How Rural Teachers Can Become an Enviable Profession

"As long as I have breath in me, I won't let them be unable to afford school." Ye Lianping, now 91 years old, lives in Buchen Village, Wujiang Town, He County, Anhui Province. With white hair and a stooped back, he still insists on teaching classes and grading homework. His love for and dedication to education commands deep respect. Rural teachers hold fast to the countryside, lifting up the dreams of one rural child after another.

For a long time, the state has attached great importance to building the teaching force, elevating it to the height of "to revitalize the nation, one must first strengthen teachers," which is deeply encouraging. With the implementation of the Rural Teacher Support Plan (2015-2020), many regions have now begun training generalist teachers and introduced training programs such as "integration of arts and sciences," "one specialty with multiple abilities," and "phased training."

Li Chang'an, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics and a special commentator for China National Radio's "Countryside Voice," believes that most of these programs focus on how county-level teachers can "teach well," while rarely addressing the question of how to get teachers to "go down to the grassroots and stay there."

Teachers are the bearers and implementers of education. The core issue in developing rural education is to cultivate a high-quality contingent of rural teachers. In the Rural Teacher Support Plan (2015-2020), the practice of promoting generalist teachers at the primary school level was proposed. A primary school generalist teacher refers to an encyclopedic teacher with noble professional ethics, broad knowledge, competence in both arts and sciences, able to paint and sing, and versatile in many skills. They need to be capable of handling the teaching tasks of primary school Chinese, math and English courses, and also master any two skills among music, dance, art and calligraphy. In China's current teacher training system, this is undoubtedly something new, and it also sets higher demands on teachers. However, although this approach can better solve the problem of how to "teach well," how to get more talented teachers to "go down to the grassroots, stay there and teach well" has become a major problem facing many rural primary schools. Due to relatively low salaries, poor benefits and unfavorable working conditions, some young rural teachers cannot be retained, and backbone teachers either go to towns or to private schools with better pay, making teacher turnover a prominent issue.

Li Chang'an believes that to solve the above problems, one can start from two levels: first, the social level, establishing a more complete incentive mechanism and using better policies to attract talent to the countryside; second, the individual level, raising salaries and benefits and warming rural teachers with practical actions.

Therefore, to develop rural basic education and consolidate and improve teaching quality, more effort must be devoted to raising rural teachers' pay and improving their working environment. That is to say, the building of the rural teaching force must be placed in a strategic position of priority development. On the one hand, it is necessary to broaden the sources of rural teachers, open up channels for college graduates and urban teachers to teach in rural schools, and gradually form an incentive mechanism in which "the closer to the grassroots and the harder the conditions, the higher the status and pay." On the other hand, it is necessary to continuously raise rural teachers' wages and benefits, care about their growth and development, warm rural teachers with practical actions, and enable them to "go down to the grassroots, stay there and teach well." Of course, fundamentally speaking, it is still necessary to strive to achieve a balanced allocation of urban and rural educational resources and accelerate the realization of equity in urban and rural education. Only when urban and rural education has basically achieved equalization will the problem of retaining rural teachers be readily solved.

Reporter: Ji Yingying

Copy editor: Li Weimin

This article is excerpted from: Countryside Voice, Sannong China. If there is any infringement, please contact us for deletion.