ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the educational record of post-Mao China through the prism of the some perspectives. It undertakes a more extended analysis of the PISA paradigm for evaluating educational success, for which Shanghai has become a poster-child. Shanghai is where orthodox attempts to burnish the educational achievements of post-Mao China have met the ostensibly practice-oriented agenda of Westerners anxious to identify 'what works'. This has involved serious distortions of Shanghai's educational performance, and that of China more broadly. But more fundamentally, attempts to frame Shanghainese or Chinese schooling as a shining success story reveal an impoverishment of conceptions of education's purposes. The chapter focuses on the implications of that impoverishment. In post-Mao China, policy on education, as on the provision of other public goods, has been governed by two overriding goals: the maintenance of socio-political 'stability', and the pursuit of prosperity.
