Educational Inequality — Education for All?
In 2002, I was lucky to arrive on earth to a fantastic family in Dalian, a city in Northern China. I started kindergarten when I was only six years old, marking the beginning of my life as a student. As a teenager who was born in an urbanized city, early education may seem normal; however, more than 70% of the entire human population lives in rural conditions, where many families treat education as unaffordable luxury. During a summer internship in 2017, when my team conducted interviews in a southern Chinese province, we met numerous families that sell street food as their only source of income, and the children of these families never received any education. The significant contrast between the two scenarios reflects a gap between the economic ladder in modern society, and the culprit, the issue of educational inequality, becomes transparent, especially within the last decade; as such, many activists around the world promote a global solution recently: establishing a set of international laws that require a high school degree under general education. While I personally may support the notion that the current schooling system under general education is always beneficial (K-12), I still agree more strongly with the argument that the issue of educational inequality differs from country to country, so global approaches may not be as tangible and effective as the solutions that local/national legislation can offer due to varying factors such as population size and educational culture for each country.
For the stance of handling educational inequality with global approaches such as setting a minimum educational requirement for every student, the proponent of a country’s population size plays an unavoidable role in their effectiveness when applying internationally. Comparing to many western countries, most eastern countries have a much larger population size; for example, according to Worldometer, China has nearly 1.5 billion people while the United States only has roughly 350 million, and approximately 230 million students in China are currently enrolled in senior high schools while only 50 million students are in the K-12 general education system . The discrepancy of population sizes between the two countries symbolizes the difficulty of executing a set of international laws on educational inequality because the number of educational institutions is limited, where competitions and students’ performances become the ultimate determining factor for admissions. In the United States, not mentioning the potential differences in educational quality, the system of community colleges and public K-12 schooling systems provide plentiful opportunities for every student; in other words, determining factors of public schooling do not exist in most western countries, so education is always accessible to anyone who is willing to further pursue educational degrees. In China and many eastern countries, on the other hand, the K-12 schooling system may not be guaranteed to every student because of a significantly larger population and limited teaching resources. Thus, advocates who encourage global education requirements may have neglected the feasibility of such international laws based on the population size, so such a changing factor of population size in each country may inevitably raise a new problem of classroom capacity around the world.
Then, what can be a potential national solution that better addresses the issue of educational inequality? Let me introduce the idea of vocational education. Vocational education focuses on a specific skill learning. People who pursue this path have all given a clear instruction that intends to equip them for industrial or commercial occupations and directly integrate them into the workforce. Most of the skill-learning process takes place in trade schools and even factories. On a global level, people’s understanding of a vocational degree is relatively different between eastern and western countries. For example, even the fundamental term of “vocational” education may sound exotic to many readers in the western countries. In the case of the western culture as a whole, dedicating all the time to a job may correspond to the worker’s passion; without persistence and continued effort, the tedious repetition of a motion proves to be exhausting to most people. Many people from eastern countries are attached to the idea that vocational education symbolizes a leftover choice for students who do not meet the score line of a middle school/high school graduation test; in other words, a large proportion of the people around the world may consider general education as a superior form of education. As a result, if international laws are established, the contradiction of educational culture between countries may impose an unprecedented threat to the educational stability around the globe.
In the context of educational culture, vocational degree may represent the disadvantages of international laws and the global approach; however, in the context of employment on a national level, the national approaches such as offering vocational degrees and setting an educational standard for its own country allows workers to quickly position themselves into society without worrying about misplacement because their fields of interest can be interpreted as pre-determined, and, at the same time, a stable source of income and guaranteed working conditions are clear advantages of following a designated national approach.
Above mentioned reason, I object to the effectiveness of the global approach based on the issue of educational inequality and promote solutions on a national scale. For the activists who prefer to continue pursuing a global approach, I recommend a more productive way of utilizing community resources and understanding the differences between countries’ educational systems before executing any plans on a global scale. Since the process of globalization urges many countries to adapt to a global atmosphere, some skeptics may have the same stance for education, but, still, a global approach fails to fulfill each country’s necessity.
Educational inequality enlarges the gap between people around the world because education represents the bond between a shared mode of communication and networking. Weighing both the national approach and the global approach, employment opportunities and individual traits are deeply integrated into the topic of education as a whole. The utopia of providing educational opportunities for everyone proves to be optimal, but such activists who advocate it need to ask themselves a question: “How can we make this happen?” Rather than treating education as a necessity, each student truly represents a path of invaluable possibilities, where general education is simply one of them. Little by little, the future generations can enrich themselves with knowledge and benefit society at the same time, without worrying about a global restriction that hinders what they are eager to pursue.
