New Oriental makes push for rural education

Yu Minhong, founder of English-language training giant New Oriental Education and Technology Group, hopes to do more to help children in rural areas to get better education.

"This year, I plan to return to a rural high school in a poverty-stricken area to work as an honorary principal. I want to bring high-quality resources to such schools, so children in rural areas who may have no hope for high-quality education will one day enter a prestigious university in China or other countries," Yu said at the ASU GSV Summit 2019 in San Diego.

China has invested a great deal of  money in education over 40 years of reform and opening-up, dozens of times more than it used to be. However, the country still faces the problem of education imbalances, he said.

"Children in rural and mountainous areas are unable to receive the same quality education as children in urban areas, yet with the development of technology such as remote learning and dual teacher, we can do a lot of things in improving education equality in China."

He believes the real development of China's future must be the development of education equality through technology, so children in every corner can receive the best quality education in China, so every child has the opportunity to enter the best universities in the world.

The son of a farmer in East China's Jiangsu province, Yu failed the gaokao — the national college entrance exam — twice because of low scores in English. However, he was finally accepted by the prestigious Peking University in 1980 and later became a teacher there.

After quitting Peking University in 1991 he opened an English school, which later became one of the largest English-language training institutions in China.