Small, country schools vanish as China transforms rural areas

Huang Xiuru, 12, no longer needs to look at a rudimentary sundial, a nail hammered into a wooden pillar, to tell if class is over for the day. As a conseuqence of China's policy to upgrade rural education, Huang was sent to a new school near the county seat in 2009 after her old one was closed. "I miss Teacher Li," Huang said, with tears in her eyes. Li was her teacher at the tiny and now abandoned Shuiquan Primary School, in the county of Chicheng in north Hehei Province. The school became famous after Zhang Yimou's 1999 award-winning movie "Not One Less." In China's rural areas, many small, poorly-resourced schools remain. Shuiquan Primary School once had about 40 students. Sitting in one adobe building, first to fifth grade students shared one teacher for all their subjects. "When I gave lessons to grade one, I'd ask the other students to do their homework or learn on their own," said Li Xiangping, 52, who taught at the school for 33 years. "I had to prepare lessons for all subjects for all grades," he said. Li Chunsheng, an official with the education bureau of Chicheng, said the quality of education at such schools was far below the bigger schools. "In these schools, there's no music, English or computer classes, because many old teachers can't speak English themselves, and there's no pianos or computers," he said. According to the Ministry of Education, China had 553,600 primary schools in 2000, but the number dropped by more than half to 257,400 in 2010. According to the education official, Chicheng, with a population of 292,000, had more than 400 schools 10 years ago. Now there're only 104.