(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-15 10:43

Education Minister Zhou Ji presented a rather rosy picture of public education in China at a press conference on Friday. That assessment was more or less at odds with the general perception.

Education, from the pre-school to the college level, has been a subject of public discontent for years. And there is no sign of the situation changing in the years to come.

We have little ground to challenge Minister Zhou's claims because he spent most of the time hovering at the macro level, where one has little to complain about. There is no denying lots of changes have taken place over the past few years, ranging from compulsory education to life on college campuses. Most of these changes have created new opportunities for students.

Exempting rural kids from school fees, which are perhaps negligible by urban standards but backbreaking for some extremely poor rural households, will undoubtedly help make compulsory education true to its name. The continuous expansion of college enrollment, despite the concerns about sliding teaching quality, will clearly create new opportunities for people to expand their horizons in the classroom.

However, all this good news should not blind us to the less-than-inspiring situation closer to the ground. You may call them minor, but we face an abundance of troubles.

The Education Minister told us quite a lot about government efforts to narrow the gap between rural and urban areas, saying the countryside is getting more from State coffers than cities do. Which is exactly what we need.

But even that is not enough when we consider the size of the gap, a result of decades of near neglect.

Zhou was right in saying qualified teachers are essential when it comes to guaranteeing the quality of education. To deal with the historical imbalance between rural and urban schools, we have to first make sure rural schools have access to equally excellent human resources.

It would be wrong to assume all teaching positions are unappealing. But we cannot deny that few people are interested in working in the countryside. Few graduates, including those who have trained to be teachers, are willing to teach in rural schools.

Rhetoric about fairness will do nothing to help students in the countryside prepare for lives in which they can compete for jobs on an equal footing with their urban peers.