grade performed in the same way: standing, waving tinsel, shrieking their poems at ear-splitting volumes, under the lead of a conducting teacher. The older children performed longer and more complicated poems than the younger ones, but otherwise the performances were identical. Several weeks later, as the school year came to a close, Principal Li of the University School sent a questionnaire home with each child. One of the questions each parent was asked was “what do you think our school does well?” Among the responses, I was struck by the large number of parents who specifically mentioned the extensive Tang poetry memorization for Children’s Day. “Keep up the good work with the Tang poems,” 32 many parents commented; “this is what your school does well, and what is raising the suzhi of our children.” DIFFERENTIATING STUDENTS What is interesting about the aesthetics of language and literacy in Beijing is that we might predict, based on research in the US and other western countries, that this is precisely where a discourse of language differentiation based on the suzhi of the child would exist. If space, bodies, and institutions are all differentiated ideologically and practically according to the suzhi of the children using/inhabiting them, then language, which is always differentiated, would seem to be an ideal site for the high/low suzhi distinction to be made. In fact, as noted above, Collins and Luke claim that language differentiation by class and race is precisely the effect of literacy training in the west. As discussed above, however, in Beijing classrooms language differences were effaced as part of efforts to constitute a seamless, unified language community. This “erasure,” as Irvine and Gal (2000) note, is not an uncommon aspect of language ideology and differentiation. In observing daily language use in schools, however, I noted that while teachers “erased” language differences within the classroom, there were significant differences in how the children at different schools used language outside the classroom. It is in these differences, I argue, that language use intersects with suzhi, and where children’s ability to use “beautiful” language exposes social differences. A prime example was in the ways children at different schools interacted with their teachers. In China, children are not taught to be polite by constantly repeating the words “please” and “thank you,” a verbal performance that strikes most Beijingers as both silly and meaningless. Instead, children express politeness by recognizing and naming appropriate relationships. As soon as they can talk, Chinese parents direct their children to call adults by the title appropriate for their relative age and status: auntie, uncle, teacher, grandparent. This naming of relationships is not merely indexical, a sign of the child’s ability to recognize hierarchy. It is also performative, in that by naming the relationship the child produces both him/herself and the interlocutor. Thus, as soon as students arrive in kindergarten or first grade, they are immediately taught to express 33 respect for teachers by greeting them politely through offering a Pioneer salute16 and saying the word “teacher [laoshi].” This both recognizes the teacher’s position and produces the child’s status as a student. At University School, however, children only greeted some teachers this way; others were, at best, routinely ignored. In fact, getting stuck in a hallway or stairwell at University in between classes or when the children ran to the lunch line was downright dangerous; I was regularly shoved, elbowed and had my feet stomped on. At East Avenue School, the students were equally boisterous in the hallways, but always had an eye out for teachers and other adults; they may have trampled each other as they raced down the stairs, but assiduously greeted all teachers politely on their way down.17 The University School students, by contrast, had a kind of radar for their Chinese and math teachers and the school principal, to whom they were invariably polite; anyone else was just a body in their way.18 This “radar” was a form of class-based distinction: the children recognized who had power over them, who assessed them, who had access to their parents to complain about their bad behavior or grades. All the other teachers were merely content deliverers, to obey or not according to the students’ interests and predilections.19 Some teachers – those with genuine authority over the children - were recognized politely and the hierarchical relationship was constantly reproduced by the calling of the title. Other teachers were not hailed the same way, demonstrating these children’s ability to make very fine distinctions between those with power over them and those without it. The East Avenue students, however, recognized all adults as potential authority figures through their use of polite language and bodily hexis. When I asked, teachers at both schools conceded that working-class children are much more polite than those from the upper-classes; presumably, one marker of class status is the ability to distinguish, then differentially treat, one’s social inferiors. 16 The Pioneer salute, derived from Youth League practices in the Soviet Union, resembles an American military salute, except that the right hand does not touch the forehead. See 1981; Landsberger 2001. 17 For my first several months at East Avenue, every student who passed me in a hallway would stop, snap their right arm up in a smart Pioneer salute, and clearly annunciate: “laoshi hao,” the standard respectful greeting to teachers. I knew I had become accepted as an honorary member of the East Avenue community when the students dropped the formal salute for the offhand fling of their right hands and the shortened “lao hao” greeting they gave their regular teachers. 18 The Chinese (yuwen) and math teachers in elementary schools are responsible for testing and grading children, and thus have significantly more power over students than the other teachers do. 19 I thank Mary Ann O’Donnell for her help with this argument. 34 But “working class” has a particular meaning in the case of Beijing, for I discovered though my observations at the Bright Day School for children of migrant workers that a lack of polite language is considered one of the distinctive markers of a rural, low-suzhi background. Principal Chen frequently yelled at her fourth-grade students for not speaking well, which, she claimed (correctly) marked them as inferior and low suzhi to Beijing residents. To my surprise, however, her definition of “speaking badly” was not related to accent, word choice, or grammar, all of which marked her students as non-natives of Beijing. Instead, she criticized their level of politeness: whether they greeted adults and visitors to the school with the right words of welcome; whether they swore at each other in the playground; whether they used curse words when out on the streets in public. When I asked teachers and parents directly about the aesthetics of language, few if any remarked on this aspect of language use. Yet is was essential to the formation of class-based subject positions, and readily distinguished the varying suzhi levels of children in different schools. CONCLUSION: THE NATION-STATE, LANGUAGE, AND CHILDREN Knowing how the literacy is currently taught, and the kinds of language ideologies which underlie language pedagogies, influences how we understand the relation between children and the nation-state. As I discussed in Chapter 2, much of the theorizing on nationalism takes for granted that children are socialized, via statesponsored texts, into nationalist feeling; Gellner, Hroch, Anderson, and Balibar, all of whom theorize that school systems are (part of) a project that produces nationalist subjects. State ideology is often assumed to reside in the content of the textbooks, as if the state were a single, unified subject reified into the lessons children are taught. This leads to the methodological project of analyzing children’s textbooks for political content, as a way of understanding what the state “is” and what children “become” as state subjects.20 In these studies, textbook content is a transparent medium of statesponsored ideological transmission which students “either are structured into, or resist” (Luke 1992:109). In Chapter 2 I discussed how textbook content is only one of many 20 A common scholarly task through the Cold War was analyzing Chinese textbooks for socialist content. (Cites). 35 sites where children’s nationalism is produced, and here I add another example.21 My observation suggest that children are inscribed into the national community not so much by the specific political content of their textbooks than by the language ideologies that guide literacy learning. These ideologies dictate what kind of language-learning subject each child is, position the child within an aesthetic national space, and erase language differentiation. The result is a literate moral community – or at least an ideology of one – with children able to produce standard language through phrases which position them in national space, and relative to the people around them. 21 See Woronov, T.E. 2007. Performing the Nation: China’s Children as Little Red Pioneers. 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