Record: Xiaoming Sheng, “Christian Homeschooling in China” in British Journal of Religious Education 41, no. 2 (2019): 218-231. [abstract here]
Summary: Xiaoming Sheng should be a familiar name to veteran readers of this blog. We have previously covered her work on Chinese homeschool law and on a small group of Confucian homeschoolers involved in a very interesting collective. In this study she shifts her attention to Chinese Christians who homeschool, particularly examining why and how they do it.
Xiaoming was able to locate, through snowball sampling, 30 subjects (all mothers), making this the largest study of Chinese homeschoolers to date. All of them live in Beijing. She recorded and transcribed semi-structured interviews lasting 1-1.5 hours with each mother and then coded the results. Given that homeschooling is illegal in China, Xiaoming was very careful to avoid making public any identifying data.
Xiaoming begins with a bit of history, noting that from the 1830s to 1949 Christian missionaries from the U.S. and Europe established many, many schools at all levels. In 1949 the Chinese government began reforming and replacing these schools such that by the middle of the 1950s there was no more Christian education in China. But with the growth of Christianity in the 21st century has come a renewed interest in Christian education, most fully realized in the nascent homeschooling movement in China. Xiaoming estimates that there may be as many as 5,000 Christian homeschooling families in China today (p. 222).
With this backstory in place, Xiaoming reports on her findings. First, showing up again and again in her interviews, it is important to note that parental motives are multiple. Xiaoming’s subjects were “ideologues” in Van Galen’s classic sense, eager to pass on Christian beliefs and practices to their children. They were also “pedagogues,” (Van Galen again) who wanted something more for their children than the dreary drill-and-kill test prep that Chinese children must endure in government schools.
When it comes to actually doing the homeschooling, Xiaoming describes five primary approaches and the curricular model preferred by each:
- English speaking, western-educated Chinese parents sometimes use American curriculum and practices
- Zealous adult converts often use the Bible extensively, as well as English-language Bible-based curricula.
- Creative parents want their child’s individuality and artistic talents to be cultivated even as they also try to pass on Christian commitments. These families frequently expose children to the Chinese version of classical literature as well as to art and science.
- Parents who lack social mobility sometimes think homeschooling will provide it for their children. These families combine Bible-based instruction with the same curriculum taught in government schools.
- Church-related schooling (hybridized, often with a co-op as the central experience) is increasingly popular and attractive as it frequently provides the potential for a child to win a church scholarship to pay for higher education. Curriculum here tends to be somewhat eclectic.
Xiaoming also finds diversity in terms of pedagogy. As has been found multiple times in the United States, Xiaoming repeatedly found among “nearly all” of her subjects a gradually loosening up over time as they became more comfortable with homeschooling (p. 226). Mothers usually started out trying to replicate the structure and pacing of schools at home. But over time they grew more comfortable with a more hands-off, progressive approach that allowed the child more latitude in how the day was structured.
Xiaoming concludes with a section on outcomes. Interestingly, the outcome of most interest to the parents in this sample is not academic success but moral formation, and most of the interviewees seem to think that homeschooling has helped their children grow in their Christian moral lives. She does note, though, that the “vast majority” of these mothers are economically privileged, well-educated, and English-speaking (p. 228). They want to send their children to Western universities eventually. They think that homeschooling with English-language curricula will be a better preparation for that future than learning in conventional Chinese schools.
Appraisal: A 2014 study by Zhao and Badzis had identified Christianity as a contributing factor to Chinese homeschooling, but that study was extremely limited in its methodology. Xiaoming’s study here provides far richer data and analysis. She notes, as is so often the case in homeschooling research, that her qualitative study of 30 subjects all from one city cannot stand in for all Chinese homeschooling, but as noted above it is the largest sample ever collected of Chinese homeschoolers. Its generalizations are consistent with those found by Xiaoming in previous studies and with those of other researchers. Thus it seems fairly safe to say that what she finds here is likely what is really going on in China. Homeschooling in China happens when wealthy, Western-educated mothers want their children to escape the drill-and-kill pedagogy of traditional Chinese schools, want to pass on Christian (or, as other studies have found, Buddhist) moral commitments in the face of official government atheism, and want to prepare their children for higher education in Europe or the United States.