 Working
people who have received senior middle school or secondary
specialized school education and young people who have
failed to enroll in regular institutions of higher learning
can still receive higher education through the adult education
system. At the present stage, means of higher
education for adults in China are mainly adult universities
(evening universities, correspondence universities and
spare-time universities, for example), radio and TV universities,
and the higher education self-study/examination program.
Working people are primary receivers of adult higher education.
This education has a fairly big room for survival and
development since there are flexible ways of running schools
providing such education and since such schools do not
require huge input by the state. In the last 50 years,
adult higher education has developed side by side with
regular higher education. At present, radio and TV universities
and the higher education self-study/examination program
are biggest in scale.
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Radio
and TV universities are a form of distance education.
Teaching is provided mainly through the television medium
and part of humanities courses are offered through radio
broadcasting. Schools are open to the society, and students
include countless numbers of auditors (watchers) as well
as regular ones who have been selected on the basis of
examination results. By 2000, the Central Radio and TV
University had turned out more than 2.8 million graduates.
Professor Zhang Yingqing of Shandong University is one
of the Central Radio and TV University's 90,000 graduates
of the first year. He still keeps
notebooks he used when he took courses from the university
during 1979-1981. At a time when TV sets were still scarce,
he and others watched a nine-inch black-and-white TV set
on mornings and worked in the afternoon. "At that
time, the worst thing was a power outage. Once when there
was a power outage, I rushed to the TV station's transmission
room after riding bike for 50 minutes and took a lesson
there," he said. |
