Settling Down - Famous Essays that Touch China

Author: Yi Lei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: The mountain boy Han Shao Gong starts the autumn semester on September 1st at a rural school, but there is no movement in the junior high division; the classrooms are empty. The reason is that too few students have registered for school, so the school has had to suspend classes for two weeks, sending teachers to villages to search for students and persuade them to return to class. According to the teachers, the dropout rates for eighth and ninth graders are high. If things go well, they can eventually stabilize about 70% of the students to graduate. Junior high dropout has become a new heavy burden in the countryside. The study is dull and burdensome, causing the children to dislike school. Even after completing their studies, there is no guarantee of employment, which is making the parents. Money, of course, is the bigger problem: after repeated reforms by the relevant education departments in 2002, the lowest tier of school fees for first-grade primary school students was over 300 yuan—still not including future tutoring, exam papers, materials, uniforms, activities, insurance, and health expenses. If a child wants to attend high school, it means "looting" for a farming family. According to current regulations, rural compulsory education does not include high school, so the fees for high school are relatively free. A student would almost have to spend tens of thousands of yuan annually, and in the words of farmers, "even a nap has a price—you might as well say you’ve been kidnapped by the school." This civilized large-scale "kidnapping" has made rural high schools flourish, and tens of millions of yuan in profits are handed over to the government, becoming a new source of revenue for some local governments after the widespread decline of township enterprises. It can be simply calculated: even the over-300-yuan fee for first-grade primary school students is nearly 100 times the fees of the same level in the early 1980s—yet during the same period, the price of rice only increased fivefold, the price of pork only increased sixfold, and the price of bamboo even dropped. This means that under slow entry and fast exit, farmers have not only gained from the marketization process but have also taken away dozens of times or even hundreds of times more through the education channel. Li Benren had to take his wife and daughter out to Guangdong to work to support his son’s high school education, leaving behind a home overgrown with weeds and covered in cobwebs. Meanwhile, money was flowing like water to the other end, to the distant city: more than 85% of the profits of the many publishing houses in this province came from textbooks, making them as rich as an editor boasted: "At our company, we give out everything except our wives." The publishing houses, along with certain education management departments, schools, and bookstores, formed an alliance that benefited from the industrialization and monopolization of education, akin to a massive blood-sucking machine—their employees moved into new buildings only to move into even newer ones, and after being sent on government-funded trips to Hong Kong and Macau, they would go on trips to Europe and America. This was seen as a result of reform and opening up, so some people were very unhappy with the national policy of capping textbook prices, saying it would disrupt reform and opening up and destroy "the main channel of socialism." The beneficiaries were not without pressure. According to the rules of market exchange, if one hand gives money, the other hand must give goods—for example, schools must hand over diplomas. Only then can it be considered a fair transaction. Many junior high diplomas in A Township were issued this way, even if a graduate couldn’t solve a simple linear equation. But since the parents have paid the full amount, they have the right to receive a fair return. However, the fowler may catch the cicada, but there is still a sparrow waiting behind. The training certificates of the teachers in A Township were also obtained in this way. They were ordered to improve their professional qualities, not only by participating in various professional exams: Mandarin, computers, teaching methods, political thought, etc., but also by taking exams for secondary school diplomas if they didn’t have one, for junior college diplomas if they didn’t have one, and for bachelor’s diplomas if they didn’t have one. All examinees had to attend training, and all trainees had to pay money, but whether they actually attended the training after paying or whether the training was truly beneficial was not as important—as it was merely a formality outside the transaction. Because it was far from the county seat, over 60 kilometers away, with exorbitant travel costs, the teachers in A Township only sent representatives to the county to attend classes on weekends. Later, even the representatives didn’t fulfill their duties—if they missed the bus, they would go gardening or fishing instead. Wang Lin, a lecturer from the province, was very surprised by this. She was determined to help the trainees acquire as much knowledge as possible in the shortest time, meticulously preparing the training materials and lesson plans, but she found the trainees initially confused and then furious. "We’ve paid for this, and now you expect us to study until we go blind? Is there any such thing as that?" they shouted, "Your superiors are too ruthless!" She refused the trainees’ banquet invitations and refused to reveal the exam questions, as a result of which she almost became an enemy of the people, being driven to the brink by the trainees’ boycott. She even became an unwelcome teacher in the training authorities and never received another lecture invitation. Since education can be detached from knowledge, it can also be detached from normal human dignity. My visits to A Township kept plunging me into confusion. I found that among the rural youth who were cheerful, well-rounded, strong in practical skills, and good at interpersonal relationships, most had low educational attainment. The tiger-headed Hu from the old Li family only finished junior high school and was a carpenter, but he was fascinated by any machine, from motorcycles to door locks, and could repair them all. He would observe a crane on the highway for half an hour—it was a "jack of all trades" sought after by everyone, and his own life was quite prosperous. Xian Ren from Zhoujia Dong was an even younger man who hadn’t even finished the first grade of junior high. He farmed when busy and did business when idle, occasionally playing mahjong or table tennis but without becoming addicted. He had already married a kind wife and would cheerfully go to help neighbors with difficulties, even humming mountain songs while walking on the mountain paths. In contrast, if you saw a young man in this area with pale faces, thin bodies, vacant eyes, and eccentric habits, if you saw them dressed neatly but never working in the fields, you could roughly guess their identity: most were rural intellectuals with diplomas from secondary vocational schools, junior colleges, or universities. They had spent a lot of money from their families, including lavish banquets when they achieved success in exams, but after graduation, they couldn’t find jobs and were bearing enormous social and psychological pressure, living as if they were being punished. But they wore grim faces, not knowing how to escape this predicament, seemingly never considering that following their parents into the fields was the way out, the path to self-rescue and the right path for human beings. Because they had received more education, they had to maintain their neatly dressed, underappreciated appearance. P21-23