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Poor families finding hope through education
(Xinhua) Updated: 2008-03-05 23:27 "But if you send their children to better schools, their lives will be totally changed when some of them get to college or get jobs." Hainan plans to offer places at town schools to more than 9,000 poor students. And by 2010, more than 40,000 students like Han will be on their way to a changing fate, according to Wei. The government and society have made endeavors to get people out of poverty, although many fell back into poverty due to disasters or illness, said Shi Ying, a researcher of the northwest Shaanxi provincial Academy of Social Sciences. About one-third of the provincial revenue has been put into compulsory education since 2003, and more than 1 billion yuan (about 140.8 million USdollars) has been invested in tuition funds and rebuilding dangerous classrooms, said Wei. Villagers often say that the most beautiful local buildings are the schools. Hainan was the first province that abolished tuition, in 2005, when its annual revenue was less than 10 billion yuan. Last year, the no-tuition policy benefited about 150 million students and 7.8 million boarders from poor families across the country. However, not every student is as lucky as Han. Many children in remote areas still cannot go to school because of poverty, researcher Shi Ying said. He said that the weak point of supporting the poor through education was the lack of qualified teachers in poor areas. As Premier Wen Jiabao said in the Report on the Work of the Government delivered on Wednesday, the government will continue increasing regular expenditures for rural compulsory education. The government will also increase living allowances for poor rural students residing on campus. Compared with Project Hope, which built many schools for rural areas, Hainan's new practice provides children with not only good classrooms but also better quality teachers, according to Yu Minhong, a member of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and an expert on English training. Yu proposed to give full play to the role of non-governmental sector and provide qualified teachers to less-developed places like Hainan. |
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