Education Development > Teacher Training and Support
A Village Teacher, in Ranges of Mountains
Mr. Shi is the only adult in the White Stone Village Primary School, a school which can only be reached by three hours of rugged, hilly walking after hours of bus journey. Shi is the school janitor, the school principal, as well as the sole school teacher. In a class with two school-levels of students, he teaches Chinese Language, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Moral Education, and Physical Education. He has to do everything at school and he says that he is simultaneously capable of "blowing a flute, playing music, singing and dancing", with a broad smile.
Teacher Shi is in his fifties. Villagers always tease him for jumping, laughing, and playing with the kids, but he enjoys doing all these. He says this is the way a teacher should be. Along the rugged, hilly roads, Teacher Shi walks his students to school and back home every day. During winter, when the waters are high, he has to carry his students on his back across the river. As a teacher he only earns a hundred RMB per month (equivalent to USD 13) and, when he finishes school, he farms and helps with housework. We asked him if his life was hard, he said, "No, but it's hard for the kids." He was referring to the freezing-cold, dilapidated, wooden hut that he called "school". He didn't tell us the sorrows of his only son and his two daughters who had to discontinue with their education because of money. His eldest daughter dropped out of school before finishing primary education, his only son left after finishing junior secondary school and his second daughter is about to drop out of school because the family cannot afford to pay for her senior secondary school tuition.
One thing keeps troubling Teacher Shi is that his education qualification only extends to lower secondary school. He has been teaching for twenty some years but he only had one short training session though distance-learning. Shi is very good at teaching: all of his students have passed the county-administered public exam and the parents of his students said to him with gratitude, "Before you came here, we believed our land and water had problems and made our kids dumb, but after you've come, the students are all doing well at school. You're really a teacher with magic hands!" Despite all these, Teacher Shi still wishes for a chance to receive proper teacher training because he believes that "if you want to give your students a bowl of water, you must have a bucket of water yourself. My greatest wish is to teach our children well!" This is a small village teacher's admirable goal - to help the development of mountain villages through education.
A documentary film about Teacher Shi's story will be released by IRD in 2006 Summer. We hope that it can draw more public attention and caring towards the situation of village school teachers.
We do not yet have statistics for the total number of village school teachers in China, but in Baojing County alone there are a few hundred. Teachers are the key to the success of education. In the mountain villages of China, many teachers are enduring extremely low salaries and harsh education environments.
These teachers and their families have been silently contributing to the development of villages and the future of China.
IRD has made an agreement with the Baojing Education Bureau to award the best village teachers each year from 2001 onwards, so that excellent teachers are given rewards for their good work. IRD is also in contact with a number of teacher-training schools in Hunan to develop village teacher-training programs.
We hope that this work can begin to provide the support and respect that these village teachers deserve.