China Focus: Rural schools eager for more teacher training

Wu Zhiguang teaches all the courses at Yukeng Elementary School. He has to, for he is the only teacher at the school in a mountainous village of Yongtai County, Fujian Province.

The all-rounder admits that he has his weaknesses. Wu says he finds teaching music, art and English particularly difficult.

"Luckily the local education authority is well aware of the problem and has helped the school install computers, so students now learn those courses online," he said. "But it can't compare to on-site teaching."

The vast majority of Chinese village teachers face a similar situation: They only have a single teacher. Disparities between quality of education in China's countryside and its cities are down to uneven funding, but also lack of training for teachers. If lone teachers have to be one-man bands, they need to know their stuff.

"I believe the math and Chinese my students learn is at the same level as what students learn in cities, but for courses such as music and art, the difference is there," said Cheng Guiying, another lone teacher in Hexi Village, Yongtai County.

"Though online education has made up for some deficiencies, learning from a computer is far different than learning face-to-face from a teacher," Cheng said.

To narrow the urban-rural education gap, the Chinese government has increased investment. The latest move announced on Tuesday includes a budget of 500 billion yuan (74 billion U.S. dollars) to build more schools and develop existing ones, and a plan to train village teachers to cover a broader variety of subjects.

As China has set the objective of compulsory eduction developing at the same pace as urbanization by 2020, the country wants versatile teachers who will be able to perform multiple roles, just like general practitioners in medicine, said Liu Limin, vice minister of education.

For Wu, "the policy sounds exciting and it reveals that rural education now has gained more public concern."

He agreed that training teachers was important. "As people's knowledge expands fast nowadays, it's harder for rural teachers to keep pace, which is not healthy for the development of village students," Wu said.

According to Yongtai County's education bureau, it spent 202 million yuan from 2012 to 2015 on new school buildings covering a total of 90,000 square meters. Another 1.2 million yuan went on computers for the schools.

"Though efforts have been made, the gap between rural and urban education remains huge. The shortage of teachers and the low salaries offered to teachers are the major causes," said an official with the bureau.

Huang Nengxian, director of the college of education at Fujian Normal University, said lack of students is also a major concern for China's rural education.

"What we need is a better overall system, to balance education resources in the urban and rural areas, to cultivate better rural teachers and to keep students in villages," Huang said. Endi