ArticleWe should give rural children equal opportunity of education (4)
Promote educational equality
Decreasing educational inequality was a key point of Premier Wen Jiabao’s government work report. Simultaneously, presidents of four prominent universities called for urgent action to close the urban-rural gap and encourage rural students to pursue higher education.
A: Let’s talk a little about the government work report which was just released.
Y: I still hope that the government should have given more money to education because the financial crisis will go away. Difficulties sometimes go away. People sometimes can deal with unemployment. But education, the result of education coming out is about like 10 or 20 years later. So you cannot give up education because you have somehow a problem is just in front of you. So still, actually I gave a proposal to the government to hope them to invest more money to education, or to encourage people to invest more money to education. But the problem is that because the government doesn’t put private education at the same level as public education. So the result is not so good, because people see students from private education system are not as good as expected. Even the teacher’s quality is not as good as expected. You can read from the work report by Wen Jiabao this year that most emphasis is on the primary education and rural education, which the directions are right. But you should still encourage, there’s no where in the report mentioning private education in China no matter which kind of areas. That means private education is not considered as an important part of education in these government leaders’minds. I think that’s kind of discouraging.
A: In 2000, you talked about the private education and promotion law. Did you see a lot of changes since then?
Y: Not really yet. I know, at least this gives us some confidence because the government shows that they would like to promote private education. But since then, the government hasn’t done much about that yet. How to implement the law, they haven’t gone into details like this. They talked about like tax exemption in that promotion law. But actually no local government has done anything the private education tax problems nowadays. So I think the law itself is good, even though it’s not complete. It’s not perfect, but the direction of the law is good because it wants to promote private education. But implementation of the law is more important and real encouragement of private education is very important. So it has to come to local government level, from the central government. The local governments have to come out a lot of details about how to really promote private education in China.
A: Of all the different proposals you talked about today, are you implementing them all at the New Oriental School?
Y: The New Oriental system itself is not to help the qualities of rural area education, or higher education areas. But still the money get, when we got IPO in the United States, we get money and still we can do something for the rural areas, like every year we train about 3000 rural area teachers in language areas and in other areas, math areas and Chinese language areas. Also every year we contribute about 5 million RMB to support those students from rural areas to study in Chinese universities. And also we are building up school campuses in poor areas. We call it like a“Hope”project. So, well, my final purpose is that if we still have extra money, with my friends, we would like to build up a real private university which is really a non-profit organization, which can get money, resources from other places to support poor students, those poor intelligent students, to come to study.
A: Where would you like to see the government put its major focus on boosting education? Will it be in privatization?
Y: The major focus should be, one part is in the rural areas. That’s very important, I think. No matter how the rural area kids should enjoy the same education opportunities with the urban area education. And the other part is higher education. Even though nowadays, we have so many students like in universities, but the total quality of the high education is really not good. So students can not learn much from the universities and they are wasting their time and its total education system is shabby.
A: Do you overall get the feeling or what are your thoughts, it seems that education has not gotten the attention that it should from the government?
Y: I think education has got enough attention from the government. That’s for sure. Education as a whole is a central task of the government, trying to show people that government pays so much attention to education. Just like what I said, there are so many other problems there. When they are doing and try to manage the country, they sometimes forget about education because something more urgent happening everyday. But I think the government should invest more money, at least every year increasing money to education.
More than 650 proposals at this year’s CPPCC session contained some sort of educational reform. Although some argue that the government is still doing enough. In 2000, officials announced plans to spend an amount equal to 4% of the nation’s annual GDP on education which is considered a global benchmark. According to the South China Morning Post, so far that goal has never been reached, only getting close in 2007 by spending 3.3%.