Poor conditions hound China’s boarding schools

BEIJING — In the United States, the words “boarding school” conjure images of children attending class in ivy-covered buildings, eating in oak-panelled dining halls and exercising on well-manicured sports fields. An increasing number of these fortunate students come from wealthy families all over the globe, many from China.

That cosseted world is unimaginable to the 33 million children living and studying in China’s 100,000 rural boarding schools, a number roughly equal to two-thirds of all children enrolled in US public schools. At a rural elementary school in a poor, mountainous region of Shaanxi province in China’s north-west, the 60-odd students, aged 5 to 14, sit for their lessons in dirty, concrete-walled classrooms. Meals, cooked on wood-fired stoves, are sparse; meat is a once-a-week extravagance. Eighteen boarders sleep in bunks in unheated rooms.

Hunger and loneliness are commonplace, said students, who spend more than 10 months a year at the school. A 13-year-old girl bundled up in a pink parka to keep warm against the early March chill said she gets to see her parents, who work in the provincial capital of Xi’an, only two or three times a year.

“The most difficult part of being here: I miss my mother and father,” she said, breaking into tears. The girl, other students, teachers and administrators interviewed for this story asked that neither they nor the school be identified, as they were not authorised to speak to foreign media.

Data gathered by independent researchers show that Chinese boarders lag emotionally and academically.

“The boarding kids are the ones who cause the most trouble,” said the principal of a junior high school in Shaanxi that has a mix of boarding and day students. “Their emotional development isn’t very good because they haven’t grown up with their parents,” he said. “They don’t study or do their homework, and when they come to class they just play with their mobile phones.”

China’s boarding schools are the product of a government policy of closing or merging small rural day schools in response to falling birthrates. The Education Ministry said more than 240,000 village schools have been closed since the year 2000 and replaced with thousands of academies built to board students.

China has more than 100 million rural students in first through ninth grades. The proportion of them who live at school has grown rapidly in recent years, reaching more than a quarter in 2011, said Mr Yang Dongping, director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Beijing.

A large number of these children are what Chinese call “liushou ertong”, or “left-behind children”, whose parents labour in factories and on construction sites in wealthier regions of the country.

A study by Stanford, the University of California at Davis, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Catholic University of Leuven found that fourth-graders in rural areas are at least two grade levels behind their urban peers in maths and Chinese. Fewer than half of rural students finish high school, compared with 90 per cent in the cities.

Since 2010, China’s Education Ministry has spent at least 61.8 billion yuan (S$13.5 billion) renovating schools in rural areas. Boarding school students are now eligible for subsidies to pay for everything from schoolbooks to daily necessities, and government-imposed tuition fees have been waived.

But that alone may not be enough.

Mr Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, cautions that China’s deficit in rural education could one day rise to the level of a national crisis. Just one-quarter of Chinese workers have a high-school education.

“There is no way China can become the high-wage, skilled economy its leaders say they want it to be when 400 million working-age adults can’t read or write,” he said. BLOOMBERG