Education in China — Secret Weapon or Ticking Time Bomb?
You may wonder why we should worry about education in China — a country with a reputation as a land of conscientious, over-worked students achieving string after string of straight As and beating themselves up over that rare, end-of-the-world A-minus. China is the home of the original tiger mom, who pushes and nags her long-suffering children to study for an extra four or five extra hours a day outside of school, in addition to oft-hated music lessons or additional English classes at the weekend. There’s plenty of well-founded criticism of the reliance of China’s education system on rote learning and the lack of focus on independent thinking, but you only have to look at the world-beating academic results of students going through the Shanghai school system to know that China’s education system is doing just fine, thank you very much.
The problem is, this is just one side of the story — the side that gets western politicians nervous and makes education reformers excited about the “China model”. The other side of the story, however, is much less promising and has the potential to hold China’s development back by decades if nothing is done.
In this post I want to look at some of the research of Prof. Scott Rozelle, Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. REAP is a research partnership between Stanford and a number of NGOs and government agencies in China, which designs new program interventions government implementation and then conducts evaluations on their success. Since 2005 REAP has carried out more than 50 projects across some of China’s poorest areas, looking at issues like health, nutrition and education; keeping children in school; and technology and human capital. Some of its findings are truly shocking and should serve as a wake-up call to China and the international community.
Professor Rozelle believes that human capital is China’s number one problem, a “ticking time bomb”.
High inequality is a massive problem for middle-income countries like China; since World War II, no country with high levels of inequality has achieved the transition to high-income status. As China’s growth slows, inequality is becoming an issue that it has to tackle head-on. If we want to predict levels of income inequality in the future, first we need to look at human capital inequality today. Along with nutrition and health, one of the most important aspects of human capital inequality is inequality in education, an increasingly serious issue for China. The gap between educational opportunities for children in China’s affluent cities and urban areas in the east of the country and those in the poorest areas of China’s rural western provinces is vast and growing.
Let’s start with university and work backwards. Out of every 100 children growing up in a poor rural area, only eight are ultimately likely to go to college, a huge contrast with the 70 percent of urban children who will attend college (80 percent in Shanghai). The odds are even worse for poor rural children if we look at their chances of getting into China’s top schools; urban children are 21 times more likely to attend an elite university than their poor rural counterparts.
There’s a similar disparity when it comes to high school education. While approximately 90 percent of children in cities and urban areas go to high school, only 37 percent of poor rural children have the same opportunity, similar numbers to Mexico in the 1980s. In terms of the share of China’s workforce that has completed secondary schooling, China already lags behind other middle-income countries, with just 24 percent in 2010, compared with 28 percent in South Africa, 31 percent in Turkey and 41 percent in Brazil in the same year. The OECD average is 74 percent.
The low quality of teaching in rural areas also increases the inequity between urban and rural, affluent and poor. A REAP study of 175 junior high schools in rural areas found that over 70 percent of all students had made zero academic progress or had even regressed in their academic abilities. Drop-out rates from rural junior highs are astonishingly high; 23 percent of rural eighth graders drop out, and this figure climbs to a shocking 31 percent among students in grade nine. This leaves us with a worrying question: what are these 13 and 14-year-olds dropping out of school now going to be doing in 2030 when they’re in their late 20s and can barely read or write?
The source of these problems, according to REAP’s research, might boil down to two basic human needs that are simply not being fulfilled for millions of rural children: health and nutrition. There is clearly plenty of room for improvement in terms of teaching, curriculum and facilities, but without tackling fundamental issues in health and nutrition, all the best teachers and state-of-the-art facilities in the world would have little positive effect.
My previous article touched briefly on the plight of millions of left-behind children. It would be a safe bet to assume that they make up the most vulnerable group of rural children. In terms of issues around safety, risk of abuse, likelihood of falling into crime and numerous other risks that children with no care giver face, then this is true. But if we look specifically at the three issues of health, nutrition and education alone, surprisingly, this assumption no longer holds; REAP has found that there is no dichotomy between left-behind children and those lucky enough to still be living with their parents. In reality, all rural children are equally vulnerable.
So, we need to improve the quality of teaching, provide nutritional school meals and ensure access to decent health services. There’s nothing revolutionary here. Something as simple as a vitamin supplement a day or a pair of glasses can transform a child’s ability to learn and therefore her future prospects. So now we know how to improve performance, reduce drop-out rates, and increase numbers attending high school. Problem solved!
Well, maybe not… The research shows that problems almost certainly start even earlier in life, before children have even started going to school. A study that tested 2,000 babies in rural Shaanxi province found that 49 percent of them were either anemic or malnourished. The same study found that 30 percent of babies from six to 12 months had low cognition or motor skills (an IQ below 90). Even more shocking is the finding that this number rose to 53 percent among toddlers between 24 and 30 months. The long-term consequences for undernourished children are extremely serious; if micro-nutrient deficiency continues beyond the baby’s 30th month, then it will have permanent, highly damaging effects on the infant’s IQ, physical and mental health, height and weight. The frightening implications of these findings, if we generalize them across the whole of China’s rural poor, are that almost 33 percent of China’s “future population”, amounting to hundreds of millions of people, could be in serious danger of becoming permanently physically and mentally disabled if nothing is done to alter the current situation.
The same study of 2,000 infants also interviewed parents about their parenting behavior, finding evidence of potentially poor parenting; only 39 percent of respondents had played with their children on the previous day, for example, and just 33 percent had read to them. Millions of poor parents from rural areas, who undoubtedly love their children, for one reason or another do not spend enough time playing or reading with their children, or building emotional bonds through physical contact and affection. Professor Rozelle suggests that, alongside malnutrition, there is a direct link between this evidence of poor parenting and slow cognitive development in infants.
A subsequent randomized control trial, carried out by REAP in collaboration with China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, studied the cognitive and motor development of 520 infants in 120 townships in a number of poor rural areas in China. Not only did this study demonstrate more clearly the links between malnutrition/poor parenting and low cognitive development, but it also succeeded in providing a potential model for improving children’s development. By ensuring that infants received good nutritional intake and also working with parents to improve parenting skills, the study found that the IQ of the average baby within the study had risen by six points in just six months.
This is China’s number one problem, according to Professor Rozelle. Forget the slowing economy; forget air pollution; forget corruption. The most serious issue facing China right now is a demographic time bomb that most people are utterly unaware of, but that could have disastrous consequences for China’s economic and social development in the coming years. For the more than 50 percent of babies with an IQ of less than 90, not only will college be out of the question when they get older, but even high school. And if high school is beyond their ability, junior high is also likely to be a challenge; this may go some way to explaining the junior high drop-out rates we saw earlier. If these findings approximately represent the situation of poor, rural Chinese children in general and if China ultimately does become a high-income, high-wage society, in few years a large proportion of these children (i.e. potentially hundreds of millions of people) will simply be unemployable and shut out of the job market, unable to support themselves or their families and unable to contribute to society.
Clearly much greater focus must be directed onto the needs of children long before they even start school. While the Chinese government has started to prioritize targeted poverty reduction in rural areas, significant gaps still exist. At the Gates Foundation we will be exploring ways to engage in China’s poverty alleviation efforts, both for China’s benefit and in order to leverage valuable lessons for the world. How we can contribute to defusing this time bomb is an area we will investigate, and as I’m sure you’ll agree, there’s not much time to waste…
Philip Nelson contributed to this article.
