The economist Down and out in rural China中国农村贫困学生学业堪忧

Down and out in rural China中国农村贫困生学业堪忧2014-08-23Many teenagers in the Chinese countryside do not finish secondary school.That bodes ill for the labour forceLIKE many rural teenagers,Yan Jingtao,the lanky son of a watermelon farmer,did not have quite the stuff for a standard upper-secondary st September,encouraged by his teacher,he and three classmates enrolled instead at a vocational school on the edge of the central city of Kaifeng to study computer animation.By November,he had quit;one of23dropouts in less than two months from a class that had started with57.The students had often got into brawls and skipped school in order to play games at an internet café.Now18,Mr Yan has landed a decent short-term job as a guard at a local military airport.“My job is better than what my friends have,”he says.But he yearns to learn a skill and get a proper career.He will have too much company in that pursuit,and not much help.In the past three decades China has made impressive gains in sending rural children to school.This has helped fuel its rise as a low-end manufacturing power.But the easygains have been achieved.If the country is to create the“knowledge economy”it says it wants,the government will have to change the way rural teenagers are educated and schools in the countryside are funded.Completion of junior middle-school has been compulsory since1986.(Middle-school in China refers to the six years of education before university.)In big cities it is already the norm to finish the remaining three years,known as senior middle-school.In the countryside growing numbers are entering senior middle-school too,but it is far less common.In1990just7%of rural students did so.Today the figure may be just over one-third.Even at the junior level(despite government figures suggesting full attendance), dropout rates are high:a study of rural students in four provinces found they ranged between more than one-sixth to nearly a third.Some quit school because of the cost;in contrast to many other countries,the upper years charge for tuition.Senior middle-schools are often far away from villages,so students have to board.Including the cost of books,the bill for three years can easily amount to thousands of dollars—more than a year’s income for poorer rural families.About half fail the test to get into senior middle-school.Others leave because they can get what they consider a decent job.Wages for low-skilled work have increased greatly in recent years.Mr Yan earns3,000yuan($490)for ten shifts a month,considerably more than the government-set minimum wage.Tens of millions of rural workers have moved to urban areas since the1990s.But China’s system of household registration,or hukou,makes it difficult for them to send their children to better-resourced and better-run middle-schools in the cities.Migrants often have no choice but to leave their children behind to be educated.A lack of parental supervision compounds many students’difficulties.In middle-school attendance,China lags behind the attainments of some newly developed economies when they were at similar levels of development.In South Korea virtually everyone was getting a full secondary education by the late1980s.By contrast, says Niny Khor,an economist in Beijing at the Asian Development Bank,China has an urban-rural gap of close to three years of education.Ms Khor calls rural upper-secondary schools“the biggest bottleneck”in the education system.China has set out to make education cheaper.In2006it began eliminating tuition and book fees for primary and junior middle-schools.But urban secondary schools still have much bigger budgets than rural ones(in some cases larger than an entire county’s education budget).Rural governments scrabble around for money,which invariably means getting money out of parents.Yi Hongmei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues at Stanford’s Rural Education Action Programme found that the most impoverished students dropped out of middle-school at twice the rate as the others they surveyed.Students with at least one sibling were also more likely to drop out because of the strain on family resources.If parents fell ill,they found,needy students would often leave school to earn money to pay for treatment.The scholars concluded that giving money to students would help.In one trial,financial aid reduced the drop-out rate by60%. In another,giving it to impoverished students in the final year of junior middle-school increased their chances of staying at least another year at school by10%.The government encourages teachers to steer academic underachievers to vocational schools.It gives a subsidy of1,500yuan each to many rural vocational-school students to help cover tuition.Measures like these helped to boost enrolment in such schools by nearly 50%,to6.9m,in the decade to2011.But vocational schools in rural areas,no less than their middle-school counterparts,are blighted by scant funding and poor-quality staff. Students still have to pay,hence richer ones enroll more than poorer ones.And their value is questionable.One study found that students scored worse in maths after completing a year of vocational secondary school.Many experts argue that providing more opportunity for students to stay in standard secondary schools would prepare them better for the workplace.But that would land the government with a huge new bill.From the print edition:China《经济学人》近期多篇文章都将目光放在了中国身上，除了有关“中国人想要什么”一系列文章，该杂志的一篇文章关注了中国农村青少年的教育问题，文章指出，“中国有许多农村青少年都未读完初中。