Opinion / Zou Hanru
Education for poor children
By Zou Hanru (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-09-23 06:12
Statistics, they say, conceal more than they reveal. Not always, though.
On September 8, the International Literacy Day, China announced it still
has 85 million illiterate people. Most of them are clustered in the
country's less developed rural areas of the landlocked western regions.
Earlier, Liu Xiaoyun, a scholar with China Agricultural University,
disclosed that there are the same number of people in China still in the
grip of poverty. Again, they are rural residents or migrant "floating"
groups from rural areas.
The announcements may have been mutually exclusive but the figure of 85
million is more than a coincidence.
Official explanations are difficult to find but it is common knowledge
that the illiterate are more likely to remain poor, and the poor are more
likely to be illiterate (or uneducated and unskilled). It is a vicious
cycle. The poor cannot afford education, and the illiterate cannot hope
to earn enough to overcome poverty.
Those caught in the cycle tend to remain poor throughout their life and,
in many cases, down the generations. And almost always, the children are
the worst sufferers in this transgenerational poverty.
So how does one get out of the rut?
China enforced a nine-year compulsory education system in 1986; and the
Ministry of Education reported a 90-per-cent attendance rate for
compulsory education last year.
It is a reasonable postulation that the 10 per cent who didn't attend
schools were children of the disadvantaged groups.
For the poorest group of children, poverty is both a cause and a result
of inaccessibility to education. Poor children are less likely to be
enrolled in schools or to complete the basic level of education. For,
even if schooling is free (a goal of the Chinese Government), uniforms,
stationery and transport are not. And these may still be well beyond the
means of a poor family.
So what does a family with more than one school-going kid do? It may
decide to pull out one or more of its children from school.
Unfortunately, in most of the cases it is the girl child that falls
victim to the hand of fate.
Xiao Mei, a senior secondary school student, is the daughter of one such
poor family in Yuzhong County of Gansu Province. Since the rural
household depends on income from agriculture, her father said he could no
longer afford education for both children, Xiao and her brother.
But he did not want to be unfair to either of them. So on August 24, he
decided to choose the "school-goer" by drawing lots. The boy won.
Unable to bear the pain of having to stay away from school, Xiao Mei
tried to commit suicide. Fortunately, she did not succeed. That is how
difficult and painful education for a poor family can be.
There is another reason why poor parents are forced to keep their wards
out of school: family income. If the child is old enough to work and
drops out of school, he/she can contribute, however little, to the family
instead of making it pay for his/her education.
In 2003, China spent 3.28 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on
education - well below the world's average of 4.1 per cent for developing
countries and merely half that of the developed ones.
Governments at the lowest levels - in townships and counties - shouldered
the bulk of the financial burden to provide education for children, most
of them in the rural areas.
Unlike central and provincial governments that have a diverse source of
revenue, the grass-roots authorities' income is heavily reliant on
agricultural taxes and fees, thus putting them in a real Catch-22
situation as far as rural education is concerned.
The rural poor have to pay more so that grass-roots authorities will be
better off financially to provide for their children's education. But the
more they pay, the more impoverished their condition becomes. And the
less they pay, the more difficult it is for the authorities to raise
education funds.
But worse than that is the choice a poor family has to make: falling
deeper into poverty to educate a child, or maintaining the status quo
without any real future for the children.
We know the cycle of poverty can be broken through education. So let the
central and provincial governments shoulder a bigger share of the
financial burden needed to make education truly free, starting with the
poorest 10 per cent of school-age kids.
Such a move will help bridge the "education gap," or inequities in
education - giving equal access to all children and relieving the poor of
the pinch of education cost.
We all know that if our children's future remains unpromising, so would
be that of the nation.
(China Daily 09/23/2005 page4)
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