A middle school in eastern China has been thrust into the centre of a national debate about Chinese society’s “worship” of elite universities, after revealing that nearly all its newly hired teachers had graduated from the same two institutions.
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Suzhou Middle School, a well-known institution in Jiangsu province, recently announced that it had hired 13 teachers, 10 of whom had attended China’s two most prestigious universities: Tsinghua University and Peking University, according to domestic media reports.
All of the candidates had completed postgraduate degrees and eight of them had received doctorates, according to the notice.
But the school’s decision to hire from a narrow pool of elite colleges has proved controversial, with critics arguing that it reflected Chinese employers’ growing tendency to focus more on the name of the school a candidate attended than their actual skills and abilities.
Graduates from Peking or Tsinghua are not necessarily going to become excellent teachers. That is basic common sense
“The whole of society now worships Tsinghua and Peking universities, with schools trying to create a high-level teaching team by offering jobs to graduates from these institutions,” said Xiong Bingqi, director of the Beijing-based 21st Century Education Research Institute think tank.
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