There is almost a tangible pulse at Dandelion. People leave and come, come and leave. Students, volunteers and teachers tentatively arrive, leave their tiny mark on the school and then depart— often before their time—, with hardly a glance back. It’s just like a mini migrant city. Yesterday, one of my favourite students in class 7-2 left the school because his parents were moving to Shanghai for work. I was holding back tears when I heard this news, partly from shock because his departure was so abrupt, and partly because I felt terrible for him. I had absolutely no idea, and no one thought it important enough to mention it to me. He had made a deep impression on me my first day of class. While playing Two Truths and a Lie, his lie was that he was happy. It was a strange lie amidst all the other light-hearted ones, but I let it go because I didn’t want to be intrusive. Later, I found out from his classmates that my first day teaching was the day he completed his departure documentation. Callie told me that he was in tears when he came to say goodbye to his homeroom teacher, Chen Laoshi. I wish I were there to say goodbye to him, to tell him that I will miss his brilliant smile. During my talk with Chen Laoshi over lunch, she told me that such movement was normal. The top students in seventh grade(初一), for instance, would often return to their parents’ place of birth at the year’s end so they could complete middle school there and take the high school entrance exam (中考)。Without a Beijing hukou (household registration status), they are ineligible to attend good Beijing public schools. Although they are able to take the Beijing exams, they will most likely be placed into a subpar school. Back home, they will have access to much better schools and higher quality teachers. Many students, however, don’t want to return home because they’ve lived their entire lives in Beijing and would have difficulty adjusting to not only daily life back home but also the regional accents of the teachers there. These students would choose to stay at Dandelion until ninth grade, taking it one week at a time. It’s an act of resignation, exasperation even. There’s not much else they can do, especially in Beijing where limitations on migrant access to public education are the most stringent. (In smaller cities like Tianjin, restrictions are much more relaxed and migrants have greater access to public resources.) Last night, I sat up in my bed wondering, how many students are there like Wu Shiyu? Even in the single week I’ve been here, our class roster has shifted around. Last Wednesday, there were 36 students. It moved up to 37 by Friday, and now it’s once again 36. I would find it quite unbearable, to be constantly on the move, to not have a place to permanently call home. Hundreds of private schools like Dandelion have cropped up in and around urban centres to serve the children of migrant workers. These schools are often poorly regulated and produce dismal results--Dandelion being one of the exceptions. Although the Beijing government has eased access to the public schools over the years, the migrants, often underpaid and the object of discrimination, do not have the financial support required to pay the expensive fees imposed by the schools. More importantly, many migrant children are often disincentivized to attend, lamenting the marked social and intellectual discrepancies between them and their urban counterparts, and the overt discrimination from teachers and peers. Even for students who successfully graduate, the outlook is dim: constrained by socioeconomic status and familial commitments, they are unable to pursue higher education or enter the higher-end service industry. Many Dandelion graduates, for instance, continue their secondary education in vocational high schools, which make them ineligible to take the university entrance exam (the gaokao 高考)。 Issues regarding migrant education have significant implications on China’s pursuit for higher-skilled labor, especially as low-skilled labor plays a decreasing role in China’s intended shift away from an export-driven economy. I love life at Dandelion. The music, the artwork, the passion. I love the students of class 7-2. When I stand in front of the room, they look up at me expectantly and with smiles in their eyes. There’s respect, and an underlying curiosity. Over the next few weeks, I truly hope to get to know them better -- as ephemeral as my stay will be. |