Shehuizhong Primary School is located in a traditional
residential courtyard in a Beijing suburb. The doors of the school
are always open. Dripping clothes are hung by other courtyard
residents on the lines that run between the school's basketball net
and the walls. The small compound looks more like a spider web than
a schoolyard.
When the bell rings to signal the end of class, the children
scamper into the yard. They are smiling and laughing, but the Zhang
Baogui heaves a sigh.
Zhang founded Beijing's first school for children of migrant
workers. Now, he says, the school must move yet again. "This is our
11th move since our school was set up 11 years ago," he says.
Neither school nor students, it seems, have a fixed abode.
Zhang Baogui had worked as a direct-hire teacher in a village
near Xinyang City in Henan Province for more than 15 years. Such
teachers, usually working in remote rural areas, are paid directly
by their students' families.
While he was teaching in Henan, he learned that most of his
students' parents were migrant workers in far-away cities. The
children were living with their grandparents. The kids were always
thrilled at Spring Festival, when they could go to the cities to
visit their parents. At the end of the holiday, however, they had
to return to the village because there was no place for them to
attend school in the cities.
Zhang felt sorry for the children as well as their parents.
In June of 1993, Zhang went to Beijing to conduct some research
on education needs of migrant workers' kids. He made many friends
among the workers he talked with on the trip, and all of them
begged him to set up a school. They hated being separated from
their children for such long periods.
"The children could go on with their education without me in our
village. But many migrant kids would lose their chance for
schooling without me in Beijing. So I decided to quit my job and
set up a school here," recalls Zhang. "It was more important for me
to open a migrants' school in Beijing than to transfer to the
government-run public schools," he adds.
On September 1, 1993, the first day of classes for Beijing
students, Shehuizhong Primary School held its opening ceremony.
About 18 pupils entered Zhang's shanty, set up in a refuse
dump.
A year later, Li Sumei and her husband, Yi Benyao, opened the
Xingzhi Migrant Children's Primary School in a local vegetable
field. Husband and wife had both previously worked as direct-hire
primary school teachers.
So schools for migrant workers' kids have existed --
however haphazardly -- in the capital city for a decade,
thanks to the efforts of people like Zhang Baogui and Li Sumei. But
many, many migrant children still don't have a place to go to
receive an education.
Zhang Ge, an administrator in a direct-hire university, had
never thought about establishing a primary school. But Zhang is
also a migrant worker in the capital. When his wife and child came
to Beijing in 1995, Zhang visited at least six public primary
schools around the Summer Palace. All of them charged extra fees
for non-residents, ranging from 10,000 yuan (US$1,208) to 100,000
yuan (US$12,081). One headmaster, trying to give Zhang a break,
said, "If you could donate two televisions to the school, the total
charge will be no more than 8,000 yuan (US$966)."
"I don't know how to describe what I felt at that time. When I
went back home, I saw many children, eight or nine years old,
playing in a produce market. They should be going to school, not
playing in the market. Why it is so hard for our migrant children
to go to school in the cities?" Zhang asks.
Zhang went to the Haidian District Education Commission and told
them that he wanted to establish a school for migrant children. A
sympathetic commissioner told him that it would be very difficult
for him to do such a thing, as it was technically illegal. The best
they could do for him was to promise to look the other way.
In early 1997, Zhang Ge opened his school, initially naming it
simply the Migrant Children's Primary School. Two weeks later, he
changed the name to Mingyuan Primary School. This was partially
because it was located at Yuan Mingyuan, the Old Summer
Palace, but also because Zhang wanted the children to live and
study in brightness, as the new name implied.
In 1998, the ministries of education and public security issued
temporary regulations on compulsory education for migrant children.
For the first time, local public schools would be responsible for
educating migrant children. Moreover, individuals would now legally
be allowed to open schools for these kids.
Since the new regulations were issued, schools for migrant kids
have mushroomed. The people who run them come from every walk of
life and level of education, from university graduates to
illiterates. Most were direct-hire teachers before coming to the
city to open a school. The others were peddlers, cooks,
construction workers -- migrant workers themselves who wanted
their children to have an education. According to Zhang Shouli, who
has conducted extensive research on this phenomenon, many people
are rushing into this field because they see potential for profit
in a huge market.
However, Shi Bonian, a professor from the China Youth University
for Political Science who is studying the issue of migrant
children, feels that this is not a bad thing. "We shouldn't be too
concerned about the motives of the schools' operators. It is
inconceivable that the public schools will be able to accept all
the migrant children. These small operators are helping thousands
of children to attend school."
(China.org.cn by Wu Nanlan, March 13, 2004)