UK professor discusses education gap between social and ethnic classes in visits to China, Zimbabwe

Upon arriving in Zimbabwe, Brown toured a rural community and its school system to compare it with the quality of education available in middle-class environments near the capital city of Harare. In interviews with the school’s headmaster, students and parents, Brown was struck by the poverty that existed in the countryside. Besides the total lack of electricity, several villages were dependent on a single deep well at one of the schools as their source of water. The disparity between the “haves” and “have nots” in Zimbabwe made a profound impression on the UK professor.

At the Masvingo Degree Programme, a three-year old teacher’s college, Brown talked about her research on management techniques useful in diverse classroom environments. In addition, on behalf of the University of Kentucky, Brown presented the Masvingo Programme with 20 textbooks on teacher education.

The following day, Brown met with professors at the University of Zimbabwe’s college of education to discuss developing a professor and student exchange program with UK. She also presented a paper on her on-going research concerning self-concept and a teacher’s ability to effectively educate diverse groups of children.

One of Brown’s goals during her travels was to establish partnerships for her research into ideas of self-concept in multi-cultural education. She was pleased to find an enthusiastic response among colleagues in both countries.

At the end of the month, Brown visited the University of Fudan and the Pu-Dong University of Social Sciences in Shanghai, China as an invited participant in a colloquium on education. At the colloquium, Brown presented and discussed her research paper: The Roles of Public Education in the Development of Contemporary Society, which examined 150 years of education in the United States that promoted an “Anglo-Saxon culture within a multi-cultured society.”

In addition to her presentation, Brown was invited to participate in a dialogue at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, an international think tank of 80 Chinese scholars.

Among the topics discussed during the day were the influences of western culture on China, the rising political tensions between China and the U.S., and economic globalization which many of the participating scholars construed disparagingly as “Americanization.”

The people with whom she spoke readily admitted that China has a problem with economic and ethnic class divisions, just like the United States, and that their education system tends to reinforce those divisions, Brown said. But the global economy was also of great concern. The rush of western-style economic development has ushered in a “me- generation” among Chinese youth, scholar said. Chinese students are overly concerned with material wealth and they were concerned about what the long term impact globalization will have on their culture.

Touring Shanghai, Brown saw classic examples of the growing gap between economic classes in the Republic of China. In many ways, she said, the disparity between Shanghai’s rich and impoverished strongly resembled those in American inner cities and rural areas. Towering office buildings and opulent apartment dwellings built within the last ten years cast shadows over shacks and tenements swollen with residents living in severe poverty. In many cases, these buildings and tenements shared the same block.