Letters

Rural kids need good education

The government has allocated huge funds to bridge the education gap between urban and rural areas, and the education system in the countryside has indeed improved over the past few years. But the government needs to do more to make quality education easily accessible to all rural children.

In February, Andreas Schleicher, OECD special adviser for education, visited Qiao Tou Lian He Elementary School at Tengchong county, Yunnan province, and was impressed by the improvements in basic education in rural areas. In an essay, written for BBC Online, he has said: "In this poor neighborhood of simple houses and farmlands, it is the school rather than the shopping center that has the cleanest and most impressive building. In terms of standards, the mathematics classes seem to be at least at the same level you would see in a European classroom."