Q1: Feng Xin. You mentioned that China’s rural schools have declined rapidly since the beginning of the 21st century. Reasons include the accelerated urbanization and a nationwide policy to shut down village schools and move students to county or township schools. How profound is the change?

A1: Well, I would say the change is almost irreversible. Let me pull out some numbers here.  In 2000, China had about 440,000 rural schools. But by the end of 2014, the number had shrunk to fewer than 130,000, making a 70-percent decline. While some argue that by moving village students to county or township schools enable better allocation of educational resources, such as teachers and facilities, the policy in fact brought little benefits.

For example, many of these village children now have to travel dozens of miles to school every day. To save travelling, some are forced to enroll at boarding schools and live away from their families at a very young age. Nutrition, safety, the psychological development of children and the quality of teaching have all become issues, which have ultimately led to higher drop-out rate. The government realized the problems and stopped the policy in 2012.

Since then, only a small number of rural schools have been able to re-open. Most haven’t been able to recover. Now if you travel to rural China, you can see many abandoned school sites. That’s what I mean when I say the effect is irreversible.

Q2: We see in your story that the remaining rural schools are facing tough challenges, especially the lack of teachers. What caused the problem? And what can be done?

A2: This has a lot to do with the hiring systems of China’s public schools. Most of the country’s rural schools are completely funded by the government. Local education departments demand that the number of teachers per school is based on the number of students.

In large urban schools, it’s quite normal for one teacher, for example, to teach 16 students of the same age, one particular subject. But in rural schools, there might be only 16 students in the whole school, who are all at different levels of academic development. It would be extremely difficult for just one or two teachers to teach all these students, not to mention the different subjects.

Since these schools are public funded, they really don’t have the budget to hire more teachers by themselves. Another problem is that rural school teachers are significantly underpaid. This makes rural schools an unattractive prospect. The Chinese government issued a five-year plan to support rural teachers last year.

For example, teacher quotas at rural schools should be given based on the number of classes rather than students. The central government should increase the number of rural teachers being paid by the national revenue to relieve local education budget. Rural teachers’ salaries and benefits should also be increased. If these measures can be adopted, China’s rural schools might face a much brighter future.

Now, you can find interactive maps and virtual reality photos of these rural schools I visited by scaning the code at the bottom of your screen with your smart phone. You can also find more of my reporting for this rural recovery series from this multimedia collection.