EDUCATION-CHINA: Rural Schools Struggle to Make the Grade

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ma Guihua

LONGLIN, China, Sep 23 2002 (IPS) - Five or six pupils at the grade one and pre-school classes of Xiajiawan primary school here in south-western China share one desk. When there are not enough chairs for everyone, some students stand throughout a class session. Others have to do their written assignments while standing.

These are familiar scenes at the Xiajiawan School — located on a slope by a mountain valley about 30 kilometres from the seat of Longlin county government in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region – and in many schools across China’s impoverished countryside.

The main part of the school is a stone-mud structure with pane-less windows, built in 1990.

Its increased student enrollment of 184 is already beyond the capacity of the 12-year-old, one-storey building, so a makeshift classroom was put up at the back of the school building. But one of its walls is missing, and the remaining three sides are supported by uneven planks, from which chilly winds sift through in winter.

“We don’t have enough classrooms, desks and dormitories,” sighs Yang Guozhi, the headmaster.

The school is also home to some students. Forty-two students are boarding at the school because their homes are distant – they walk at least one and a half hours to get to school.

Due to the lack of dormitories, some of the students have to squeeze into the small, shaky compartment above the classroom to spend the night.

“Every week, these kids bring to school rice and pickled vegetables. They have to cook their own meals after school,” says the 38-year-old Yang, head of the school for four years.

He is the only one of the school’s five-member faculty to be on the official payroll to get 600 yuan (about 72 U.S. dollars) per month.

The other four teachers, not on the official payroll, are hired by the local communities for a meagre allowance of 150 to 200 yuan (18 to 24 dollars) a month.

Because of this small income, these ‘unofficial teachers’ have to tend to their farms at home as well.

But from his meagre pay of 18 dollars a month, Yang Guangyin, a 24-year-old ‘unofficial teacher’, spares 200 yuan (24 dollars) a year to buy textbooks, notebooks or pencils for his students.

While China is promoting the nine-year compulsory education system, a ‘unified school fee’ is still charged, which varies from place to place.

In Beijing, an average student is charged 800 yuan (100 dollars) per semester. But the state has set the maximum school fee for rural students at 60 yuan (7 dollars) each semester.

But even this sum is beyond the reach of the parents of many students in Xiajiawan, says Yang the headmaster. In 2001, the average annual per capita income of farmers in Longlin county was less than 1,000 yuan (125 dollars).

“Now our school only charges 30 yuan (3.5 dollars) a semester, and even so it is still very difficult to collect,” Yang says.

Two months into the new semester, the school only collected over 300 yuan (36 dollars) from its 184 enrolled students, against the due sum of 5,520 yuan (690 dollars). The teachers have to make up the balance.

“Usually the textbook fees cannot be completely collected until the end of the school term,” says headmaster Yang, adding that the other miscellaneous costs such as chalk, sports gear, teaching materials are the teachers’ responsibilities to produce.

The local government is unable to help as it can hardly make its own ends meet, says Liang Zhigang, a township official.

Other rural schools in Longlin county are in a similar plight. They are helped somewhat by a textbook-revolving scheme supported by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in which 65 grade one and grade two students of the school can have free textbooks for Chinese and mathematics.

They then pass on these books to succeeding students, for the books’ two-year continued use. A total of 58,500 primary school students in Guangxi have benefited from such a programme aided by the Australian government.

But this can only be a temporary solution to what experts say is the bigger problem of the dispersion of rural schools with inadequate facilities and expertise.

“If you have so many small-sized schools in those poverty-stricken areas, their education quality can never be guaranteed as none of them can afford qualified teachers for every grade and every course,” observes Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at the People’s University in Beijing.

“You see a lot of redundancy at a very low level. It’s a waste of the limited resources for education,” he explains.

Up to 2000, Guangxi alone had 28,805 teaching sites or ‘incomplete’ schools, some with one or two teachers and no more than 15 students.

As the Ministry of Education tried to have fewer but bigger schools, Guangxi closed down 5,121 small schools and plans to eliminate 11,000 ‘undesirable teaching sites’ by 2005.

Restructuring creates other problems. Wei Xuechang, deputy director of the education department in Longlin county, says that closing down village schools means that many children will have to drop out of school because their parents cannot afford their boarding at schools that are now even farther away from home.

Shi Jinghuan, professor of education at Beijing Normal University, says the concentrated school scheme is “for the convenience of administration instead of serving the target groups”.

China’s Ministry of Finance has said it will pool 5 billion yuan (625 million dollars) to improve basic education in rural areas from 2001-2005. The government has appropriated 3 billion yuan (375 million dollars) to renovate rundown schools in rural areas by 2003.

But some experts say the central government should take full responsibility for rural education, providing free compulsory education and guaranteeing payment of teachers’ salaries.

Although education spending has grown since the eighties, investments in basic education in rural areas have been much lower than those in higher learning and basic education in cities. This is so although rural areas account for 70 percent of the China’s primary and high school student population, one education expert says.

“If the government grudges to spend say an extra 100 million yuan (12.5 million dollars) now on basic education every year, the losses cannot be retrieved in the future even with a triple or quadruple more investment,” warns Wu Changshun, principal of Beijing No 5 Middle School.

EDUCATION-CHINA: Rural Schools Struggle to Make the Grade

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ma Guihua

LONGLIN, China, Sep 23 2002 (IPS) - Five or six pupils at the grade one and pre-school classes of Xiajiawan primary school here in south-western China share one desk. When there are not enough chairs for everyone, some students stand throughout a class session. Others have to do their written assignments while standing.
(more…)