Learning the hard way
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), June 14, 2000
By Jing Zhang
At eight o’clock in the morning, Cao Shuiyin, a 10-year-old girl in pigtails, walks along a huge vegetable farm on the outskirts of Beijing to attend her first-grade lessons.
The “School with a Loving Heart” is where she is going. The school name is written, in huge Chinese characters, on a red, mud-brick wall of a three-room house with a wooden roof that stands in a western corner of the farm. A ray of sunlight peeps through a broken classroom window and rests on the blackboard. No electric light can be seen.
Six rectangular tables, or rather wooden planks and iron pieces knocked together by the head teacher Yang Guimei, stand on the mud floor of one of the rooms. The school has only two teachers for its 40 pupils: Ms Yang, 40, from Zhangjiakou, 150 kilometers north of Beijing, and a woman in her early 20s.
It is one of more than 150 "illegitimate" schools that have sprouted around the capital since 1994 to educate roughly 20,000 children of Beijing’s migrant workers. The migrant schools vary in student enrollment from seven to 1,300, and tuition fees range from 300 to 600 yuan (about 41 to 82 Euros) a term for each pupil.
Ms Yang puts her hand on Cao Shuiyin’s hair and says, “Shuiyin should have been at Grade two, but her father couldn’t afford the 40-yuan monthly fee last year and she missed a term.”
Cao, wearing clothes given by her classmates and a pair of white sport shoes too big for her, often rests her shining black eyes on her teacher when she relates her family story. Her 16-year-old brother helps her father make a living on bicycle repairing. Her jobless mother has just given birth to a baby sister. They have come from Sicuan Province, more than 1,900 km from Beijing, in search of a better life.
More than 310,000 migrant families have come to the capital with similar dreams. They make up different layers of a pyramid in terms of income as well as social status. The pinnacle comprises returned students from abroad, technicians with at lease master degrees and IT entrepreneurs, whose monthly pay exceeds 10,000 yuan.
Traders and owners of small businesses from southern provinces like Zhejiang are well off and occupy the second highest rung. However, the biggest proportion of the migrant population lies at the bottom of the pyramid. They earn from 800 to 1,500 yuan a month by peddling, growing vegetables and collecting garbage-jobs which Beijingers and residents of other relatively prosperous mainland cities are no longer willing to do.
In recent years, the average rural income in China have fallen to half of that in urban areas. On the other hand, expanding cities have a big demand for unskilled labour, resulting in 90 million surplus farm hands pouring into cities, bringing with them two million school-age children.
Zhao Shukai, a researcher at the Development Research Center, a think-tank for the central Government, said: “Cities are not well-prepared for this rush, and public services can’t cope with the transients. The problem of schooling for migrant children is becoming increasingly acute.”
For 50 years, China’s residence registration system has drawn a clear dividing line between urban and rural areas. Peasants have been supposed to stay on their farms and urban workers in their towns. Even after a peasant has obtained a temporary residence permission in a city, he does not enjoy any of the privileges granted to citizens. So the children cannot attend city schools to receive state-mandated nine-year education unless their parents have paid extra "enrollment fees".
Wang Hongjin, director of the Statistics Department of the Ministry of Education, said: “Such problems wouldn’t exist in foreign countries as they don’t have a similar residence registration system. ” In some countries, general education is the sole responsibility of the central government. But in China, educating responsibilities are divided among governments at all levels.”
State schools in Beijing charge migrant children three types of fees: A 480-yuan per term off-home area schooling fee, a 1,000-yuan school-choosing fee and a required “donation” varying from 1,000 to 30,000 yuan. Many schools ask migrant parents to hand in all the fees at once.
Zhang Simin, a fruit peddler, said: “These charges are unreasonable. We are migrants, who don’t know where we will be the next year. Only fools will turn in 10,000 yuan at once.”
Mr Zhao said: "Some municipal government officials think these high enrollment charges may help drive poorly-educated transients home. If they don’t want their children to be dropouts, they’d better go home, they reason."
Migrants have become a target for complaints-being blamed for everything from rising crime rates to wage deflation. Mr Zhao dismisses this as unfair: “Migrant labor has contributed a lot to Beijing people’s life. They are doing all sorts of work that the locals wouldn’t care to do. We rely heavily on them now. Furthermore, they are tax-payers. ”
Mr Zhang said: “I’ll keep my family together at all costs. And my daughter will have education in Beijing. Nobody looks after her in my hometown since my parents died.”
In a small sign of progress, Beijing Education Commission has asked its branch in Fengtai District to put on a trial boarding-school intended for migrant children. However, its 3,000-yuan-per-semester fee has attracted less than one hundred students. Mr Zhang instead sends his 12-year-old daughter to a 750-student primary school at Huangzhuang in Shijingshan District. Such medium-sized school which charge at 300 to 400 yuan per semester enjoy tremendous popularity.
Chen Enxian, head teacher of Huangzhuang Primary School, said: “Migrant parents attach equal importance to education as urban families do. They’ve suffered from illiteracy and want no such pains for their children. As long as they can afford, they will send them to school.”
At the centre of the school campus is a 50-square-meter computer room, which is cooled by two electricity fans on its ceiling in Summer, and heated by a coal stove in Winter. Mr Chen used to teach History at a key high-school in Hennan Province. He visited Beijing two years ago, and learned about the plight of 300 school dropouts, all migrant children. He then decided to make migrant schools his life's vocation.
Mr Chen’s 30 teachers each receive 500 yuan a month, half of that of their state-employed counterparts. But they are still better paid than in their hometowns. Mr Chen's school relies on tuition and investment from his nephews, but no donations. He can just make ends meet, but often gives poorer families a tuition cut or waiver.
He admits envying Yi benyao, his former high-school classmate and headmaster of another migrant school. Mr Yi’s school has so far received 300,000 yuan donation from a Hongkong philanthropy foundation and a Los Angels Chinese-American. On May 18th, Chen registered an Internet domain (www. 61net.org) to attract publicity for the plight of migrant children.
“My biggest worry is that someday the government will cancel this school,” he said.
Educators of migrant children are looking for a governmental endorsement that will end their "illegitimate" status. But officials are sending confusing messages. Some are ambiguous, others want to see them closed down.
Wang Hongjin, a director with the Education Ministry, believes the school fill a much-needed vacuum. “It is improper to regard migrant schools as illegal. It is true that they have not been authorized by the government, but many migrant children can’t afford to attend public schools. ”
Mr Zhao warns, “It is impossible to legalize these migrant schools because it will jeopardize present education system. These migrant schools aren’t qualified to teach. Most of their teachers, including their headmasters, are migrants themselves. Only 14 percent of them has a normal university or college degree, a must for primary school teachers. The best way to solve the problem is to give migrants an identity as urban dwellers. ”
One irony is that the state schools, which children of migrant families cannot afford to attend, are short of pupils. Statistics show that more than 100 classrooms in Beijing have become idle. But such schools remain unwilling to make it easier for migrant children to enroll. Mr Zhao sighs, “Profit has a say everywhere.”
(End)