BEIJING – There is a movement afoot to bring Chinese students to Maine public high schools. Stearns High in Millinocket plans to enroll 60 Chinese students this fall, about a quarter of the school’s total enrollment.

This will be a groundbreaking experiment that has even more far-reaching implications than Maine’s implementation in 2006 of a requirement that all high school juniors take the SAT.

One inevitability of Maine’s educational entrepreneurship will be increased scrutiny of the state’s public schools. If Maine can be a successful global germinator, other states will follow its lead.

Perhaps someday before too long, Chinese public high schools will open their doors en masse to American students. Millinocket’s tiny sociological cauldron has the potential to foment a resurrection of ping-pong diplomacy.

As a former teacher living in Beijing, I became interested in Stearns High last fall when I read in The New York Times about the superintendent’s plan to recruit Chinese students.

Recently, I wrote an op-ed in China’s Global Times, questioning whether Chinese parents would receive adequate value for money spent to educate their children for one year at Stearns.

I was also concerned that the students, coming mainly from Beijing and Shanghai, would experience dislocation challenges in the rural Maine environment, since each of those Chinese cities alone is more populous than all of New England.

Shockingly, some American media assumed that I was representing the views of the Communist Party.

Most in need of GPS guidance was The Atlantic, which published an article entitled: “China Launches Propaganda War Against Small Maine Town, Loses.” The author of the commentary attacked the “Global Times” suggesting it was merely a “regime tool to flatter the Communist Party and to assail its enemies,” and “the leading producer of cheesy propaganda.”

The Atlantic’s writer purported to know why the government was voicing its opposition to a school recruitment effort by an American high school when in fact the government had nothing to do with the opinion.

The Atlantic also resorted to Cold War hyperbole by suggesting the high school had landed on the Chinese government’s “enemies list.”

Just as in the West, signed opinions on an op-ed page in Chinese newspapers are the opinions of the author, not necessarily the newspaper.

Global Times copy editor James Palmer responded recently by acknowledging that the “Chinese media operates under very real and often burdensome political restraints” and that the newspaper’s chief editorials generally reflected “a conservative Chinese view of the world.”

But Palmer cautioned that freelance submissions to his newspaper had nothing to do with any political agenda and that the newspaper published mine because the editors thought it was interesting. That’s the same standard presumably that will determine whether you are reading this freelance submission in Maine.

Palmer also wrote that The Atlantic author’s attitude was “typical of those Americans who fail to recognize the genuine debates going on inside both the Chinese media and the Chinese government, but instead choose to see everything as a plot against the U.S.”

China 2011 is not the USSR circa 1961, and the Chinese media is a far cry from Pravda.

Over the next year, I hope to begin a correspondence with some of the Chinese students at Stearns and some of the townsfolk to learn how things are progressing. I intend to write some articles for the Chinese press about the experiment and hope to share some thoughts from inside the Great Wall with the people of Maine.

– Special to The Press Herald

 

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