A Study On The Rearrangement Of The Distribution Of Primary Schools In Rural Areas

In May 2001, the Chinese government issued a document to rearrange the distribution of primary schools in rural areas aimed at optimizing the allocation of education resources, improving the quality of the compulsory education and balancing the development of education in both urban and rural areas. Many people have benefited from the implementation of the policy with a lot of money saved, the allocation of resources optimized and the quality of primary education in rural areas improved. However, every coin has two sides and so does the implementation of the policy, which negatively affected the interests of some villagers and even caused conflicts between the government and the people related. Hence, President Hu Jintao delivered a speech to demand changes of the situation in March 2007. In order to contribute to the optimization of the allocation of the education resources in rural areas, this dissertation is based on the problems existing in Jinyun County. Through investigation and research, facts and data of the ongoing primary education in Jinyun County are collected and analyzed before strategies and approaches are obtained to solve the problems.Through empirical research this dissertation has collected a lot of information to locate the most serious problem with primary education in rural areas by consulting educational policies and files in Jinyun County and referring to over 170 educational documents at different levels of the local government. In order to make clear the different attitudes, views and needs of different people related to the problems, three kinds of questionnaires are designed for teachers, pupils and parents, 1472 of which have been given out in five primary schools. What's more, the author has interviewed 20 people including government officials, principals, teachers and experts and visited 15 primary schools, the pupils of which come from 47 villages, in faraway towns such as Shijian Town and Daishi Town. 39 cases have been recorded from the interviews and visits, which show villagers' needs and feelings.In this dissertation, great importance is placed on the interests and feelings of the farmers (or villagers) and their children when redistribution of primary schools or even the building of new primary schools is taken into consideration, which will surely make it possible to achieve the goals of developing rural education, promoting rural cultures and building harmonious society. The fact has come to light that the quality of elementary education in rural areas is really being improved and that the government, the teachers and part of the farmers have benefited from the state policy. But there is no denying that some of the farmers' interests are harmed because of the policy and that not all the goals of the policy have been achieved. What's worse, because the government fails to make good use of the money in the process of redistributing primary schools, some unexpected problems are appearing, such as boarding pupils, the loss of rural cultures and the waste of money spent reestablishing them.The causes of the problem resulted from the central government, the local government and the villagers themselves. The central government fails to ensure enough money spent on primary education and the continuity of educational policies. What's more, the building of new socialist countryside lays little importance on primary education. The local government pays too much attention to economic efficiency by merging small primary schools into bigger ones, just as is the case with companies, which brings about boarding schools together with a lot of problems. The programming of towns fails to take primary schools into consideration, which shows that the local government lack serving awareness and pay little attention to the needs and interests of the villagers, whose interests are harmed because of the cancellation of primary schools in their villages, which causes the loss of rural cultures and the declining of the villages.Hence, this dissertation deals with suggestions and approaches to solving the existing problems caused by the redistribution of primary schools in rural areas from the view of administration and the principles and the ways of policy making. The most important task is to adopt the view of administration in a scientific way. Redistributing primary schools in rural areas appropriately can contribute to the building of a harmonious society, the solution to the problems of sannong (agriculture, farmers and rural areas), and the development of elementary education with rural characteristics, which will show the characteristics of public goods of compulsory education. The task can be fulfilled in the following ways. Firstly, a procedure of policy making should be established to ensure the interaction of the four parts, which are interest-related to the policy (as shown above). Secondly, based on the physical and psychological characteristics of the low-grades in primary schools, some indispensable teaching places should be established to solve the problem that some children have no easy access to school. At last, great importance should be laid on the good use of national assets, the building of boarding schools, the guarantee of pupils' safety of going to and coming back from school and the compensation of harmed interests of the farmers caused by the implementation of the policy. However, good suggestions and approaches should be put into practice conditionally, whose benefits cannot be seen in a short time. So the suggestions and approaches in this dissertation can only act as reference for policy makers.