Three young teachers return to their hometowns amid an education crisis in China’s countryside
三位乡村教师自述：回顾曾经的选择，也在想自己能为乡村的孩子们带来什么
Five summers ago, I stepped off a slow green train into pouring rain in a small city called Jishou, nestled between the mountains of western Hunan province. I had arrived to teach English at a teacher’s college for a few weeks after my first year of university, but I quickly realized I would learn more than I could teach.
Many of my students came from the surrounding Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, where close to 80 percent of the local population identifies as an ethnic minority. Until recent years, the region’s mountainous geography made it challenging to build roads connecting the area’s many remote villages with the outside world.I met young women like Kayla, Jane, and Fay, who were part of a “five-year teacher training program” aiming to train teachers for rural elementary schools in the prefecture. Matriculating directly from middle school, the students receive five years of government-subsidized education in exchange for teaching for five years at an elementary school in a town or village in their home county.Targeted-training programs like these, which also exist in other fields ranging from medicine to agriculture and national defense, were started in the late 1980s to address the difficulty of attracting talented workers to remote, underdeveloped regions. Though recent poverty alleviation efforts have greatly improved conditions in rural areas, teachers in rural schools still face unique challenges.
Rural students often move to towns for education, leading small schools in more remote villages to close
Many participants in the five-year program spoke especially of the difficulties working with some of China’s nearly 7 million “left-behind children,” who are being raised by grandparents and relatives while their parents migrate for work in the cities. The lack of parental guidance can impact a student’s education, and the young teachers observe many of their students needing more care and attention at school to make up for what they are missing at home. Other students display a lack of interest and motivation for studying, with some simply waiting until they finish their nine years of “compulsory education” so they can drop out of school and find work.The paths that Kayla, Jane, and Fay chose at the young age of 14 or 15, often under the influence of family members and other adults, promised both security and limitations. For their parents, a guaranteed job as a teacher immediately promised an “iron rice bowl” for young women with few career options in a rural area. For some students, too, the program was a cost-effective way of obtaining higher education and avoiding the risk of an uncertain job market, and many find a sense of mission in supporting rural education and expanding their students’ worldviews.Others, though, wonder whether graduating with only an associate’s degree from the five-year program will limit their career prospects, or whether they missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get higher education, build their character, and expand their horizons by remaining in their hometown during some of the most ambitious years of their lives. Though they must pay a fine to the government if they breach their contract, some students in the program have abandoned their studies or teaching posts. “I felt that I knew too little,” said one young teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, after leaving her job to obtain a master’s degree in a large city. “I felt that staying was not productive to my own growth or my students’ growth.”Kayla, Jane, and Fay, like me, were young, ambitious, and searching for their place in the world. In the years since I taught in Jishou, I have returned several times to visit my students, who have now become my friends. At the cusp of their graduation, I made portraits of the three young women and asked them to write letters to their future selves. Since then, all three have started teaching at their assigned posts, and have shared further thoughts with me about their chosen path, its challenges, and how it has pushed them to grow.I first heard about the five-year program when I was in elementary school. Like most kids, I had no plans for myself, and “the future” was something our teachers talked about in the classroom. I would always mindlessly write that my dream was to be a teacher.This childhood innocence started to fade when I finished middle school—the first crossroads in my life—but that wasn’t enough to encourage me to continue on to high school, because I worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with my studies and wouldn’t be able to get into a good university.
I was disappointed during my first year at the teacher’s college, because my life and studies were not how I imagined university to be. In middle school, we had to follow every instruction from our teachers, but now we had complete freedom. Knowing we’d be guaranteed a job in the end, there wasn’t much motivation to learn. I don’t lack self-discipline, but that kind of environment didn’t push me to meet the expectations I’d set for myself. Yet although I complain about the experience, I had felt nostalgic when the time came for me to graduate.If I could choose again, would I make the same choice? I might have asked myself this question when I was still in school, but after I started working as a teacher, I stopped. What I’m focusing on now is how to teach my students well and how to improve myself.Actually, what I am constantly afraid of is a life that I can see right to the end of, so now, I focus on doing everything I can to pursue a better self. I think this is why a lot of relatives initially persuaded me to enter the five-year program: to seek progress within stability.
I am a homeroom teacher at a middle school in a rural area. My days mostly consist of dealing with teenagers. Every day, I get up at 7 a.m. and have to check the dorms at 9 p.m. In between, I prepare lessons, correct homework, manage my class, and deal with rebellious students. It’s tiring, but I feel a lot of pride when I see my students slowly improve.
The process is not as smooth as I make it out to be. In addition to being rebellious teenagers, many of the students’ parents are absent from their lives, and the lack of guidance at home makes educating them at school especially difficult. I experience a lot of frustrations as a teacher and the best thing I can do is to guide my students into becoming honest and kind individuals. Grades are not always the most important thing.
Images by Cindy Liu, and provided courtesy of Jane, Kayla, and Fay
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