China needs more input in education

This is in sharp contrast to the situation in Belgium, where education, generally speaking, is not tied to a high price tag, and for many families it nearly costs nothing.

Some may say, China's per capita income still stands at around $7,000 while that of Belgium is six times more, so it is foolish to compare the two countries. But this is a false argument. China should not wait until it becomes a high-income economy before it starts to invest heavily in education. Instead, increasing the investment into education and ensuring there is a well-educated workforce would speed up China's process of becoming a higher-income country.

China has started to design its new five-year development roadmap for 2016 to 2020, and it should include expanding the length of its compulsory education from nine to 12 years. The country's fiscal strength provides the ability to do this.

Second, the country should offer facilities and teachers to satisfy the growing demand for extracurricular classes. In Belgium, local governments offer long list of after-school choices for kids to tailor to their interests and hobbies, and these are not necessarily offered by their own schools. In China, classes such as piano or violin lessons are quite expensive, while in Belgium, they cost nearly nothing. If China offered such public goods free of charge or at very low cost, it would not only help Chinese families, but also create more job opportunities for teachers.

At the same time, the government should invest in the construction of more facilities, such as art centers, swimming pools, theaters and cinemas. China has up to 20,000 towns and at least half of them don't provide accesses to such facilities and are short of teachers and coaches.

While the king and the queen of Belgium were with their kids on Sept 1, many migrant parents in China could not accompany their left-behind kids to school. I hope this will be a thing of the past, when the students of today take their children to school.

The author is chief correspondent of China Daily based in Brussels. fujing@chinadaily.com.cn