Gong Weiquan is the headmaster of a middle school in a village in Yunnan Province in southwest China. But last October, he was given a task, just like his students. Gong took part in a training program for middle school headmasters from remote rural areas organized by Beijing-based Capital Normal University (CNU) where the participants were asked to draw a self-portrait.

Gong's drawing was laden with symbolism. It showed him plodding forward, but a river and a high mountain blocked his way. Behind him people were walking away from him.

Gong captioned the image to explain the difficulties he faced at work: "There are rivers that are hard to cross, mountains that are hard to climb, and people that are hard to take along." Rural education in China has been weak due to relative underdevelopment, lack of good teachers and people's unawareness of the importance of education.

"Rural schools are an important part of rural vitalization," Yang Zhaohui, Director of the School Improvement and Assessment Center at the CNU, told Beijing Review. "If rural teachers lack motivation, the development of rural education and society will be hampered. Therefore, it's urgent that we pay attention to rural school headmasters."

The measures taken during the last decade to change the situation include the training Gong underwent. The annual session was introduced in 2014 by the Ministry of Education (MOE). Yang is one of the organizers.

During the three-month training, university professors share their expertise and insights and the participants also visit suburban schools to learn their experiences and share their own. When they return to their schools, they implement the best practices they have witnessed. Researchers from the CNU have visited the schools to assess the progress and help out.

From 2016 to 2020, the government allocated nearly 164 billion yuan ($25.2 billion) to improve schools in underdeveloped areas, according to Ministry of Finance data. This year's government work report, delivered by Premier Li Keqiang on March 5, emphasized educational fairness and promoting balanced development of compulsory education, as well as improving benefits for rural teachers.

Urban-rural gap

According to the MOE, by the end of 2019, there were over 300,000 schools to provide compulsory education. So now, with the problem of providing basic education for all resolved, the task is improving the quality of education and addressing the gap in educational development between urban and rural areas.

According to Zhong Maochu, a professor at the Institute of Economics, Nankai University in Tianjin, and a member of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the top political advisory body, the educational gap between urban and rural areas is an important part of the gap in public services between urban and rural areas.

Zhong told Beijing Review there should be at least one high-quality primary school in each village, which is important for maintaining the scale of rural population and vitalizing rural areas. People often tend to migrate from rural areas to cities to get better education for themselves or their children.

From 2016 to 2017, the number of rural schools decreased by nearly 8,000 and the number of rural students by 1.4 million, according to the China Rural Education Development Report 2019 published by the MOE and the Northeast Normal University.

Han Ping, another member of the 13th National Committee of the CPPCC and former Deputy Director of the Zhejiang Provincial Education Department, told China Education Daily that one way to ensure people would not migrate for their children's education was by improving the schools. A good rural school can contribute to rural vitalization, he said.

Success stories

Combined efforts are creating success stories in many areas. In the Tangfang Primary School in Guizhou Province, southwest China, the number of students has risen dramatically from 75 to 1,000 in about a decade. The number of teachers has increased from three to 66 and the campus area from 2,000 square meters to over 30,000 square meters.

The man behind the miracle is Wu Xiong, headmaster of the school. As many rural children help with farm work at home, they are good at sports. So Wu introduced sports activities to attract more youngsters. One of the first initiatives was converting an ordinary table into a table tennis table. In 2006 the school hosted its first sports meet.

One reason many children dropped out of school was the hostile terrain. They had to clamber up a steep mountain trail every day to reach the school and undergo the same exercise to return home. In 2008, Wu had the idea of building a dormitory so that the children could stay there and go home on the weekend. He managed to get funding from a company and the dormitory was built.

Since then, with his efforts, the school also has a new building and has hosted 15 sports meets.

"My biggest wish is that my students can pursue their dreams and do what they like and are good at when they grow up," Wu said at a symposium on rural education vitalization earlier this month.

One challenge for rural schools is changing their exam-oriented focus. The problem with the overemphasis on scores is that it often results in students losing self-confidence. Since the schools assess their teachers by the grades the students get, it means the teachers become demotivated in promoting all-round development for students. And since the educational authorities assess schools by the scores of their students, the schools too are affected.

"If we compare education to agricultural production, students are seeds and education is soil, sunshine and water," Yang said. "There should be different soil and different amount of sunshine and water for different seeds. However, rural education was like a standardized assembly line for industrial production, ignoring students' different characteristics."

The Dingtang Middle School in Wuzhong, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwest China, experienced an academic disaster eight years ago when it was among the worst performers in the county.

As the deputy headmaster at that time, Yang Xueming volunteered to teach math to eighth grade students. Later, when he became the headmaster, realizing the problem with the excessive focus on grades, he started a reform. He introduced extracurricular activities and sports, from basketball to teaching papercutting and Huaer, a folk song that has been recognized as a national intangible cultural heritage. The students learned fast and put on a performance at the annual gala that year.

During a more recent high-school entrance exam, the school ranked first in the county.

Retaining teachers

Lack of qualified teachers has been a persistent problem for rural schools. Young teachers tend to switch to schools in urban areas once they acquire some experience.

Ma Hengyan, Secretary of the Communist Party of China Committee of the 21st Primary School in Yinchuan, Ningxia, and a deputy to the National People's Congress, the national legislature, told China News Service that many schools don't offer music, fine arts, physical education, and science and information technology courses because of lack of teachers.

To address this, her school has started an assistance program for rural primary schools with its teachers giving online classes in some of these subjects. However online courses can't replace offline teaching entirely though they can address the dearth of teachers to some extent. Ma suggests improving benefits for teachers to attract and retain them.

Zhong has a similar suggestion. The key to guaranteeing the quality of education in village primary schools is ensuring the competence of teachers, he said. Therefore rural teachers' salary should be higher, perhaps on par with that of public servants.

As the rural vitalization strategy is implemented, Ma foresees more and more migrant workers will return home. There will be fewer left-behind children, better village schools and greater educational equality. 

(Print Edition Title: A Class Act)

Copyedited by Sudeshna Sarkar

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