Legislators attending the current First Session of the 10th
National People's Congress in Beijing have called for a revision of
the existing law on compulsory education.
A
total of 376 deputies to the NPC, China's top lawmaking body, have
jointly signed a motion on revising the 17-year-old law on
compulsory education. They include government officials, private
entrepreneurs, experts and scholars, as well as farmers and
workers, and constitute nearly one eighth of the total NPC
deputies.
"In my memory there has never been a motion winning so much support
from so many legislators in the NPC's history," said an NPC staffer
in charge of handling the deputies' motions on Friday.
"We all share the view that top priority should be given to
education if the Chinese nation wants to attain its long-term
development goals," said Wang Bintai, a deputy from Jiangsu
Province and one of the motion's initiators.
Statistics showed that by 2002, 90 percent of the Chinese
population had undergone nine years of compulsory education as a
result of the enforcement of the law since July 1986.
However, there are still approximately 450 counties in China where
tens of millions of people remain outside the compulsory education
scheme. Most of the counties are situated in the outlying and
underdeveloped western regions, a traditional habitat to many of
China's ethnic minorities.
Meanwhile, the recent years also witnessed a widening gap in
compulsory education development in different regions of the
country.
"In my school there are colored TV sets, slide projectors, desktop
and laptop computers and Internet connection in every classroom,
but some schools in the rural areas are housed in dilapidated
buildings with no teaching facilities but a blackboard and a piece
of chalk for each room," said NPC deputy Ren Jichang, headmaster of
a famed middle school in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang
Province.
Ren said he was also worried to see many children drop out of
school because of difficulties faced by their families. A survey
found that some 20 to 30 million teenagers in China leave schools
for this reason last year.
The revised compulsory education law should explicitly state the
liability of governments at all levels for guaranteeing adequate
funds be allocated to education, said the deputies in their
motion.
It
should also be more concerned about the "disadvantageous group of
people" in society.
(Eastday.com March 17, 2003)