Friday is a good day for eight-year-old Yang Zongtao. He will see his mother and baby sister after spending the week boarding at the Jiaoba Central Primary School in Guizhou, a southern province and one of China’s poorest. The walk from his home takes an hour, too long to undertake alone each day. So, like millions of pupils in China’s countryside, he remains at school all week. There are rural children who start boarding as early as age three.
Educating rural people has long been a challenge. In the 1990s almost every village had a primary school or “teaching point”, where children aged six-ten often attended class in a single room. But school enrolments began to fall because of plummeting birth rates and migration to cities. Local governments responded by closing underused village schools and pooling resources into larger ones such as Jiaoba Central. In 2001, it became national policy to merge schools this way. Between 2000-2015, nearly three-quarters of all rural primary schools, over 300,000, were shut down.
There are two main types of boarding schools in China. Some are privately run fee-paying institutions for children of the urban elite. Pupils often attend such schools close to where they live (many parents believe education is helped by separation from the distractions of family life). Far more common are rural schools such as Jiaoba Central. These are state-run and government-funded. The idea behind the rural ones is that pupils will benefit from not having to commute, take part in household chores or toil in fields. Such schools are also expected to offer better academic support for students than they can get at home: many older people in the countryside have little formal education. Another proclaimed benefit is that the schools can ensure proper nutrition and healthcare for poor students.
But many rural schools are ill-equipped for these tasks. In Guizhou, government spending per child on education in rural as well as urban areas is less than half the amount in Beijing, reckons Unicef, the UN agency for children. At the Jiaoba Central Primary School, where more than 100 children board (about one-tenth of the total), the head teacher admits that facilities are “poor”. He says that if a family can avoid sending a child to board, it will. The bare concrete walls of the eight bedrooms are filthy; their windows have no curtains. There’s no space in them to do homework. The dormitories are unheated, though it’s extremely cold, even in spring.
Yet Jiaoba Central has better facilities than many other such schools, where children often have to share beds, and toilet blocks are far from dormitories. The government pays 1,000 yuan (Rs.9,372) per year towards the cost of each child’s lodging, breakfast and supper at Jiaoba Central (there is also a 4-yuan subsidy per child per day for lunch). But elsewhere, many parents have to foot the bill. Many schools don’t even provide three meals a day, according to Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Programme, and the fare often lacks much nutritional value.
Children in the Chinese countryside tend to be unhealthy compared with their urban counterparts. But those at rural boarding schools are even less robust. They are more likely to be anaemic (which affects both academic accomplishment and health) and have intestinal worms. Far more are unusually short for their age than non-boarders — a sign of poor nutrition.
Boarders often suffer from a lack of supervision and emotional support. At Jiaoba, two elderly women stay in the dormitory building overnight. But teachers there admit that some students are “withdrawn”. Children who live at their schools are more prone to anxiety, depression and other mental-health problems. They are also vulnerable to sexual and other forms of abuse: a spate of such incidents has been reported at rural boarding schools in recent years; far more may go undetected.
In recent decades, China has seen rapid improvements in educational standards. The average number of years a Chinese child spends at school has doubled since 1980. The share of the labour force with any kind of higher education increased from 1.1 percent in 1980 to 12.5 percent in 2015. But these statistics often obscure how far rural children are left behind academically. Less than 10 percent of them go to senior high school, compared with 70 percent of children in cities.