WEI Yufan stays busy during the week and spends her weekends and holidays at cramming schools, taking math, English, piano and taekwondo classes.

The nine-year-old is chauffeured from one class to another every Saturday, with a short break for lunch at a nearby fast-food restaurant. She spends only Sunday afternoons at home, but schoolwork takes up most of the time.

Wei's parents want their only child to excel, or at least, keep up with her peers.

"All the other kids are taking many extracurricular classes and she will fall behind if she doesn't take any," says her mother Xie Jing, a government employee in Nanning, capital city of south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. "We hope she'll enter the best secondary school and eventually a top university."

But the third-grader is not enthusiastic. Though she never openly defies her parents, she struggles to hold back tears when asked whether she enjoys her weekend classes.

"I don't like any of them," she says. "They never ask how I feel before they sign me up."

Xie says she knows her daughter is too busy and "a little bit tired," but insists that "hard work always pays off."

"When she's older, she'll understand," her mother asserts.

Wei dreads Fridays, always followed by two lonely and exhausting days. "It's even worse than normal school days."

Wei would rather be at home, reading for fun, but her parents call her favorite books "rubbish" because they don't lead to higher grades.

The girl's frustration is typical of children raised in an age of material abundance in many cities. Parents are often college educated and expect them to excel in academics, speak at least one foreign language well and do well in art and sports.

In Beijing, it is not uncommon for preteens to squeeze advanced math courses alongside computer programming, English, ancient Chinese literature, bridge, piano and golf into their after-school and weekend schedules.

Winter and summer holidays are often filled with intensive training, contests or certification tests that are widely expected to yield certificates or other credentials that may be an advantage in the child's next round of competition for a place at a high school.

These classes each cost around 10,000 yuan (US$1,629) a year on average. They are also considered care givers by working parents.

Wei's mother, Xie Jing, says she felt terrible when she was ill in bed. Her daughter dined out alone in a restaurant, "totally indifferent" to her ailing mother, she said.

"For the first time, I doubted my parenting skills. Maybe it was wrong to send her away to classes every weekend and not spend time with her myself."

Struggling in poverty

While urban children hustle to get to everything into their packed schedules, children in remote areas put their lives at risk by trekking to school across mountains and rivers.

Luo Tingxi, 13, is still a third-grader at a village-run primary school in the landlocked southwestern province of Guizhou. He is at least four years behind others, since Chinese children normally enter primary school at age 6 or 7.

Schooling was delayed partly because the trip to and from school is laborious and risky for young children. Luo leaves home at 5am and hikes for more than three hours on winding mountain roads. When he gets to school at 8:30am, he often collapses in his chair, unwilling to move.

By lunchtime, Luo struggles to stay awake. His parents give him 1 yuan a day for lunch, and he can only afford bread at the grocery near school. He has no water to drink since the school has none in the mountain area.

In the afternoon, he sleeps.

His teacher never scolds him for being late or sleeping. "It's a blessing they are safe. Many children cut school when it rains or snows," says Wei Yingzhong, headmaster of the Mazhai Primary School in Ziyun County.

According to Wei, at least 80 of the school's 226 students hike long distances to school from small villages. Village population is so scattered that there aren't enough children to justify opening new schools.

The school does not offer lodging for students.

Though China ensures nine years of compulsory education for all children, few students in faraway villages go on to high school at the end of the nine years, says Wei.

Poverty has caused a huge gap in these children's cognitive skills and communication with the outside world.

"What's an iPad? Is it edible?" asks 10-year-old Wei Haizheng in his ramshackle home in a remote village in Guangxi's Dahua County.

Eleven-year-old Fang Yuna says she wants to be rich. "I want to buy beautiful clothes," says the third-grader from a mountain village in Jinzhai County in Anhui Province.

Fang knows her future depends on whether she goes to the city in search of work, like her migrant parents who only see her once a year and leave her and her brothers in the care of grandparents.

Fang is smart and teachers say she should go to college. "But she longs for money and city life. I doubt if she will finish junior high," says a teacher.

Earning a living in cities tops the wish list of many primary school students in the remote villages of Guangxi.

According to Zhang Fayun, an official in rural Ziyun County, only 40 percent of junior high school graduates go on to senior high. Nearly 20,000 students finished junior high school last summer, but only 3,223 attended high school, Zhang says.

Almost all the others had migrated to cities in search of work. "The students worry about their families' financial burden. Some families live on less than 2,000 yuan a year," says Zhang. "The students also know it's getting difficult even for college graduates to secure a job, so they'd rather earn a living at a younger age."

Happy childhood a dream

Many adults recalled the good old days of growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, when few families were rich but children were probably happier.

Today a happy and carefree childhood seems out of reach for both urban and rural kids.

In 10 years, city children such as Wei Yufan will probably be studying at a university in Beijing, eyeing well-paid jobs in big companies.

By then, Luo Tingxi may have become a skilled worker on a factory assembly line or in a coal pit. He might be married with two children.

If the economic disparity is not reduced, growing pains will persist on both sides.

While city children fight pain inflicted by demanding parents, rural children's pains often reflect the fast-growing, unbalanced economy. This situation could backfire and hamper further economic growth, warns Liu Fuxiang, deputy education chief in Yanchuan County of northwest China's Shaanxi Province.

"The yawning rural-urban income gap has worsened disparity in many other sectors, especially education," he says.

Rural children perform far worse than their urban peers on major tests, he says, but not because they are not clever or diligent. "They are victims of an unbalanced allocation of teaching resources."

Cities a magnet

Rapid urbanization draws migrant rural workers to cities and boom towns where schools have been built. Many rural schools were closed and children from several villages share one school. As many migrants take their children along to cities, poor village schools close. Remaining ones are more like day-care centers for left-behind children, orphans and handicapped children, Liu says.

These schools lack funding and qualified teachers. "Some schools only teach reading and arithmetic. Gym is about frolicking," says Liu. "Many kids wait for the nine years of compulsory schooling to end so they can get a city job."

The consequences of the disparity could be severe, as poverty can twist value systems. "Children are our future," he says, "but it will be gloomy if they are not well educated."

"Poor children tend to admire the material abundance in cities and even worship money," says Yang Yuansong, a rural teacher known for "Left-behind Children's Diaries," a collection of tear-stained diary entries written by rural children whose parents work in faraway cities.

"When young migrants return (to their village) with fashionable clothes and stylish haircuts, their value system changes. Others long to see the wide world instead of concentrating on school," Yang says.

Reminding children of the importance of learning and keeping their dreams alive is essential. But parents are often gone and not enough teachers can offer guidance.

Ding Xueqian, a rural school teacher in Gansu Province and a deputy to the local parliament, urges more funding from the central and provincial treasuries to boost education in remote rural areas.

"It's important to train qualified teachers and build safer classrooms for countryside schools," he says.

"By narrowing the gap between rural and urban education, we can expect to provide quality education to rural students and reverse the widespread prejudice that 'going to school is useless'."