A Winter in Wutonghe: rural education in China’s Rust Belt
“Poor kids, through no fault of their own, are less prepared by their families, their schools, and their communities to develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids. For economic productivity and growth, our country needs as much talent as we can find, and we certainly can’t afford to waste it. The opportunity gap imposes on all of us both real costs and what economists term ‘opportunity costs.’”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
Voluntary teaching, long deemed as a must-have experience for millions of Chinese college students, has come under fire in recent years. Nascent critics acknowledge the benefits those well-educated urbanites could reap after teaching young pupils in rural areas, but the question remains as to what, if anything, those short-term programs might actually achieve in bridging the education gap rather than enriching college students’ experience at the expense of those poor kids’ holiday time. I got a bit ambivalent about our presence there, but nonetheless felt very humble and regarded this journey as a chance to learn from those kids, whose sacrifice and endurance have enabled them to thrive in the face of life’s hardships. So I signed up the form, prepared for the interview and four history classes, and then brought my luggage and packed my bags. Yes, we were going to teach in a ranch school in the Northeastern province of Heilongjiang this January.
To teach is to learn
It was a blessing that we had students from different departments, including one girl from Malaysia, being represented in the teacher’s team. From the way we approached kids (we were required to audit other teachers’ classes and gave suggestions respectively), you could tell the distinct characteristic and personalities each of us possessed: some played nice guitar and had a charming voice; some knew how to make friends with almost every kid; some were adept at empathizing and communicating; some did an awesome job in mimicking a Northeastern accent; some delivered one of the best classes on sex education that every teacher went to audit (though it sounded a bit fishy that we were all adults); some had a humorous soul and never failed to make us laugh; and with most of my colleagues complimenting me as “informative”, “knowledgeable” and “elegant”(?), I was, to be honest, an insipid guy to those lovely faces that yearned for charisma and compassion from their teachers. However, I did work hard to verse myself in the art of teaching through days of role-playing and experience-sharing. One of the most pivotal takeaways was to take care of other people’s emotional needs. I got galvanized from an extremely thought-provoking part of the program called “Viva La Vida” where two of our teachers offered blank canvases and colored pencils to all the students in the classroom and let them decide what to draw in a picture that best described their feelings at the moment. We received paintings projecting their innermost desires and thoughts in various forms and shapes. One of the pictures that shocked all of us came from a very outgoing and cheerful boy that we were all very fond of, which was painted in a very dark, deep blue base color. Later we were told by the school that his ruthless parents have abandoned him and moved to other cities since he was very young, leaving him alone with his old grandpa. That was the story of the kid who smiled at his brothers and sisters from Fudan every day when he popped into our office and shared his candy with us. It could also be the story of every smiling friend in your life that suffers from emotional exhaustion. And we can’t stand by.
Our students
My history class was basically comprised of three parts: the learning skills we need to score high in standardized examinations (I hate to talk about it, but for them, and most of us in China, it’s definitely very significant), how to think critically in analyzing historical events and characters, and the opportunities and challenges in the coming future. In conjunction with some practical tips to make preparations for exams, I encouraged them to draw a timeline or a mind map to remember historic events and start to utilize historic maps, i.e. visual information, to understand the changes of dynasties in certain contexts (I used to be a geographic nerd). Though most of the arguments we make in junior high history classes are just “summary with no explanation”, I still asked everyone in the classroom to share their takes on the rise and fall of great empires and elucidate what could be drawn from past mistakes, and their answers have made me more proud and inspired than listening to any US presidential or British parliamentary debates. At the end of the session, I offered a lecture on the future of the Anthropocene, where I covered some major threats that might stifle peace and development, the upcoming fourth industrial revolution and the climate emergency governments agreed to tackle. I shared what I had learned from my daily doses of podcast and reading that the rise of artificial intelligence could perpetuate or even exacerbate the already-existing inequalities among our society (between rich and poor, men and women) with an unsaid yet obvious implication that they should learn or at least be aware of what those new technologies might bring about and try to be data-savvy. After that, we talked about human activities that disrupted the lives of other animals and how air and water pollution were detrimental to people’s health, especially that of children and the elderly. And it’s been very empowering to see how much they cared about the environment of their hometown and how they were ready to fight against ecological degeneration when we exchanged the efforts in combating those problems in Wutonghe and Shanghai. It was this kind of attachment with their community, bonded by the ties of sympathy and love, that made me irrationally optimistic about our future.
By the end of this ten-day long program, students were expected to give a performance in every designated group with the help of their teacher. Instead of singing or dancing, our group decided to give a comedy show — the one that enjoyed great popularity in Northeastern China called Xiaopin (“小品”), for the cause that everyone in this group could have a chance to participate and play their part. We spent two days editing the script and another four days in rehearsal, during which time I gave full freedom to the students. They did a great job and some talented students took the lead to direct and make adjustment while I just sat in the back watching. The show was a success and I can tell from the face of the student director that she was really exhilarated and contended. On our departure, I gave her a note that read, “Keep on working, you will become a great director or actress someday”. Later the dean told us what made our few days here so memorable was some of the students that used to feel unimportant because of their “mediocre” academic performance, regained their confidence and became more proactive in class activities because they had this experience of directing or performing (What a consolation!). She was right, being a teacher also demands us to see the brilliance of every student rather than treat anyone with the same set of standards for excellence.
School as a family
There’s one thing I have to clarify, the school we taught at Wutonghe wasn’t as dilapidated as many people might perceive, it has a well-functioning heating system, modern equipment for teaching and learning plus delicious food offered by the school canteen that hasn’t been privatized. The only thing that’s unsettling was they didn’t have indoor flush toilets for students, which can be quite inconvenient if those juveniles wanted to go to the restroom in winter. Besides the great responsibility to take care of these kids, this year’s program also featured a research project that aimed to investigate the development of primary education in this particular region. We would have to interview school staff and parents of local families while sending out questionnaires to all kids in the 6th and 7th grades. Three other Fudan students and I were assigned the work to interview the dean and school principal while the others would pay a visit to the family of some of our students.
Having worked in three different schools, the principal was originally from a different zip code, and like some influential technocrats in China, he presented himself as a visionary leader with many years of professional experience. With a reference to the 18th CPC National Congress Report, he prided his effort to push the modernization of this school in upgrading hardware and teaching facility, cultivating more intensive inter-school resource sharing as well as a stronger family-school linkage. They have harnessed the exponential technology development and established an effective feedback system via the platform of Wechat, where parents could play a vital role in supervising their kids and updating whether they have finished their homework or listened to the news. More attention has thus been paid to the well-being of the students (otherwise some parents would have lower educational aspirations for their kids and are less likely to help their children foster good habits and become more disciplined). Besides, he’s been very passionate about their sinology education(“国学”) though he lamented that they lacked key resources such as museums and temples of Confucius and the teachers they had were generally very old and were disproportionately concentrated in areas like music and P.E. rather than major courses like Chinese or math. His remarks on the diagnoses of these problems were even more refreshing: Like the Ruhr Valley in Germany and the heartland in the US, the three Northeastern provinces have long suffered from the decline of heavy industry. Over a million college graduates left their hometown to more prosperous cities in the last decade and the population growth rate for Heilongjiang was a disheartening -0.41%. And we all knew, the underrepresentation of young professionals in the teacher’s group will only worsen the situation in those regions, rendering these places less attractive and magnetic to the young folk grew up there.
The academic dean was, on the other hand, a gentle woman with a very tender demeanor who has dedicated herself to this school for several decades. She was proud that her school was a pioneer in leading the liberal education (“素质教育”) reform where systematic ball game and music education are accessible to all students from first to eighth grade. Furthermore, afterschool courses like Chinese flute, calligraphy and drawing are made available to every student free of charge with music instruments provided by the funds from the ranch. And thanks to the omnipresence of Wechat in China, they’ve got parents on board to help implement the news-watching initiative and assist their children with the material they need to make a 3-minutes-speech before every Chinese and English class. I got super nostalgic about the latter one and immediately started to reminisce about my own high school where I got the chance to share the Ig Nobel Prize, patriotism in South Korea and the Inaugural Address by Nelson Mandela with my classmates before English and Chinese classes. The most worrisome phenomenon, she stated, was the shrinking student number. They only had around 30 new students every year, half of what they had ten years ago, which was also something that I could resonate with after having visited other village schools that also experienced a steep decline in student numbers — you never know it’s the rapid urbanization that caused the rural decay or vice versa. Despite the constraint put forward by limited social and economic resources in Wutonghe, she still wanted to close the gap with schools in big cities as much (and as long) as she can. Talking about that some of her students who started their work in more developed regions asking her why would she still live and teach in such a small school, she said with great sincerity and enthusiasm, “I may not be able to see the wonderful world out there, but I am more than pleased to draw a wonderful world for my students here.”
Epilogue: mountains beyond mountains
I can still recall the first text we learned at middle school: named as “On the Other Side of the Hill” (“在山的那边”), the poem described the state of euphoria a rural-born young man was in when he finally saw the coastline after he made arduous journey through steep mountains and rapid streams. In the West, ancient Greeks and post-war French existentialists had similar mythology about a man who repeatedly kept pushing a boulder to the top of a mountain, searching for eternal truths in a world where absurdity seemed to prevail. The existential crisis facing our students in Wutonghe, however, wasn’t about instilling belief and building inner equilibrium, it was about fighting against material scarcity and educational backwardness. There weren’t many progressive ideas permeating this place, but every step they moved forward was making real progress.
In retrospect, I still wanted to give my gratitude to everyone in Wutonghe, for teaching me so much in every possible way. The most important lesson I learned from this experience, I would say, was to treat everyone as a unique individual. To really understand those young children, we need to resist our condescension (emanating from city center or college campus) and avoid treating all of them alike, as an undifferentiated group of students from a deprived region, flattening out the vast differences in their emotional and social needs. They are not simply a homogeneous group of people we have to mourn for, but dignified human beings who expect and deserve to be respected and loved on the same footing, just like you and me.