From Chinese Press

Preschool education in focus

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-18 08:43

Preschool education was in focus at the just concluded annual sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee with many deputies and members moving proposals to allot more funds to the once marginalized sector. But funds alone cannot be that helpful, says an article in China Youth Daily. Excerpts:

In hundreds of proposals, NPC deputies and CPPCC National Committee members appealed to include the three-year preschool education system into the compulsory education system. The National Outline for Medium- and Long-Term Educational Reform and Development (2010-2020), too, says more funds and efforts should be put into preschool teachers' training programs.

Some local governments have already moved in that direction. The Beijing municipal government, for instance, plans to spend 5 billion yuan ($760.46 billion) to build kindergartens or refurbish the existing ones.

But before allotting more funds to the preschool education sector, we should be clear about which areas and why the additional money is to be spent. Building more kindergartens blindly will not produce more and better teachers or improve the level of education.

We should draw lessons from other fields in which extra funds have been pumped in without producing real results.

As CPPCC National Committee member Liu Yan warned after coming to know that the central government plans to spend 3 billion yuan this year to strengthen preschool education in West China, we should know how the additional money will be spent: to support universities to train more preschool teachers or to build more kindergartens.

(China Daily 03/18/2011 page9)