Zhao learns to read ... aged 100
Print Edition
at the age of 100, and after a 10-day literacy course, Zhao Shunjin, who had never learned to read or write, has mastered over 100 Chinese characters.
Zhao, a former vegetable seller from Hangzhou in east China’s Zhejiang Province, had never been to school and knew no characters except her own name before taking the course, part of a government-funded program.
Most people who applied for the community literacy classes were aged 70 to 80. “We never expected Zhao would apply,” said Shen Yundi, one of the teachers at the city’s Sanbao Community.
“Considering her age, we arranged one-on-one tutoring for her,” Shen said. “She spent two hours learning every day. Sometimes she would come to the classroom accompanied by a relative or sometimes a tutor would go to her home.”
Zhao’s son Luo Rongsheng said: “I pushed her to the classroom in her wheelchair. When we met friends on the way and they asked where we were going, she always replied proudly ‘I’m going to study’.”
Zhao passed the test at the end of the course, and received a literacy certificate last week.
“Every day, she goes through her textbooks and reads aloud the characters and words,” Luo said.
Since Zhao has bad eyesight, her textbooks were specially made by her son and community workers with especially large characters.
According to Luo, his mother’s inability to read caused her a great deal of trouble when she was young. She received a large order from a university in the 1950s. Every day, staff from the university canteen would send her a list of the vegetables they needed. Zhao’s fellow villagers were just as incapable of reading the list as she was, so she had to walk miles to find someone in a neighboring village to read it to her.
The literacy course was the fifth organized by the Sanbao Community for its 300 illiterate residents since 2014.
Elderly people are paid from 300 yuan (US$48.3) to 500 yuan each to attend the course.
“Many of them were attracted by the stipend in the beginning, but later on they found it a fulfilling experience, as they made friends and learned new things,” Shen said.
Communities are calling for more funding for such schemes. A community teacher in Hangzhou’s Tonglu County said: “These literacy classes are solely funded by governments. Compared with those in downtown Hangzhou, many literacy programs in townships are short of money.”
A census in 2010 found China’s illiteracy rate was 4.88 percent, compared with 80 percent after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, thanks to a campaign that began in the 1950s. The figure means there were still more than 54 million illiterate people in China in 2010, with most of them living in rural areas.
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