Chinese Education

In one day, Wednesday, April 14, we saw the best and worst of Chinese education. In the morning, we went to the Beijing National Day School (BNDS), named for the day in 1952 when it was officially opened. The BNDS is the best of the best in Chinese Schools. It educates 5,000 of the top 6% of Chinese students. It sits on a 156,000 sq. meter campus that has the best of all educational resources, including 400 teachers. In the afternoon, we went to a migrant children's school just a few miles across town. This school educates the children of migrant laborers who have migrated to China's cities to escape the abject poverty of its rural farming villages. These migrant workers have to work 15 to 18 hours per day, mostly in construction. I know they work these kinds of hours because we have witnessed them begin work at 5 am and still be on the job at 11:30 pm! Their children are educated in buildings that in the US would be condemed as completely unsafe, let alone be used for school buildings, because there isn't room for them in the regular public schools, so individuals who want to help educate them start what we would call charter schools and they receive no funding from the government so they have to make do with whatever resources they can scrape together. This migrant school building was one of the worst physical structures I have ever been in and yet there was a very high level of instruction occurring. I think the pictures tell the story of the difference between the two schools.