Aggressive expansion of school enterprise raises difficult questions, however. Nonschool enterprises may object to competing against school enterprises that receive special tax breaks or other advantages. This kind of complaint has sometimes arisen in the United States, and we heard that it is also being discussed in China. Observing the institutional strategies that are being tried in China will be instructive for the United States. In recent years, U.S. policy makers have been intrigued by Germany and other European countries where employers take major responsibility for education and training of young people.
China has schools run by enterprises, too.
But it also has, apparently on a larger scale than in Europe or the United States, enterprises run by schools. Developing a variety of approaches to combining education and enterprise may give China unusual flexibility in adapting to demands of the emerging global economy, where learning and production are increasingly intertwined. David Stern is a professor of education at U. C. Berkeley.