Primary School in Rural China
Lingshi County, located in the central of Shanxi Province, is basin topography and surrounded by mountains on three sides.
The traffic is relatively not convenient, only one main road to the outside.
Rain is sparse, and when the city is not caked in a thick layer of debilitating smog, strong winds will clear the skies, bringing bright sunshine, blue skies and chilling nights.
Xiazhuang Village is not a more ordinary village among hundreds of Lingshi’s villages.
Along the winding mountain road hidden in the hillside, only a few chimneys still emit the curl of smoke.
Even after wandering around the village for a long time, few people could be seen to move around, except for the chirping of birds in the trees and dogs tied to iron gates.
But people here tell me that long ago there were many many people in this village, even many migrant workers. Because this is the hometown of coal mines.
Xiazhuang Primary school, lying in the valley, is the only school within a radius of four kilometers and the schoolhouse is the most beautiful and modern house in the village.
It once housed students from several nearby villages, but the number of teachers and students has plummeted in recent years.
Here has trained generation after generation of Lingshier, but now almost no longer out of the children's voice of reading.
A kindergarten student and two third graders are studying together
Nine-year-old Wang Shibo is extremely introverted. Even when he answers the math questions correctly, he is always writing and erasing them with uncertainty. He talked to me in a voice so faint that I could hardly hear him, by telling me that he was from Hebei Province and he likes having English classes. As for whether he wants to go to primary school in the county or what he wants to do when he grows up, he has not thought about it.
Ten-year-old Dong Zexiong told me that his favorite game is The Eagle catches the Chickens, when he plays the eagle, the other plays the chicken, or play The Hide and Seek, he hid, the other to find him.A school with only two people, each is the other's most reliable and only partner. In the world without the teacher they were like different people, become lively and naughty.
Dong Zecheng in the middle class of kindergarten seemed to be more talkative, but his dialectal baby voice made me almost unable to understand what he was saying.
His current main task is just to write "C" right in pinyin.
Xiazhuang primary school is a miniature of rural schools.
From Shanxi, Ningxia, to Fujian, Chongqing, Hunan... A "downsizing wave" of rural primary schools is sweeping the country at an accelerating pace.
There are more and more abnormal phenomena, such as multi-track system (multiple classes in one grade) changing to monorail system, only one or several students in one class, or even only one student in one school.
"Hollow schools" are emerging in large numbers.
Local people move into cities and the population of childbearing age decreases, which are the reasons for the sharp decrease of rural students. A group of weak rural schools and teaching sites have become history since the policy "canceling teaching sites and merging primary and middle schools in the rural areas" carried out in 2001.
Although some places have attracted controversy and even criticism due to the excessive speed of the removal of some schools, those harsh commentators have to admit that "removing some schools and merging them" is generally beneficial to the improvement of the quality of rural education.
Compared with the "one-to-one" teaching which is widely popular in the city, the students in some rural primary schools and teaching sites are far more "extravagant" than those in the city.
Due to the sharp decrease in the number of students, like the former central primary school, it is even "several to one”.
On the surface, it is more beneficial for teachers to teach students in accordance with their individual characteristics and improve the quality of teaching, but grassroots teachers generally reflect that this is not the case.
"Due to the lack of classmates and friends, some children become introverted and are not willing to communicate with others actively, which will seriously affect their character development in the long run, and also make it difficult to carry out the curriculum reform, because the curriculum reform requires communication and cooperation between students, which cannot be replaced by teachers. "
-Said Ma Yuxiang, the teacher at the school.
Data Source: China Education bureau
Cave House
In ancient China, there is a story about a mother moved three times.
It tells that a wise mother would try to find a good environment for her children’s best education.
Dong’s family is going to move for the second time immediately for the children, and we do not know if they will move for the third and fourth time.
The horizon, knowledge, and pursuit of the new generation of peasants are quite different from those of the old. In addition to their own "go out", the general practice is to let the children go to a good school regardless of cost.
Urbanization is like an unstoppable flood, pushing rural children out of rural primary schools and into city schools.
The rapid influx of rural students has resulted in the prominent phenomenon of “super capacity class" in many central town and city schools.
This is also the biggest worry of Dong’s mom in the future. Can a large number of class teachers still can take care of their children?
