Living conditions of children in western China.

Recently, CCTV reported the phenomenon of "small dining table" for students in mountainous areas of Guizhou. Education in the western region has always been a big problem. Although it is often mentioned by the media, it has not been well solved, and often old problems have not been solved, and new problems have come.

The significance of education to the development of a country or a region is self-evident, but the present situation of education in western China is really worrying. Take my hometown of Gansu Province as an example. A few years ago, the government, the Education Bureau and schools invested heavily in building school buildings. The teaching building is getting bigger and bigger. However, in recent years, all localities have begun to merge schools. The reason is that family planning makes a family have only one child, and the number of students drops sharply. Take the primary school in our village as an example. Six or seven years ago, there were at least 30 students in each class, but now there are only a few to a dozen students in each class.

From this perspective, it is necessary to merge schools, in order to integrate educational resources, reduce management costs and strengthen teaching management. It is estimated that children in mountainous areas of Guizhou need to walk for up to three hours to go to school. However, the problem is that in these areas, the hardware facilities such as restaurants, dormitories and teaching buildings have obviously failed to keep up and can not meet the needs of students. Why are you doing this? Children in my hometown are facing such problems now. Children between the ages of seven or eight and twelve or thirteen do not have the ability to take care of themselves completely, but they have to go to school by mountain road since childhood. The nearest one takes two or three hours to walk, and the far one takes a bus. They have lived in school since childhood, so food, housing, hygiene and other issues are worrying.

Compulsory education in the western region is now free, which is of course a good policy. However, after the merger, even in places where students' accommodation has been solved, students' living expenses are a lot of money for parents. Parents go out to work, and the lives of the elderly and children are unattended; If you don't go out to work, you can basically live on the meager income of farming. In addition, most of the infrastructure and road traffic in the western region are underdeveloped, and it is often the case that children can't get a taxi even if they have money. In fact, many parents let their children drop out of school because they are far away and are not worried that their children are too young to live on campus, or they can't afford the living expenses for their children to live on campus, which has caused a new phenomenon of dropping out of school.

In view of these problems, I think it may be better to change these dilemmas from the following aspects:

1. When a school is merged, it should be comprehensively evaluated. Whether to merge or not should be decided according to the local actual situation. After all, education is a service, and whether it is convenient for students to go to school is an important reference. Moreover, the original school building already exists, what's more, it was a mistake in decision-making, but since it already exists, there is no need to rush to integrate resources, and it is not too late to wait until the school building that needs to be merged is completed.

2. Highway construction in remote areas in the west needs further improvement. Especially in areas with more geological disasters such as Guizhou and Sichuan, it is necessary to build high-quality and wide-coverage highway facilities.

3. Increase the amount of aid for poor students, expand the area of aid, and let more children afford to go to school and study hard. We should not only solve their tuition fees, but also solve the living expenses of students with special difficulties.

4. Raise the salaries of teachers in the western region and encourage more talents to serve in the western region with high salaries. The existing education system is a process in which social elites are concentrated in cities, and the loss of rural elites is a very important reason for the slow development of rural areas. At present, the plan of college students going to the grassroots to exercise and free normal students proposed by the state can not completely solve the dilemma of lacking a large number of excellent teachers in the western region. If China's education is a competitive market, private schools will certainly improve teachers' salaries to attract outstanding teachers, thus attracting more students and improving their competitiveness. However, China's current education is almost completely monopolized by the state, especially primary and secondary education, which determines that we can't solve these problems through the market mechanism, so the state must have similar incentive mechanisms to make up for it.

Of course, these measures are far from solving the problem. To fundamentally solve the problem of children going to school in the west, there must be institutional reform. China is developing faster and faster, but there are more and more problems. The gap between the rich and the poor in the east and west is a huge problem. To get rid of poverty and become rich in the west, education must go first.