Bringing the best brains to rural schools

An NGO is helping to overcome a shortage of skilled teachers in some of China's most isolated areas, as Li Lei reports.

In the past decade, a nonprofit organization has been trying to reverse an imbalance in the quality of education provided in urban and rural areas. Since 2008, Teach for China has been sending graduate volunteers from some of the country's top universities to teach in remote villages and address a shortage of talented teachers. The program is now beginning to reap real rewards.

When He Liu arrived at the middle school in Dazhai village, Yunnan province, seven years ago, the local children had never heard of Beethoven, Chopin or other composers, and often looked confused when their new teacher played a nocturne in class or showed them DVDs of The Phantom of the Opera. For the students, anything from outside their isolated village was entirely unknown, and therefore hard to comprehend.