Education in the countryside: A class apart
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Apr 12th 2017 | JIAOBA
FRIDAY is a good day for eight-year-old Yang Zongtao. He will see his mother and baby sister after spending the week boarding at Jiaoba Central Primary School in Guizhou, a southern province and one of China’s poorest. He misses his mother “a bit”, he says stoically. But the walk from his home takes an hour, too long to undertake alone each day. So, like millions of pupils in China’s countryside, he remains at school all week (some stay longer). There are rural children who start boarding as early as the age of three.
Educating rural people has long been a challenge. In the 1990s almost every village had a primary school or “teaching point”, where children aged between six and ten often attended class in a single room. But school enrolments began to fall because of plummeting birth rates and migration to cities. Local governments responded by closing underused village schools and pooling resources in larger ones such as Jiaoba’s. In 2001 it became national policy to merge schools this way. Between 2000 and 2015 nearly three-quarters of all rural primary schools, more than 300,000 of them, were shut.
Because journeys to school are now longer on average—and are often costly, exhausting or dangerous (or a combination of these qualities)—many children now have no choice but to board. By 2010, the latest year for which data are available, around 10m primary schoolchildren in rural China were doing so—about 12% of students in that age group. Half of all secondary-school students in the countryside now board, too.
There are two main types of boarding school in China. Some are privately run fee-paying ones for children of the urban elite. Pupils often attend such schools close to where they live (many parents believe that education is helped by separation from the distractions of family life). Far more common are rural schools such as Jiaoba Primary (pictured). These are state-run and government-funded. The idea behind the rural ones is that pupils will benefit from not having to commute, take part in household chores or toil in fields. Such schools are also supposed to offer better academic support for students than they can get at home: many older people in the countryside have little formal education. Another proclaimed benefit is that the schools can ensure poor students eat well and have their health properly monitored.
But many rural schools are ill equipped for these tasks. In Guizhou, government spending per person on education in rural as well as urban areas is less than half the amount in Beijing, reckons Unicef, the UN agency for children. At Jiaoba’s primary school, where more than 100 children board (about one-tenth of the total), the head teacher admits that facilities are “poor”. He says that if a family can avoid sending a child to board, it will. The bare concrete walls of the eight-bed rooms are filthy; their windows have no curtains. Toothbrushes stand in lines of mugs on small tables, but there is nowhere to store other belongings—not that many of the children have personal possessions. There is no space in them to do homework. The dormitories are unheated, though it is extremely cold even in spring.
Yet Jiaoba has better facilities than many other such schools, where children often have to share beds, and toilet blocks are far from dormitories. The government pays 1,000 yuan ($145) a year towards the cost of each child’s lodging, breakfast and supper at Jiaoba Primary (there is also a four-yuan subsidy per child per day for lunch). But elsewhere many parents have to foot the bill. Many schools do not even provide three meals a day, according to Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Programme. The fare often lacks much nutritional value, too.
Children in the Chinese countryside tend not to be as healthy as their urban counterparts. But those at rural boarding schools are even less robust. They are more likely to have intestinal worms and to be anaemic (which affects both academic accomplishment and health). Far more are unusually short for their age than non-boarders—a sign of poor nutrition. A study in 2009 in the northern province of Shaanxi found that rural children who boarded were on average 3cm shorter than those who did not. Many of the boarders may have been undernourished earlier in their lives. But their rate of stunting increased with age, suggesting that school was aggravating the problem.
Teaching quality and facilities are sometimes better at the merged schools, but staff turnover is often high. The large size of classes can make teaching more difficult: at Jiaoba some of them have 75 children. Academically, boarders perform even worse than their peers who live at home. Last year a study of boarders in five provinces found they did less well than day pupils in tests of their language ability, memory and speed at problem-solving (there was little difference, however, in their abilities in maths). Students who begin their primary education in old-style village classrooms tend to do better than those who start in larger schools farther away, according to some findings.
Boarders often suffer from a lack of supervision and emotional support. At Jiaoba, two elderly women stay in the dormitory building overnight. But teachers there admit that some students are “withdrawn”. Children who live at their schools are more prone to anxiety, depression and other mental-health problems. They are also vulnerable to sexual and other forms of abuse: a spate of such incidents has been reported at rural boarding schools in recent years; far more may go undetected.
Since the merger policy was adopted, drop-out rates may have risen. In 2012 the National Audit Office found that the number of students who quit had more than doubled between 2006 and 2011 in 1,155 primary schools it investigated. That was a rare admission by a government body. The official drop-out rate for all primary schoolchildren in China was 0.2% in 2015, but researchers at Shaanxi Normal University reported a rate 20 times higher than that in a survey of 15,000 children aged 9 to 11 in the countryside.
In recent decades China has seen rapid improvements in educational standards. The average number of years a Chinese child spends at school has doubled since 1980. The share of the labour force with any kind of higher education increased from 1.1% in 1980 to 12.5% in 2015. But these statistics often obscure how far rural children are left behind academically. Less than 10% of them go to senior high school, compared with 70% of children in cities.
The government acknowledges that its efforts to concentrate resources in a smaller number of rural schools have not solved the problem, and have sometimes resulted in students having to live in poor conditions without adequate safeguards. In 2012 it ordered local authorities to stop “blindly” closing schools before ensuring that centralised ones are up to standard. But local governments have little incentive to spend more money, since any student who does well academically is certain to leave the countryside. Rural children will form the backbone of China’s future workforce. By failing them, the government is failing the country as a whole.
