Test Scores, Identities, and Cultural Possibilities

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In my Reviewing Policy section of this journal I have often analyzed a number of significant books that focus on other nations. Such an international agenda is important. Analytically such a wider perspective provides fresh insights into the lenses we employ to understand crucial sets of social relations that are created by and create educational and larger dynamics. This international view has now taken a very interesting turn with the publication of Paul Willis’s newest book, Being Modern in China: A Western Cultural Analysis of Modernity, Tradition and Schooling in China Today. At the center of his analysis is the public school and especially the power of the national examinations in China as both structures that divide populations but also as powerful devices that embody identities both now and in the future. But it is much more than this. With its primary focus on both commodified and lived youth cultures, the book constitutes a substantive contribution to the questioning of the orthodox view of economic determinism within the political economy of education. Given this, it is definitely worth reading the book, but it is important to remember that this is indeed a “western” analysis.