Study On Sichuan Primary School Teachers' Situation In The 1930s

Many modern exogenous modernization nations had often considered that elementary education and primary school teachers had played a very important role to make the country prosperous and strong. Modern Chinese people expected to save the nation from poorness and weakness by developing education. In fact, the development of elementary education was one of critical factors to make modem China prosperous and strong and the primary school teachers were in charge of the important task. Reviewing Sichuan primary school teachers' situation, we can find out why modern China was always so weak and backward from certain perspective. The author discussed the conditions of Sichuan primary school teachers in 1930s from the following several aspects:Firstly, many schoolteachers were not competent for their jobs. The backwardness of normal school resulted in the shortage of trained teachers. Some measures had been taken to improve the teachers' ability, but there had been little effect and still had been short of trained teachers.Secondly, primary school teachers were often in danger of unemployment. In modern China, primary school teachers were employed by the schoolmaster. Because of the schoolmaster abusing his function or the administration authority's intervention, most primary school teachers had to scramble for employment during winter and summer vacation.Thirdly, primary school teachers' wage was very low. Due to the unstable source, the disordered management and the unequal distribution of the educationalexpenditure, Sichuan primary school teachers' salary standard was so low that they couldn't keep the pot boiling. Little salary caused the teachers dissatisfaction with their jobs and hindered the development of Sichuan elementary educationFourthly, primary school teachers had no credit worthiness, which resulted from poor ability of themselves, the high cost, rapid development but inefficiency of the elementary education.From the discuss above about the teachers' ability, employment, wage standard and prestige, we can understand how low Sichuan primary school teachers' position is in the society, and this epitomizes all the modern Chinese primary school teachers. The basic factors which make primary school teachers' social class so low is that modern China had no perfect integration system to ensure elementary education a sound development and to guarantee primary school teachers a corresponding social status.Today, Chinese primary school teachers still have low positions in society, and this does not gear to the great career they are engaged in. It is the arduous task in the course of Chinese education modernization for the government to enhance greatly primary school teachers' social class.