Rural teachers set to broaden their horizons
Print Edition
WU Zhiguang teaches all the subjects at Yukeng Elementary School. He has to, for he’s the only teacher at the school in a mountain village in Yongtai County in southeast China’s Fujian Province.
The all-rounder admits he has his weaknesses. Wu says he finds teaching music, art and English particularly difficult.
“Luckily the local education authority is well aware of the problem and has helped the school install computers, so students now learn those courses online,” he said.
“But it can’t compare to on-site teaching.”
The vast majority of rural teachers find themselves in a similar situation.
Disparities between the quality of education in the countryside and cities is down to funding, but also a lack of training for teachers. If they have to go it alone, they need to know their stuff.
“I believe the math and Chinese my students learn is at the same level as what students learn in cities, but for courses such as music and art, the difference is there,” said Cheng Guiying, a teacher in Yongtai’s Hexi Village.
“Though online education has made up for some deficiencies, learning from a computer is far different than learning face-to-face from a teacher,” Cheng said.
To narrow the urban-rural education gap, the Chinese government has increased investment. The latest move, announced last week, includes a budget of 500 billion yuan (US$74.6 billion) to build more schools and develop existing ones, and a plan to train village teachers to cover a broader range of subjects.
As China has set the objective of compulsory eduction developing at the same pace as urbanization by 2020, the country wants teachers who will be able to perform multiple roles, just like general practitioners in medicine, said Liu Limin, vice minister of education.
For Wu, “the policy sounds exciting and it reveals that rural education now has gained more public concern.”
He agreed that training teachers was important. “As people’s knowledge expands fast nowadays, it’s harder for rural teachers to keep pace, which is not healthy for the development of village students,” Wu said.
According to Yongtai’s education bureau, it spent 202 million yuan from 2012 to 2015 on new school buildings. Another 1.2 million yuan went on computers for schools.
“Though efforts have been made, the gap between rural and urban education remains huge,” a bureau official said.
“The shortage of teachers and the low salaries offered to teachers are the major causes.”
Huang Nengxian, director of the college of education at Fujian Normal University, said a lack of students is also a major concern for the future of China’s rural education.
“What we need is a better overall system, to balance education resources in the urban and rural areas, to cultivate better rural teachers and to keep students in villages,” Huang said.
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