The RCEF Blog 博客

We just heard the shocking news of the passing of Liu Laoshi, a good friend and mentor. Liu Laoshi was a teacher and rural development activist who played an invaluable role in helping us learn about rural China. He was one of the first people we talked to who expressed a coherent vision for rural [...]

The article below from China Daily reports the startling statistic that “…the number of rural schools nationwide fell 43.7 percent from 2001 to 2009, and the number of classes in rural areas dropped 35.7 percent.” Since many village children now have to go closer to cities for school, they end up boarding and have less [...]

RCEF provides an egg a day for students at Xiaochao Primary School in rural Yongji, Shanxi Province. Another non-profit, the Rural Education Action Project, has been studying the consequences of malnutrition in rural primary school students and is also evaluating the “egg a day” project in Shaanxi Province. I wonder if their research and policy [...]

Sometimes people assume RCEF promotes “American-style” education in China. However, the kind of education RCEF promotes–relevant to students’ lives, connecting of skills and knowledge to solving real world problems–is not the norm in any country. The below editorial from the New York Times describes a successful case of U.S. high school students picking the topics [...]

RCEF strives to cultivate 5 life skills and attitudes in rural Chinese children: self-confidence, communication and leadership skills, independent thinking, empathy, and social responsibility. These sound a lot like the 5 skill areas promoted by “Social Emotional Learning (SEL)”, which you can read more about in Jay Mathew’s Washington Post education blog (below) and the [...]

It’s no surprise to RCEF that Chinese children can be incredibly creative! Many past examples of the creativity of our rural students spring to mind–the artwork of Xie Laoshi’s students (see photo at right), the song and dance created by Guan Ai School’s “Little Librarians”, fifth-grader Ren Chao who turned scrap materials into all kinds [...]

Starting this semester, rural high school students may be eligible to receive financial aid from the Chinese government. This continues the government’s efforts in recent years to close the gap in financial resources between urban and rural education. Much remains to be done though in the area of teaching quality–the next frontier of education improvement [...]

Recently, the principal of Guan Ai School, Sun Huimiao, started a blog for Guan Ai! It’s a great idea and the teachers have taken to it with enthusiasm. The account is shared by all the teachers and each teacher posts on it at least once a week about any topic related to the school. Some [...]

This post was written by Xiaochun Li, a first grade teacher at Guan Ai Primary School. She is part of a team of teachers and RCEF staff who work on the library and reading program at the school. 以下的博客是关爱小学的李晓春老师写的。她是学校图书和阅读项目的一名负责人。 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [...]

Guan Ai has a group of very inquisitive and energetic fifth grade boys. Last semester, they took an interest in the bees which buzzed around the school yard and crawled around water droplets on the faucets. For several days in a row, one or more of these boys would rush into the RCEF office, exuberant, [...]