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Restoring rural schools will help countryside
By Huaxi Dushi Bao |
July 30, 2012, Monday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
ELEVEN years after launching the drive to abolish village schools or merge them into bigger, often township schools, the Education Ministry is applying the brakes.
In a notice issued last Monday, these school closings and mergers are to be stopped when they encounter overwhelming opposition from pupils' parents and, when necessary, some eliminated or merged village schools should be restored.
The schools were originally closed or merged because of the drastic reduction in the number of village children, since many of them had gone to cities with their migrant worker parents. According to statistics, from 2000 to 2009, the number of village primary schools have dropped by 50 percent.
As a result of the abolitions and merges, some children have to travel long distance to their schools, sometimes on makeshift school buses. Last November in Zhengning, Gansu Province, a bus certified to carry nine passengers were crammed with 64 pupils, and in a fatal collision with a coal truck, 21 were killed and 43 were injured. As schools become more distant from village homes, some pupils have been obliged to stay in boarding schools that do not meet the most basic sanitation standards. Rising education costs lead to more school dropouts.
Village schools are vital to sustaining China's agrarian civilization, as villages are the custodians of traditions and manners. As dilapidated village schools are turned into pigsties, villages were deprived of their underpinnings. The lamentations about the decay of rural life are thus by no means sentimental.
A columnist once observed: In remote villages, every school is a pile of kindling, and every teacher, a lamp. However dim that light is, it has been glowing for thousands of years, warm and comforting. The latest policy reversal could begin the healing process of decaying villages.
In a notice issued last Monday, these school closings and mergers are to be stopped when they encounter overwhelming opposition from pupils' parents and, when necessary, some eliminated or merged village schools should be restored.
The schools were originally closed or merged because of the drastic reduction in the number of village children, since many of them had gone to cities with their migrant worker parents. According to statistics, from 2000 to 2009, the number of village primary schools have dropped by 50 percent.
As a result of the abolitions and merges, some children have to travel long distance to their schools, sometimes on makeshift school buses. Last November in Zhengning, Gansu Province, a bus certified to carry nine passengers were crammed with 64 pupils, and in a fatal collision with a coal truck, 21 were killed and 43 were injured. As schools become more distant from village homes, some pupils have been obliged to stay in boarding schools that do not meet the most basic sanitation standards. Rising education costs lead to more school dropouts.
Village schools are vital to sustaining China's agrarian civilization, as villages are the custodians of traditions and manners. As dilapidated village schools are turned into pigsties, villages were deprived of their underpinnings. The lamentations about the decay of rural life are thus by no means sentimental.
A columnist once observed: In remote villages, every school is a pile of kindling, and every teacher, a lamp. However dim that light is, it has been glowing for thousands of years, warm and comforting. The latest policy reversal could begin the healing process of decaying villages.
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