Hou Changliang, 36, was a volunteer teacher from Hunan. In 2011, he took part in a volunteer program . He then taught in rural schools in Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan for 11 years.

What’s the best way to help rural students? If you ask Hou, he would say it’s not buying new books or desks, but a change of mindset .

Learning to love their hometown

Hou thinks it’s important for rural students to understand and love their hometown. Only in this way will they care about its future and that of its people, he said.

 He told us that he could feel his students’ interest in city life. They once asked him what amusement parks or subways were. Hou then realized that textbooks talk much about city life and rarely include scenes of rural life. 

“As rural students look up to city life shown in textbooks, they may just want to go away from home,” he said. “They need to leave the mountains and see a larger world, but they are also the hope of rural areas.”

So he sometimes showed pictures of rural life in class. He also turned farming work such as collecting bamboo shoots into topics for writing tasks and math problems. He wanted the young people to feel proud of their villages.

Changing parents’ minds

For two years, Hou said he had to fight the drop-out rate of his students in Dahua, Guangxi, reported CGTN. People there often didn’t want their children to go on with their studies, especially girls. When they were old enough, they would be brought to big cities to work. Once Hou had to spend hours talking a girl’s father into letting her finish nine years of free compulsory education . Luckily, in recent years, the drop-out rate has decreased greatly, according to Hou.

 Helpful programs

 ●The volunteer program that Hou took part in is run by the Communist Youth League of China and the Ministry of Education. It started in 2003, calling for graduates to work as volunteers in western areas. More than 370,000 graduates have joined the program in the past 18 years, reported China News.

 ●In August 2021, China brought out a notice. It said that starting from 2021, about 10,000 students will be trained each year to become teachers in underdeveloped counties .

 These students do not need to pay for their studies or daily needs, they get money for living expenses . But they need to teach at schools in underdeveloped areas for at least six years, reported China Daily.  

A parent gets a piglet from the school on Jan 6. SCREENSHOT

 Cute award

 Hou Changliang posted pictures of his everyday life with students on the video-sharing platform Douyin. The videos have drawn nearly 300,000 followers and got more than 7.3 million likes. His story has made national headlines, reported China News.

 One of the popular videos is about an unusual award . In January, Hou’s school at the Xiangyang Primary School in Zhaotong, Yunnan, awarded 20 excellent students with piglets . Hou said the piglets were from some kind-hearted men. They hope the students can study hard and help their families.

 The piglets weighed around 10 to 15 kilograms each. The students and their parents were very happy to get the piglets.

Numbers on China’s rural education

As of 2019, there were about 89,000 rural primary schools. About 25.6 million students across the country go to these schools.

More than half of the 2.9 million rural teachers across the country have a bachelor’s degree or higher. 

As a volunteer teacher, Hou got about 800 yuan every month. This had remained unchanged for the past 10 years.

This year, among the 4,402 freshmen at Peking University, 442 are from rural areas.