Teachers vital to improve education in rural areas

Editor's Note: A China Youth Daily report, which went viral recently, has claimed that, by taking live-streaming lessons from Chengdu No 7 High School in Sichuan province, 88 students from impoverished areas secured admission to the premier Peking University and Tsinghua University. In the public debate that has followed, one group says the teaching method will narrow the urban-rural education gap, while skeptics say the report exaggerates the role of technology in education. Three experts share their views on the issue with China Daily's Yao Yuxin. Excerpts follow:

Live-streaming courses cannot replace teachers

The report gives a detailed account of the live-streaming courses of Chengdu No 7 High School, saying they have greatly improved the quality of education in rural areas and helped many of the 72,000 students from 248 schools taking them to get admitted to colleges since 2016.

By sharing quality education resources with rural students, Internet Plus can promote fairness in education to some extent. But its effectiveness should not be overstated.

To ensure students in impoverished areas receive fairly high-quality education, well-qualified rural teachers should be the top priority, because they play the leading role in imparting education, which can be enhanced by additional teaching courses. As the story says, rural schools' success is dependent on the support of local teachers.

Moreover, there is a need to reform the examination-centric education system, because when it comes to seeking admission to a college, rural students will always be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis students from city schools.

The Chinese government launched a five-year project in 2012. To expedite the poverty alleviation work, the project made provisions for about 10,000 students from 680 impoverished counties in 21 provinces to get admission to universities. This significantly increased the gross enrollment ratio from rural areas－which increased from 15 percent in the base year of 2002 to 45.7 percent in 2017.

Therefore, it is not accurate to say the 88 students who got admission to Peking University and Tsinghua University in 2016 owe their academic success to live-streaming lessons. Instead, the country's admission policy to reduce poverty deserves praise for that. To understand the real effect of livestreaming education, the comparison should be confined to students who attended live-streaming courses before the project was introduced in 2012.

Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute

More funds needed to improve education

The China Youth Daily report exaggerates the role of teaching techniques in education. Therefore, we should weigh the pros and cons of the live-streaming teaching method before hastily rolling it out on a vast scale across the country.

Live-streaming classes can work for some students, but they can hardly enhance students' knowledge or nurture their personality. As the purpose of education is to cultivate students' knowledge and character, a one-fits-all model will not work.

Online classes such as the one from Chengdu No 7 High School can be uploaded on the internet as another choice or additional teaching course for rural schools. But they cannot be the main method for teaching students in rural areas. Simply put, live-streaming classes cannot solve all the problems of rural students. In fact, over-reliance on live-streaming classes could end up doing more damage than good to the students. Education is about teachers imparting knowledge to students, and the interactions and exchanges between them. So when teachers in rural areas are "downgraded" to become assistants of live-streaming courses, their teaching skills would suffer, and the students would become the ultimate victims of this futile exercise.

To improve the quality of education in impoverished areas, the authorities should allocate more funds and other education resources, apart from organizing special training programs and raising the salaries of rural teachers.

Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences

Super schools are a result of unfairness

Rather than being a shining example of the education system, "super" schools, such as Chengdu No 7 High School, are a result of unfairness. To augment their political performance by highlighting the local success rate in the national college entrance exam (gaokao), governments at different levels usually use their executive powers to put the majority of quality resources in and take preferential policies for a few schools, and thus expand the gap between the quality of education in rural and urban areas.

In this regard, there is hardly any difference between the super schools in first-tier cities and those in second- third- and fourth-tier cities, except that more students from first-tier cities get admitted to prestigious universities such as Tsinghua, Peking, Yale and Harvard. So hints at using new media and new techniques to replicate the super-school model are worrying signs, as these super schools' top pursuit has always been to ensure their students secure higher grades in exams.

We shouldn't be influenced by the report, which says cooperation among local governments, capital and super schools could make the education system fairer, because by using fairer education as a cover to replicate the teaching method of super high schools, the authorities could end up creating new types of unfairness and make it more difficult to realize fair and quality education for all. Giving rural students such hopes is to build a smoke screen.

By contrast, these super schools should have been the main target of education reform, which is a social consensus. Due to entrenched interests, however, the reform has proceeded very slowly.

Wang Tianding, a professor at the College of Liberal Arts, Journalism and Communication, Ocean University of China