RE: FW: [mlg-ics] Edu-Factory Project and Website

["Matthew Hale" <husunzi@hotmail.com>]

Thanks for forwarding this, Dan. I've been following the Edu-factory project 
on an and off, and I'm interested in how changes in the education system in 
China, student activism, etc., relate to situations in other countries and 
in capitalism as a whole. Please let me know if you run across any other 
material on these topics. I wrote some comments on Wang Hui's interview on 
the CSG blog here:

http://www.chinastudygroup.org/index.php?action=blog2&type=view&id=29

content:

The new Edu-factory website has posted a video (MP4) of an interview with 
Wang Hui about the marketist restructuring of China's university system. 
Glad to know someone from China is taking part in these discussions, 
although I'm not sure what I think about their general direction (theories 
of "cognitive capitalism" etc.), on the one hand, and it seems that China's 
experience could be related to global trends in more helpful ways, on the 
other. But this is a valiant first effort.

WH says that the percentage of college entrants from rural families has 
dropped dramatically in recent years, both because it’s more difficult for 
rural students to prepare for the college entrance exams, and because rural 
parents increasingly regard education as a waste of time since degrees are 
worth less on the labor market. Has anyone seen any statistics to support 
this? He mentions the media stir last year about college graduates’ 
difficulty in finding jobs – I had seen the figure “3 out of 5” college 
graduates failed to find jobs in the fields they trained for, but when I’ve 
mentioned this to faculty at the school where I work, they say that’s 
impossible – almost all graduates can find jobs, it’s just that they’re 
unwilling to take them in remote locations. I’d be interested to see any 
other statistics people know of about this.

I was surprised that when the interviewer asked about student responses to 
this situation, WH only said that “everyone’s talking about it, but there’s 
no easy solution” – what about all the student riots last year about the 
value of degrees on the labor market? (See, for example, this, this, and 
this.) This would be a great topic to research in more depth, and to relate 
to the general Edu-factory discussions.

His account seems to describe the situation of grad students at some of the 
top few universities, but not most universities and colleges. For instance, 
he talks about how open and connected universities are to global events and 
knowledge via the internet, but in fact most students, including grad 
students, at Sichuan University, ranked the tenth best school in China, 
cannot access many off-campus and most overseas-based websites (the school 
provides access to its own campus network, and very few students splurge for 
installing their own connections), only Ph.D. students have access to more 
than a few domestic periodicals, and the libraries are so difficult to use 
and understocked that many students don’t even bother, preferring to squat 
on the floors of bookstores and skim books, or, more often, just to skip 
reading altogether and cheat on their papers and tests. Several of my 
master's-level students last semester didn’t have email addresses, since 
they used the internet only to chat with people on QQ and read entertainment 
news, and students often have trouble accessing even domestic email accounts 
from the campus network. Most of the students at the small, private college 
(affiliated as a “branch” of another major university) where I teach now, on 
the other hand, use the internet only at off-campus netbars on the weekends 
(the school doesn’t have computer lab, and most students don’t own 
computers), and some have never even used a computer.

Glad he mentioned students’ growing involvement in rural activism, but here 
I think he’s also neglecting the majority of students. His point in 
mentioning this activism is to indicate a recent trend toward overcoming the 
gap between students and the laboring masses, but actually many students 
still come from peasant and working-class families, and, as he himself 
indicates, most see themselves as training for white-collar jobs they may 
not even get, not as elite academics in some kind of ivory tower. In fact, 
most student volunteers I’ve met (“activists” doesn’t seem appropriate in 
most cases) see their volunteering as a way to help them get some kind of 
government job in the future, not as a way to ally themselves as organic 
intellectuals with subaltern struggles. So, on the one hand, it seems to me 
that most students are not so cut off from the masses in the first place, 
and on the other, the recent rise of student volunteering is not necessarily 
a move toward overcoming whatever gap may exist.

Please let us know if you run across any other publications, in English or 
Chinese, dealing critically with China's "industrialization of education" in 
relation to situations in other countries and any possible changes in 
capitalism and the class struggle.

By the way: the English translation of the report on the Yangzhou workers' 
struggle by WH and Cui Zhiyuan has not yet been finished after many months - 
please help out with that if you have a few minutes.

Matt

> From: "Daniel F. Vukovich" <vukovich@hkucc.hku.hk>
> To: <zhongguo@openflows.org>
> Subject: FW: [mlg-ics] Edu-Factory Project and Website
> Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 11:17:18 +0800
>
>  Link below contains an interview with Wang Hui, fyi...
>
> Dan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mlg-ics-bounces@lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> [mailto:mlg-ics-bounces@lists.andrew.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of Imre Szeman
> Sent: May 21, 2007 1:16 AM
> To: cacs@mailman.srv.ualberta.ca; cultstud-l@comm.umn.edu;
> mlg-ics@andrew.cmu.edu; g-csacont@mcmaster.ca
> Subject: [mlg-ics] Edu-Factory Project and Website
>
> fyi, i
>
> ----------------------------
> Dear friends,
>
> We are very happy to announce that the edu-factory website is up and
> working.
>
> http://www.edu-factory.org
>
> On the site there are three video interviews on conflicts in knowledge
> production and transformations of the university available for download. 
> The
> interviews, which were recorded at the Global Meeting in Venice, Italy in
> late March 2007 are with:
>
> Ranabir Samaddar, Calcutta Research Group Stanley Aronowitz, City 
> University
> of New York Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, Beijing
>
> We are very happy to be able to present these interviews about changes to
> the university in three key sites: India, the USA and China.
>
> As we hope to build the edu-factory website into a resource for edu-factory
> and other linked projects we would be very happy if list members could send
> suggestions for links, bibliography, multimedia materials etc. Please send
> all suggestions to this address.
>
> Also we ask you to spread news of the site through your networks.
>
> edu-factory collective
> _______________________________________________
> MLG-ICS mailing list
> MLG-ICS@lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/listinfo/mlg-ics

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