Growing Up in a Chinese Secondary School for Girls: "Do You want to know what I think or what I really think?"

Abstract

The shift to a market economy and accompanying efforts to maximize the efficient management and diversification of secondary schooling in the Peoples' Republic of China have had damaging consequences for the educational attainment and achievement of female students in rural and urban China. This paper explores the impact of economic and social reform on gender inequality in education by focusing upon the experiences and ambitions of students who attend the Shanghai Number Three Girls' School, Mainland China's only allfemale key (zhongdian) secondary school. Their concerns are examined in the context of their teachers' conceptions of gender (xingbie) and adolescent development, the introduction of sex education in the Chinese secondary school curriculum, the inceasingly ”psychologized” approach to moral training practiced by Chinese educators, and the potential for Chinese perceptions of female adolescence to inform cross-cultural research on development. Interviews and observations for this study were conducted in Shanghai during eighteen weeks of fieldwork in 1988, 1989, and 1991. They are part of a larger, on-going research project in which the Shanghai Number Three Girls' School, originally founded a century ago by Methodist missionaries, provides the setting for exploring how North American and Chinese women in late-imperial, republican, and socialist China have perceived the connections among schooling for women, indigenous and foreign oppression, and the transformation of Chinese society.