(English) An Uncommon School

| 把 2008年8月22号 粘贴在 课程发展, 乡村教育探索平台, 其他组织, 个人影像, 项目计划, 素质教育, 乡村教育促进会 上面里 Print This Post Print This Post

抱歉，中文版将于近日更新，请先阅读English版。

Be Sociable, Share!
 

6 replies

  1. Linus Kendall 说：

    在 %I:%M%p 添加 2008年8月22号

    Hi,

    I have been reading your blog for a while. It’s great to read about these examples and I soon hope to be working in this area. What I am wondering is how they actually select the students, you say they only take children from poor rural families? From my limited experiences when working in China it was always slightly hard (even for the native Chinese I worked with) to distinguish the genuinely poor from say middle class students who were also interesting in attending such programs?

    Would be great to hear some inputs on that?

    Take care,
    Linus

  2. Diane Geng (作者博客) 说:

    在 %I:%M%p     添加 2008年8月23号

    Hi Linus,

    I’m not sure exactly how Desheng defines which families count as “poor”. However, I think the principal personally visits students’ homes and the school calls parents’ meetings regularly. Thus, they have ways of observing family conditions and parent behaviors. There have been cases where families have lied to the principal in order to get their child enrolled. For example, saying that one parent passed away when actually s/he left or divorced. However, the number of available spots at Desheng is quite limited with only one class per grade so the school is apt to be pretty strict about acceptances.

  3. Marco 说：

    在 %I:%M%p     添加 2008年9月5号

    I think the principals guiding the school are very impressive, as is the design of the classrooms and other hardware that makes it up, but I have to say the school is very selective of its students. The hand picking of a select small number of students and the amount of resources the school has access to can definitely help create an effective teaching environment that echos the dreams of those who run the school. I truly believe this is a good thing as progressive ideas can then be tried out and established there. The question I have is what happens with the other children that can’t attend such a school. Do they get left behind in the other schools in the area who probably can’t afford such quality design?

    I think the Desheng school is a great model school that the surrounding schools can learn from. Is there an exchange of ideas between the different schools? If so who takes the lead in such a discussion? If not is it because of resistance from the public school teachers and administration?

    When I first visited Guan Ai we had a short conversation about charter and public schools, I feel this issue to be a bit similar. It is up to the charter schools (or other private schools that have the resources and the ability to be selective about their student population) to take the lead in creating new reforms and ideas. Yet I believe that it is also their responsibility to take the initiative to reach out to the public schools so that they can share there new ideas with the majority of the population.

    I’m sure it will take a lot of hard work and cooperation for educators to transfer the ideas that are developed in a controlled environment into the public system successfully. People working hard for reform, like at Desheng and Guan Ai, are the necessary first step.

  4. Diane Geng (作者博客) 说:

    在 %I:%M%p     添加 2008年9月5号

    Good point, Marco. This is the critical issue RCEF faces as it invests in individual schools with the ultimate goal of promoting widespread reforms in more schools throughout rural China. After reading your comment, I wrote some more at the bottom of this post. Please take a look. What do you think should be the role of RCEF in shaping the goals of our partner schools?

  5. Marco 说：

    在 %I:%M%p     添加 2008年9月5号

    Really I think just doing what your doing is best, especially now that the focus of RCEF is developing local teachers instead of bringing in outside talent. I feel that slowly but surely other schools in the surrounding area will catch on.

    I saw when I was at Wangzhuang this summer that the local teachers there are not bad teachers, just maybe they were taught a certain way or had to adjust to the environment and resources that were given to them. As long as RCEF and its affiliated teachers are working in the area there will always be an opportunity for exchange and dialogue between educators. We just have to make sure that we also work to facilitate that discussion when possible.

  6. Sara Lam (作者博客) 说:

    在 %I:%M%p     添加 2008年9月9号

    Hi Marco, thanks for your very thoughtful comments!

    The Pingmin school model could be adapted by a lot of regular public schools, especially boarding schools. They do not consider students’ IQ or academic potential when selecting students. They do select students’ whose parents are hardworking and honest, but the only way to assess that really is to see if they have a job and ask around to see if they are known to have problems like alcoholism, gambling etc. They do have an advantage in that they can threaten to expel the student if parents do not cooperate, but they’ve never actually expelled any students. A lot of the hardware improvements can be made at lower costs. It’s just a matter of adding a rung on the bunk beds so that kids have a clean place to hang their towels neatly, or making a brick shelf so kids can keep their things organized.

    If a principal was very motivated to change their school, they would think of a way to do these things with less resources, but a less motivated principal would dismiss it as unfeasible because they do have less. The face of the matter is that the average principal in the Yongji area (and most of China) probably fall into the second category. So as we invest in Guan Ai and start initiatives here, we definitely have to consider not only if it is replicable, but whether other principals and teachers will PERCEIVE it is replicable.

Leave a reply