CSUN to Use Grant to Help China Train Its Educators

Cal State Northridge officials Wednesday announced that the university has received a grant from the People’s Republic of China to assist in a massive overhaul of that country’s educational system.

The university will use a $965,888 grant to run a series of educational workshops aimed at boosting the quality of teaching in rural China, officials said.

CSUN was selected by the Chinese government over three other universities to receive the grant.

The university’s application for the grant spurred some dissent last year among faculty members who said they feared that the university would appear to be supportive of China’s totalitarian regime.

But physics Prof. Paul Chow, who helped the university prepare its grant application, said the university’s efforts will benefit common Chinese citizens, not the country’s political leaders.

“People should make a very, very clear distinction between the people and politics,” Chow said.

“The people must be educated. Education has no boundary.”

More than 75% of the People’s Republic of China’s 2 million junior high school teachers do not have any college education and some did not finish high school, Chow said.

As part of a long-range plan to expand compulsory education in rural areas from six to nine years, the government has launched a massive effort to retrain some of these “unqualified” teachers.

China received a $50-million loan from the World Bank earmarked for educational improvements.

Some of the money will be used to purchase equipment for schools, Chow said.

With the grant money, Chow said, staff members with the campus’s China Institute will recruit educational experts from around the world to go to China to run a series of two-week workshops.

The sessions will be on topics ranging from methods of teaching physics and geography to the use of computers for educational management.

Each workshop will accommodate about 40 faculty members of China’s Institutes of Education, where Chinese secondary schoolteachers go on weekends, nights and vacations to improve their teaching skills, Chow said.

CSUN competed for the grant against Ohio State University, Columbia University’s Teachers College and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto.

Some faculty members at the university were upset because they did not want to appear to support the Chinese government that in June, 1989, killed scores of students in a massacre in Beijing’s Tian An Men square.

They had urged the university to sever any educational links with China until its citizens were granted more freedom.

But other CSUN professors argued that a better educated populace would be better able to press for change and freedom in their country.