ABOUTDandelion Middle School
This blog is a documentation of our experiences and thoughts during our 10 week volunteer stint at Dandelion Middle School (蒲公英中学) in Beijing's Daxing District (大兴区). Below is an explanation for why we are here and the circumstances we find ourselves in. Dandelion Middle School (grades 7-9) is a boarding school for migrant children in the southern edge of Beijing. The term migrant worker or nongmingong 农民工 refers to persons from the countryside who have unofficially entered the cities to seek employment. The reason why this is significant is because in China, a citizen’s access to social services are limited to the administrative region their household registration or hukou 户口 is linked to. As such, children of migrant laborers are not entitled to public education in the cities. This is why schools like Dandelion exist. The tens of millions of Chinese migrant children in need are (supposedly) entitled to an education by China’s compulsory education laws, which is why the state tolerates the quasi/semi-legal migrant schools. Dandelion has many similarities with other migrant schools. Its facilities are fairly Spartan (the actual campus itself used to be an abandoned light switch factory) but this is not the school’s main challenge. Dandelion’s student body is highly divergent in age and educational achievement, since many migrant children have multi-year gaps in their education for various reasons. Teacher and student turnover can reach double digit percentages within a single semester. Teachers will leave to pursue better jobs as the pay and prestige at migrant schools is not high. Students will drop out for many reasons: some have given up on being able to pass the difficult high school entrance examination (zhongkao 中考), others follow their parents as they hop from city to city in search of work, and many of the brightest students go back to their homes in the country side*. Despite these challenges, the Dandelion schools has a track record of academic performance on par or better than some Beijing public middle schools. For this reason, officials from the ministry of education often come to visit, in the hopes of replicating Dandelion’s success. The story of Dandelion middle school is one of success in the face of adversity. It will be interesting to learn more about it. *Chinese regulations state that one can only register for the college entrance examination in the place of their hukou registration. This and the widely diverging test materials and curriculum in different Chinese provinces and municipalities also makes it more sensible for college bound students to return home. Background information: The hukou system and rural residents The hukou system as we know it is attributed to the first chancellor of the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 AD), Xiao He (萧何), who wrote the system into the Nine Basic Laws of Han. The basic premise of the hukou was to control internal population movements and to make censuses, conscription, and tax collection easier by tying households to a geographic location. Anyone familiar with the Soviet Propiska system, the Japanese Koseki, or the South Korean Hoju will be familiar with the concept. The basic premise of exerting control over a populace remained in place even after the Communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949. Under Maoist rule, holders of urban hukou would receive subsidized healthcare, food rations, welfare benefits, access to public education, and a host of other government benefits. The disparity between urban and rural hukou holders was most aptly demonstrated during the Great Leap Forward when peasants attempting to beg for food in the cities were turned away and starved to death. Since Mao’s death and the economic liberalization of the Chinese market, hundreds of millions of peasants flooded into the cities to work in the factories and construction teams that fueled China’s meteoric economic growth. Many have commented that this influx of rural laborers who are not entitled to social benefits such as education or healthcare is in effect a labor subsidy for China’s vast state owned enterprises. The inequality and substandard conditions the hukou system forces on rural migrants has elicited resistance in the form of riots or refusal to leave the countryside, resulting in persistent labor shortages in many Chinese cities. In response to the unrest and labor shortages, the Chinese government announced in late 2013 that it would soon abolish the hukou system entirely in the near future. This would effectively give all migrant children access to public education. Thus, the existence of schools such as Dandelion is thus in doubt, perhaps for the betterment of Chinese society. However, many China commentators have noted that the reluctance of urban residents to pay for migrant childrens’ educations and the sky-high debt burdens of China’s local governments mean that an implementation of hukou reform will be slow and painful. For the immediate future, schools such as Dandelion still have a vital role to play in Chinese society. Sources http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4424944.stm http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2013/12/17/china-to-abolish-hukou-system.html This website is made and run entirely by the students of DukeEngage Beijing 2014. |