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Closely Observed
Since schools being at the day care level (although all babies are not in day care centers) children are subject to close observation from an early age by a number of people. I had wondered how talents are identified and students selected to do what the state wants them to do. After seeing the efforts to train gifted students and feeling that the working adults with whom we came in contact were well educated and suited to their jobs, I decided that the Chinese are probably as able as we are to discover and channel individuals to appropriate work. We were told that entrance exams are given for university acceptance and for all other areas of special education. I think the Children’s Palaces are training places for selection to schools of advanced education in the arts.
What comparable provisions, if any, there are for the more intellectual disciplines, we did not learn. At the kindergartens we visited, the equipment provided and, in some cases, the space alloted were minimal. The theory of early childhood education in China is obviously nothing like our own, which focuses on imaginative play, improvisation, and in some schools sophisticated approaches to numbers, reading and other conceptional learning. Instead, we saw Chinese children singing and dancing in a highly structured form.
Since our group was primarily legal in orientation, our leader asked to visit the Peking prison and we were
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