Rural education in China: Separate and unequal
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Apr 12th 2017
LAST year some images went viral on the internet in China. They showed children descending an 800-metre (2,600-foot) rock face on rickety ladders made of vines, wood and rusty metal. Their destination: school. The photographer was told by a local official that “seven or eight” people had died after losing their grip. Yet the children did this regularly—there is no school at the top of the mountain in Sichuan province where they live. The photographs conveyed two striking aspects of life in the Chinese countryside: a hunger for education so strong that children will risk their lives for it, and a callous lack of government attention to the needs of rural students.
In many ways, education in China is improving. Since 2000 the annual tally of students graduating from university has increased nearly eightfold, to more than 7.5m. But many rural students are neglected by China’s school system, and they are not the only ones. So, too, are the children of migrants who have moved to the cities from the countryside and poor students who want to go to senior high school.
This is not only unfair; it is also counterproductive. China faces a demographic crunch: its workforce is shrinking and it can no longer depend on cheap, low-skilled migrant labour to power its growth. Its young—especially those with rural roots—need to become more skilled. That calls for better education.
The government has not been completely blind to the need to ensure that rural people have enough schooling to work in factories, but it has shown little sense of urgency. The schoolchildren from Sichuan are a case in point. So perilous was their journey to school that officials arranged for them to board, like tens of millions of children in rural China. They travel back home only every few weeks.
That may sound like progress. Since the population of young people in the countryside is falling so smaller schools are closing. Better to board than to trek for miles every day to one that is still open. But conditions at these boarding schools are often appalling (see article). Many children do not get enough to eat, which affects their health and their ability to learn. So poor is their nutrition that they are often shorter than their counterparts at day schools.
And it is not just the boarders who suffer. In all kinds of education, rural children have less chance of doing well than their urban counterparts. Less than 10% of them go to senior high-school, compared with 70% of their peers in cities. That is because the government stacks the system against them.
Everyone in China has to attend school for nine years—until the end of junior high school. But it was not until 2007 that all rural children could do so without paying. Like city dwellers, they still have to pay for senior high school. But their families tend to be much poorer, so few can afford it. And rural schools are far more rudimentary. Local governments are responsible for running them. If officials have tax revenue to spare, they see no point in doling it out in the countryside. How can you boost growth, they wonder, by spending money on villagers who will eventually move away?
It is no better for the migrants once they are in the cities. China’s household-registration system, known as hukou, treats rural migrants as second-class citizens. Their children are often barred from state-funded urban schools. They must pay to send them to ramshackle private ones instead, which are often worse than rural state schools. Even there, children’s education is frequently disrupted: officials have forced many such places to close, citing safety and other concerns.
People with rural hukou make up nearly 60% of the population. So it is vital that the system is scrapped. Everyone in China deserves the same access to public education, health care and other services. The central government must also do more to ensure that rural schools have enough money to teach and feed their pupils—basic education is too important to be left to ill-motivated local authorities. And it must give more financial support to the rural poor in order to help their children graduate from high school and enter university.
People from the countryside are the unsung heroes of China’s economic rise. The migration of more than 200m of them into cities, where their labour is more productive than it is in the fields, has been the rocket fuel of the country’s spectacular growth. In China, as elsewhere, education is what will make society fairer, and ultimately wealthier.
