The RCEF Blog 博客

RCEF’s rural teacher training was held at the Desheng Common Peoples School (德胜平民学校), a rural elementary school in Xiuning County, Anhui Province. When picking the location for the training, we looked for an innovative school that could be a source of inspiration and new ideas. Desheng is quite well known for its interesting model and had the bonus that it shares some similarities with Guan Ai. It is an elementary boarding school and is privately managed with funding coming from a foundation. With a focus on life skills and morals, it has also experimented with new curriculum and teaching methods, all things that Guan Ai wants to strengthen.

In 2005, the head of a company called Tecsun (德胜苏州洋楼有限公司）decided to create Desheng as a school that would focus first and foremost on cultivating hardworking, upright citizens out of rural children from poor families. He started a foundation that would fund all of its costs so that the students wouldn’t have to pay for anything. Room, board, clothes, and school supplies are all free and there is no tuition. The school only accepts children from “poor, decent and hardworking” families because it believes guardians’ behaviors greatly influence children’s development. It recognizes that a school, no matter how intense, can’t do a good job raising children without guardians’ involvement as responsible role models. Desheng’s principal said that she doesn’t want to “reward” or “subsidize” guardians who have bad habits. The school will only help those who are being responsible about helping themselves first.

Desheng started out as a mission-based school so it had a lot of advantages in laying a solid foundation for its work. In 2005, it began with just one first grade class and has added one new grade per year. (This year it will have four classes total, one for each grade 1-4). New students aren’t accepted after first grade ensuring that Desheng students are fully integrated into the school culture from an early age. Walking in through the front gate, my first impression was how clean and spacious the school felt. The grounds were spotless and the buildings were spread out comfortably across the grounds. It was clear that habits of cleanliness and order were deeply engrained in the culture of the school. This culture is transmitted by the principal and teachers who never cease to talk about their core values of honesty, hard work, responsibility, compassion, and civility (i.e. cleanliness and manners). This is done by nurturing daily habits in the students. All the children make their own beds, wash their own clothes and dishes, clean the bathrooms, and tidy up the school grounds. They also work in the school vegetable garden for at least one period a day, learning to appreciate labor and farming. There are nannies but they don’t do things for the children—they facilitate the children to accomplish things themselves. While we were there, a few third and fourth graders came to the school. I often saw them helping the cooks to wash the vegetables for lunch. After our meals, they were in the washroom mopping up and wiping down tables.

The layout and hardware at the school was interesting as well because Guan Ai is in the process of designing new dorms and offices. Most buildings at Desheng were no higher than two stories, in contrast to the monster multi-level buildings that most schools have in the Guan Ai area. (This is partly dependent on land availability though.) Desheng is affiliated with a vocational middle school and most of its furniture is custom made by the vocational school’s carpentry students. We slept in child-friendly bunk beds where the top bunk was not far off the ground. There were ample sinks and faucets for washing clothes and brushing teeth. Specially made shelves stored face basins and ledges carved into the walls supported rows of toothbrushes and cups. In all, the school had many nice design features that seemed suited to elementary school students’ life needs.

Some thoughts about how Desheng’s model relates to Guan Ai:

• Desheng had the advantage of implementing its policies from the start. Guan Ai has to work with the parents and student body it has now as it tries to institute new policies they are not used to. However, we are limiting new enrollees this school year to try and cut down on the destabilizing effects of students transferring in and out as every semester, which was an obstacle to building up good habits in the student body in the past.
• It’s best to start early in cultivating values and habits and we should work on our first graders this year while also striving to retain them at the school so that we can continue building on a solid foundation.
• Parents’ attitudes and behaviors are crucial and both schools want to start parent associations that will partner with the school in finding ways to deal with student problems and improve the quality of children’s overall education.
• Good teachers are essential to making schools like this run effectively. The work is relentless and teachers often serve as both tutors and surrogate parents. Both Guan Ai and Desheng pay their teachers more than the market rate but it is still a challenge to find suitable people who are willing to take on a job that demands so much energy and time every day. A system of professional development and career promotion is needed so that teachers can weigh the opportunity costs of transferring to other employment prospects and plan for a more stable future. Building strong, confident leaders out of the teachers is important for the school to grow beyond the vision and willpower of just one or a few original school founders.
• RCEF staff’s hands-on involvement in a school we fund is unique and very useful because we can better link our resources with the concrete needs of the school and spread the work of reforming the school amongst a number of people who have different strengths to contribute.
• What is the ultimate goal of schools like Desheng and Guan Ai? Are they only to be “bubbles,” providing a great education for a limited number of lucky students or will they see themselves as laboratories aimed at developing best practices that can help launch reform in surrounding schools? Developing just one school is already a huge undertaking. The long, hard, daily work understandably consumes the time and energy of teachers and principals. To some, it seems more practical to plan in terms of their school’s expansion rather than take on the difficult task of influencing other existing schools to also reform. Building one’s own system from scratch–and making it sustainable–is admirable, but in a country as big and monopolized as China, how far can one alternative system in one county go in making widespread change for the most rural children? Perhaps this is where RCEF comes in. We can keep the “bigger goal” in mind and set up the structures (i.e. conferences, online sharing, guidebooks) that facilitate progressive teachers to share experiences between schools. Eventually though, I think that the school leaders themselves will have to decide how important dissemination is to the purpose of their school. Resources will always be scarce, whether it’s time in a day, money, or talent. They can choose to spend these resources on making their alternative system bigger, better, stronger or on helping existing schools (and the surrounding community) to achieve more as well. It is possible to pursue both goals at the same time, and indeed, a strong model site helps to inspire other schools. However, the tricky part is allocating resources towards these two goals–a balancing act that RCEF (as outsiders) can consult on but not control. The destiny of these schools lies with their local leaders.