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China's rural areas are disappearing rapidly, but few people have noticed another reality that accompanies this: rural primary schools are also disappearing in large numbers.

Today, rural schools are experiencing a new wave of closures and mergers. According to data released by the Ministry of Education, nearly 80,000 primary schools disappeared in my country in the decade from 2012 to 2022, a drop of 35%. Most of them are small and micro schools, represented by rural primary schools.

However, as the nerve endings of Chinese education, the existence of rural primary schools is necessary. Compared with standardized, test-oriented large schools in cities, village primary schools with smaller populations are sometimes more likely to become the forefront of educational exploration. For example, in rural primary schools in Jinyun County, Zhejiang Province, an educational reform experiment was conducted to oppose involution, respect individuality, and take root in the countryside. It was later called the "Jinyun Model" in the industry. This gave some education experts hope. It caught up with the era of "double reduction". At one time, more than a dozen rural primary schools joined in. A possibility of transcending traditional test-oriented education seemed to have really emerged.

The experts who came to investigate at that time had two puzzles: first, why can so many rural primary schools in Jinyun see such a vigorous and upward vitality? Second, why can all the schools here have their own characteristics and no two schools are exactly the same?

But now, this education reform is facing new difficulties. On a larger scale, a new era of involution is coming. And this is precisely the part that a county-level anti-involution reform experiment cannot resist - the number of college entrance examination candidates has repeatedly hit new highs, academic qualifications are becoming more and more competitive, and workplace competition is becoming more and more fierce... "The whole country is in a state of competition, and this cannot be blamed on the education system." Zhao Hongzhi, former director of the Rural Center of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, said, "I have looked for a lot in China, but I can't find (a second Jinyun), so I can only persist in this way."

Seven years after the experiment began, People came to Jinyun with questions, trying to figure out the whole picture of the matter - among more than a thousand counties in the country, why did Jinyun alone see this education reform? What process did it go through, and what kind of reality did it fight against? Where did the reform finally slide to? Has the spark of the Jinyun model been completely extinguished? How did it affect the lives of the participants?

Text｜Yi Fangxing

Editor:osprey

Picture｜(Unless otherwise specified) Yi Fangxing

School Gate

You won't find another primary school gate like this one in China.

In Zhang Village, Jinyun County, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province, this school gate is located in the mountains. You have to drive nearly an hour from Jinyun, passing through several winding mountain roads, to see it. In Lishui, Zhang Village is not a famous village, and there is no big industry. Zhang Village Primary School is not a famous primary school either. As the village gradually disappears, it is also in danger - the entire school has only 64 students, and there will be even fewer in the future.

No matter how you look at it, you can't imagine that there would be such a school gate here:

It is made of bamboo, about ten meters high, like two large umbrellas, and looks like some kind of art installation from a distance. When you get closer and take a closer look, you will find that the umbrella handles are made of three large bundles of bamboo as thick as bowls, and the umbrella surface looks like two huge leaves of tea. Bamboo and tea are both specialties of Zhang Village. At the school gate, there is a small river about ten meters wide. When the breeze blows, the wind chimes hanging on the school gate hit and shake, and the sound of water and wind chimes interweave, becoming the background sound of entering the school gate.

The school gate is not the only special thing. The whole school is painted light green. There are no photos of school leaders or publicity boards of advanced deeds. When you walk downstairs of the teaching building, you will see a huge five-meter-high smiley wall with the smiley faces of 64 children in the school. Three years ago, there were 120 smiley faces painted here, but now there are only half of them. In the middle of the smiley wall is a sentence: It takes the power of a village to raise a child.

The school is not big, there is no football field, no plastic running track, but there are sheep pens, chicken pens... These are small animals raised by students, commonly known as "class pets". The school and the village share a large auditorium, in which are placed original musical instruments developed by students, such as a zither made of five bamboos of different thicknesses and lengths, which can produce five different sounds when struck. Students call it a "cannon".

It is different from any primary school I have ever seen. Zhangcun Primary School is a typical case in the anti-involution education reform experiment in Jinyun County that started in 2017. Its new school gate story is also a microcosm of the entire education reform experiment.

The construction of this school gate is related to a choice made by the then principal Ma Xinfei. In 2019, in Jinyun, 37-year-old Ma Xinfei faced a life choice: to be a music teacher in a vocational high school or to be the principal of a rural school.

In the end, he chose to go to a village primary school, "The city doesn't have the values ​​I want." Ma Xinfei grew up in the village, and judging from his academic performance, he was not considered an "excellent child." In the third grade, his parents sent him to a local boarding school. The principal of that school had worked in a theater troupe, and in order to give the students something to do, he organized them to learn music. Among the many instruments, Ma Xinfei chose the erhu.

This choice affected Ma Xinfei's life. Although his academic performance was not good, he soon found that he could learn the erhu very quickly. He could learn a piece that others had to practice for two months in half a month. There was a big stone in front of his house, and his father asked him to sit on the stone and play the erhu, which won praise from many villagers. In the end, even weddings and funerals in the village would invite him to participate. "My father was very proud at that time, thinking that his son would definitely have food to eat in the future." The place where a person first finds his self-worth can often affect his life.

When Ma Xinfei was the principal for the first time, he set a principle for himself: solve a problem when you find one. The original Zhangcun Primary School was no different from other primary schools. It had a closed iron gate. "This school gate was the place where I felt uncomfortable on the first day I went there."

Wu Liming, then deputy director of the Jinyun County Education Bureau, also recalled that Ma Xinfei came to him specifically about the school gate. "(Ma Xinfei) said that the township wanted to build a beautiful village and wanted to build a school gate for the primary school. I said no, let the township build it for you, it's better for you to design it yourself, this way you can achieve the effect you want."

Ma Xinfei later made a decision: "This school belongs to the children, and I want to leave all the designs to the children."

So, at the end of 2019, he assigned an assignment to students to collect photos of school gates around the world. In school, he used these assignments to organize a "World School Gate Exhibition" and placed them around the playground. "At this time, I found that the children's attention was still focused on whether the gate was beautiful, and not on the meaning of the gate itself." So, he took the students to the village to see various gates, so that the students could understand the role and significance of the gate.

This formed a year-long series of courses. Students submitted a variety of design drawings. Some were more practical, with a thermometer installed on the door; some were more imaginative, with Ultraman painted on the door; and some placed jellyfish on the door, explaining that this would absorb the aura of nature... The six grades of the school were responsible for different fields, with grades one and two learning design, grades three and four learning construction, and grades five and six learning to make bidding documents.

This is exactly the "project-based learning" model that has been widely promoted in the Jinyun education reform experiment. Project-Based Learning (PBL) is a student-centered teaching method that promotes multidisciplinary learning by allowing students to participate in specific, real-world problem-solving projects. In contrast, many places have been using the traditional teaching model of teachers directly imparting knowledge.

It is not enough to just have an idea, you also need to find a professional designer. With the help of Luo Xiaohong, the head of Zhipu Charity Foundation at that time, Hangzhou designer Gao Wei participated in this project. At first, Gao Wei's team was reluctant to build a school gate for the rural primary school. "But Gao Wei got excited after talking to the children. In the end, he waived the design fee and brought all the company employees here to experience it. Gao Wei also said something that touched me. He said that an excellent designer should start as an excellent empathizer. He did not regard this as a commercial project, but as a real work." Wu Liming said.

Bamboo stood out among the choices of building materials. Zhang Village is rich in bamboo, which has been used to make paper since the Ming Dynasty. The local bamboo can grow as thick as a bowl. The villagers have bamboo utensils at home, and the children are also familiar with bamboo.

Under the guidance of the course, students began to think about the details of building the school gate. Some students said that they hoped the school gate would be in the shape of a leaf; some students said that they hoped they could see the mountains and rivers outside through the school gate; and some students hoped that their family members could take a short rest under the school gate when they came to pick them up after school, and they could take shelter from the rain when waiting... In the end, this school gate brought together the wishes of the students.

With the design, money was a big problem. "At that time, I took the design drawings to ask a construction company in Hangzhou. The market price quoted was 870,000 yuan, but who would be willing to spend so much money to build a school gate in such a corner? The government would not agree either," said Ma Xinfei. But he did not give up. He told the construction company stories and school projects, and asked them to participate in charity. "Finally, I found a company and negotiated the construction fee from 870,000 yuan to 380,000 yuan. Later, I also won the support of the county education fund."

When the school gate was built, the whole village participated. Some parents drove tractors, and some parents worked on cement. "This school gate is a work that has gathered the whole school's teachers and students, and even the whole village, and took two years to build."

After the school gate was built, all 128 students left their handprints on the small platform on the second floor of the school gate. The wind chimes were also made by the students. When the mountain breeze blows, the wind chimes make crisp sounds. A student who participated in the construction of the school gate and is now in junior high school asked Ma Xinfei: "When I am 80 years old, can I come back to see this school gate?"

origin

If rural primary schools want to make such an attempt, they must have the support of local education authorities.

Today, Wu Liming, the deputy director of the county education bureau who was the main promoter of education reform at the time, is 57 years old. He has retired to the second line and has been away from the education department for two years. He will retire in three years. If you see him now, it is difficult to feel the shadow of an official from him. He wears a wrinkled gray-blue polo shirt and a pair of black cloth shoes. He said that cloth shoes are comfortable to wear and cost 25 yuan a pair. Jinyun is rich in bayberries. When he takes them out to eat, he will emphasize, "No need to wash them, the natural bayberries are very sweet. Although there are worms in them, it doesn't matter."

He admires nature. Just like when he eats bayberry, he accepts eating bugs. The same is true for education. He opposes blindly taking exams and advocates respecting children's nature. Almost everyone who knows him uses the word "idealism" to evaluate him. Some people respect him, some people gently remind him that he is "too idealistic", and some people simply say that he is an "incurable idealist". He also has a negative evaluation of himself: "I am a pessimistic and hopeless idealist."

Now, although he has retired to the second line, he still wants to continue to practice some ideas. At noon on July 2, the weather was 40 degrees. He drove to find two old friends, trying to persuade them to participate in the development of a set of music courses - take children into real mountains and fields, listen to the sounds of nature, and then express them with their own simple voices, and learn music in this personalized way. In a sense, this is also a continuation of Jinyun's education reform experiment, but it is more specific. While driving, he talked about the education reform in recent years, holding the steering wheel with his left hand and waving his right hand excitedly in the car, "It was really an interesting time."

Seven years ago, this educational reform experiment was started by a "Xianglin Sao"-style mobilization meeting organized by him. At that time, he had been the deputy director for seven years and held the power of personnel. "If I wanted to get promoted, I would not dare to do this. This would definitely attract opposition from most people, but I don't care about failure."

At that time, he felt that "it would be too late if he didn't do something." In order to avoid any regrets, he called together some familiar colleagues, principals, and teachers, a total of more than 30 people, and held a mobilization meeting in the conference room. He specially made four PPTs to tell the people present about his educational philosophy - "Three Noes."

To this day, Wu Liming still likes to summarize her philosophy with numbers, such as "three no's" and "three integrations". The three no's refer to no substitution, no utilitarianism, and no charity. In simple terms, superiors do not make decisions on behalf of schools, adults do not make decisions on behalf of children, and teachers and students are not evaluated with utilitarian goals, so as to stimulate children's interests and talents and allow them to grow independently and individually.

Wu Liming spoke for a full hour in the conference room. Then, he found a Chengbei primary school with more than 100 students in the urban-rural fringe area as an experimental area, calling on those who were willing to volunteer to go to the school every Tuesday to provide interesting courses for the children. "Whether you want to participate or not has nothing to do with my position, it only has to do with the concept. If everyone is interested, let's do it together."

A week later, more than a dozen people signed up, and every Tuesday, these volunteers went to Chengbei Primary School. "We didn't know what to do specifically, so we just followed the principle of 'three no's' and figured it out on our own. It was tortuous, but also fun."

Yin Yiqing, 30, was a science teacher among the volunteers at the time. He was also the vice principal of another primary school, doing some teaching related to science and technology competitions. Since he was a child, he liked to make things by himself. He was a person with many ideas and a childlike heart. When he was a volunteer, there was a class to learn about bridges. He suddenly had an idea and found dozens of wooden strips and asked the children to build a bridge by assembling them to reach a strength that people could stand on. After teaching the most basic principles, he let the children play on their own. That time, he saw the students' creativity with his own eyes. "I didn't give any instructions. In the end, the strongest bridge built by the students had a span of one meter and could accommodate 11 students."

In this way, various courses were developed one after another, including art, basketball, music, martial arts, and performance... In a primary school in the urban-rural fringe area with more than 100 students, more than a dozen student clubs emerged within a few months.

But Wu Liming did not expect that this pilot would lead to another result.

On the first New Year's Day after the experiment began, the principal of Chengbei Primary School invited the leaders of the county education bureau to watch a performance. The performance was held in the village's assembly hall. More than 100 students from the school performed on stage. The science group performed a volcanic eruption model, the art group performed a fashion show, and students performed fancy basketball and dance. The performance was a success in the secular sense. The stage was lively and the parents in the audience were also very satisfied. The one-year education reform experiment had a visible result, and it can be said that "everyone is happy."

But Wu Liming also noticed that some children were unwilling to perform but were forced to go on stage by the teachers. "A good state must be active, and it must be something that children want to play by themselves and can enjoy." Not only that, "many programs on the scene, such as songs, are designed to satisfy adults' expression, not what children like."

He was disgusted by this kind of formalistic "performance report". As a result, the relevant leaders of Chengbei Primary School thanked him specially: "Director Wu, you brought so many people and spent so much time and energy to help me. I must show you the results. This year, our school must win a second prize or above in the county-level competition."

"I felt very painful after hearing that." Wu Liming exploded that time, "I have never been good at criticizing people. I always encourage them. But if you do this again, I will quit and I will not manage you in your school anymore."

This practice taught Wu Liming a lesson. "I was the one who transferred her from a more remote school to this school. She said that I listened to Director Wu so much, but it was hard for her to accept being criticized like this. After this incident, I reflected that I was too controlling. If the other party does not understand what you want to do, just doing it superficially will not work."

After that, the intervention of the county education bureau began to decrease, and educational reform entered a new stage in which rural school principals explored their own ideas.

Local materials

Wu Liming was also worried about whether the exploration would be successful, because whether in terms of material resources, teaching staff, or the quality of students, the practical difficulties faced by principals of rural schools are far greater than those of schools in urban areas.

Yin Yiqing is a dark-skinned principal. Jinyun is located in the mountainous area of ​​southern Zhejiang, with lots of sunshine. Yin Yiqing often likes to take students to play outdoors, and gradually got tanned. After he had a sudden inspiration in Chengbei Primary School and taught a class on building a bridge with wooden strips, he also introduced this class to his own Ningbi Primary School.

He sawed 200 wooden strips, each about one meter long, and placed them all on the school playground. There was a table tennis table on the playground, and these wooden strips were placed under the table, so it didn't matter if it rained. "This pile of wooden strips cost the school about 200 yuan, and it's not disposable, it can be used for a long time. The first thing we thought of at the beginning was to save money, and the second was to use the materials around us, so that all students can have the opportunity to participate."

Ningbi Primary School has more than 100 students, and each grade has only one class, which is the current situation of most rural primary schools. At first, the sixth graders would use these wooden strips to build bridges during recess. Gradually, more and more children participated, and finally even the second graders could understand and build bridges. With the children's imagination, no two bridges are exactly the same. "And they don't fight with wooden strips, which makes me very happy."

This is not the end of the bridge course. The village where Ningbi Primary School is located has a well-developed water system and many bridges. "There are about a dozen bridges near us. At that time, our class was divided into two groups. I took the children to measure each bridge in the village. At the beginning, I didn't even provide a tape measure, so I asked them to find a way to measure it themselves. In the end, the children came up with a way to measure the length of the bridge by holding hands."

The oldest bridge in the village is a stone arch bridge with several decades of history. After measuring it on site, the students found that the bridge was the filming location of the 1960s movie "Phoenix Song". This past event was recorded in very small words beside the bridge. "In the past, we never looked at it when we passed by it. Now, after passing by it that time, the students will pay attention to the bridges around them."

This series of courses together constitutes a comprehensive practical activity called "Bridges in Hometown", which also echoes the course on "Bridge Building" in the textbook. In the past, students sat in the classroom to learn about bridges, but now they can experience the bridges in person.

A similar story also occurred at Gongqian Primary School in Jinyun County.

When Wu Liming found Zhao Weijin, Zhao Weijin was still the vice principal of another school. He was in charge of political and educational work in the school for twelve years and was nicknamed "Yama King" by the students. The students were afraid of him but did not hate him. "To sum up my political and educational career in one sentence, my car has never been scratched and my motorcycle has never been punctured." Since Jinyun has a rule that vice principals must be transferred after 12 years, Wu Liming asked him if he was willing to go to the Micro-School Alliance to try to make some educational reforms. At the same time, he also talked about his own set of educational ideas like Xianglin Sao.

After hearing this, Zhao Weijin couldn't sleep. He studied fine arts. "When I was in junior high school, I wanted to do something, such as calligraphy training. If the principal didn't agree, it wouldn't work. Now I'm at least the boss." He has already thought about the general direction, which is to explore new rural education concepts and educate children from an artistic perspective.

But he had no idea how to do it as a first-time principal. Until he actually walked into the rural school. "Others might ignore it, but I studied art, and I saw that the school was surrounded by rural buildings. There were many kinds of walls, including yellow mud walls, brick walls, red bricks, blue bricks, and stone walls made of stones... Aren't all the materials for rural buildings here?"

He then made rural architecture a course and took the children to explore the countryside. From the building materials, such as a tile from decades ago, to a stone slab from hundreds of years ago, to the history of old houses in the Ming and Qing dynasties, he built a rural architecture museum with the students, and then asked the students to explore the stories of the people and families in each old house. This process was preserved in the form of pictures, texts, and videos.

"I have agreed with the village secretary that if it is completed, the architectural map drawn by the students should be placed at the entrance of the village as a tourist guide." Thus, the first village map in the history of Gongqian Village appeared, and it was hand-drawn by elementary school students.

During these educational explorations, teachers' mindsets are also changing.

Chen Lixia is the Chinese teacher at Ningbi Primary School. She was a teacher at a primary school in the town before, and because she had been in the original school for more than 12 years, she needed to move. The reason she chose to go to Ningbi Primary School was purely because it was close.

"To be honest, I used to look down on this kind of village primary school. The school in my town had more than 40 classes and more than 100 teachers alone. When I came here, I always felt that this school only had a dozen teachers and a hundred students. The scale was completely incomparable." But after arriving at Ningbi Primary School in 2021, she was shocked by the rich connotation of Ningbi Primary School.

"These are all things I have never seen before," said Chen Lixia.

This year is the fourth year that Yin Yiqing has been developing various courses at school. He developed courses with the main goal of saving money. For example, in order to teach children to learn about "towers", he found two boxes of playing cards sent by Wu Liming, and spent 200 yuan to buy 8,000 paper cups, which he distributed to students, and used playing cards and paper cups to build towers; there was also a physical education class that taught round-trip running. Yin Yiqing came up with a way to combine chess, asking students to bring colorful washbasins as chess pieces and run to the finish line to play chess. He encouraged students to use their brains to solve problems, such as taking a pile of waste materials and asking students to build a small car that can carry people and run to the finish line. So, he really saw the girls in the class sawing wooden strips with a saw. The students also gave him a surprise in the end, "When we were studying at the normal school, we learned to use balloons or rubber bands to power the car, but the students came up with the idea of ​​using the elastic deformation of bamboo to realize the movement of the car."

What impressed Chen Lixia the most was the rock climbing wall. This rock climbing wall, which is about ten meters long, cost only more than 200 yuan. After buying some rock climbing bricks, the principal Yin Yiqing and the office director spent an afternoon nailing the rock climbing points on an empty wall of the school. As a result, their primary school became the only school in the area with a rock climbing wall.

The students in Chen Lixia's class love rock climbing. Each grade in the school takes turns to use the rock climbing wall. When it is their turn, the students will ask Teacher Chen to time it with their mobile phones. There is a second-grade girl named Lele. She usually has average grades and is slower than other students. But in the rock climbing competition held by the class, she won the first place and received the certificate of "King of Rock Climbing".

"She was like a little monkey, moving her hands and feet alternately without any sluggishness, and crawled from the beginning to the end very smoothly, in just 15 seconds, and all the other classmates applauded her at the time," said Chen Lixia. She also found that Lele's academic performance was better than before because of her confidence.

Along with the attempts of various project-based courses in these rural schools, a small and micro school alliance was formed in rural primary schools in Jinyun from 2017 to 2022. Every once in a while, teachers in the alliance will have a gathering to exchange ideas on reform and innovation, which is the origin of the "Jinyun Model".

Zhao Weijun remembers that the small and micro schools have gathered five or six times in total, with each district taking turns to be the host and share experiences. "For example, this month we went to Huzhen, next month we went to Panxi, and the month after that we went to Xinjian... Director Wu's biggest role in this matter was to influence the ideas of a group of principals."

When it was Zhao Weijin's turn to be the principal, he talked about "school personality". It was his second year as principal, and the "Rural Architecture Museum" course project had been developed. "I said at the time that I seemed to be on to something." He said, "Different schools should be able to combine with local villages and discover different characteristics. Ultimately, what we want to teach students is to discover beauty."

When rural schools established such a communication mechanism, educational reform was truly expanded to the entire county. At the same time, it also echoed the requirements of the double reduction policy to reduce the burden on students. In July 2022, the 21st Century Education Research Institute and five county education bureaus jointly issued the "Jinyun Consensus." The consensus stated that "rural education must have the courage to go its own way, based on the educational ecology of small classes and small schools and natural countryside, and explore a more suitable education model for rural children. Rural education should have and can have its own look."

It is not common across the country to name a consensus after a county like this, and that was the highlight of the Jinyun education experiment.

A sharp turn for the worse

Wu Liming remembers the day when he retired to the second line, which was a few months after the release of the Jinyun Consensus. That was his twelfth year as deputy director of the Education Bureau.

Wu Liming's job change exposed an obvious vulnerability of the Jinyun model: once the main leader who promotes the project ends his term, the entire project may slide in an unpredictable direction. This phenomenon is not unique to a certain department.

For Principal Zhao Weijin, the most direct sign of the decline of the Jinyun model may be that the gatherings of the micro-enterprise alliance will no longer be held. "The last one was held in 2022, and there will be no more in 2023." Then, in the first semester of 2023, all previously developed courses were suspended. "The new view of the bureau is that doing so will affect learning. In this matter, the difference in educational philosophy between the two leaders is shown."

However, the end of Wu Liming's term is not the fundamental reason for the turning point of the entire reform. The deeper reason lies in the direction of the entire education evaluation system.

Jinyun is located in a mountainous area with little arable land. Locals describe it as "eight mountains, one river, and one field." Regarding educational philosophy, there is a "pickled mustard greens spirit" in the local area. Lao Du, chairman of the Jinyun Federation of Literary and Art Circles, said, "We don't have much vegetables here, and there's nothing to eat in winter, so we dry the vegetables into pickled mustard greens. Our pickled mustard greens are different from those in Shaoxing. Our pickled mustard greens are dried very dry to prevent them from going bad. Several generations of people grew up eating pickled mustard greens when they were in school."

Lao Du and Wu Liming have been classmates for 30 years. When they were studying, they brought pickled mustard greens with them and finally left the mountains. "We rolled up the pickled mustard greens and brought them to school. When we ate, we put the pickled mustard greens on the steamed rice and ate them like that while going to college."

In Zhejiang, Jinyun has always attached great importance to education throughout history. The local Jinyun Middle School has been ranked first in Lishui for many years as a super middle school. As a county-level middle school, even parents in Lishui City come here to send their children to study. Take 2019 as an example. The first place in liberal arts and science in Lishui that year came from Jinyun Middle School. Like other parts of the country, major high schools in Zhejiang will also rank the number of people admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University in the province. As a county-level middle school, Jinyun Middle School had 4 people admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University in 2019, and one class even had 47 people who passed the Zhejiang University score line. Before 2022, the number of people admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University in Jinyun has always been ranked among high schools in Zhejiang Province.

But by 2024, the situation had changed. The number of students admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University from Jinyun Middle School decreased. On the list of students admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University in Zhejiang Province, Jinyun fell outside the top 30. In Lishui, it was also surpassed by Lishui Middle School and Suichang Yucai Middle School. According to some local people, the reason for the decline in Jinyun's college entrance examination scores was attributed to the "anti-involution" education reform experiment.

There are more pressing issues to come. In order to balance the student population and prevent “selection of the best”, Zhejiang issued a new policy for the enrollment of ordinary high schools in 2021, prohibiting cross-regional enrollment. This means that Jinyun Middle School can only enroll students within Jinyun County and can no longer recruit high-quality students from other counties and cities in Lishui. Compared with last year, the college entrance examination results of Jinyun Middle School this year have also fallen sharply, and the school has not even released a good news report to the public.

This means that the entire Jinyun County’s strong expectations for education will ultimately come down to performance.

But the test-oriented approach that places too much emphasis on scores is exactly what Wu Liming opposes. The most powerful measure in the test-oriented education is the unified examination, which is organized throughout the county every year. "There is only one unified examination during the 9-year compulsory education period, called the high school entrance examination. Others are not allowed and are expressly prohibited. The Ministry of Education has documents, the province has documents, the city has documents, and our county has documents, but basically all regions are taking the unified examination, with a new name, called literacy test. And not only in Jinyun, but everywhere else."

"The unified examination results are actually used as KPI indicators to measure whether teachers are teaching with all their heart and whether schools are running their schools with all their heart. The most frightening thing is that this indicator will determine the promotion of the principal and the professional title evaluation of the teachers. This is typical utilitarianism, but everyone does it, and it has become the soil," said Wu Liming.

It is for this reason that Wu Liming was particularly excited when the double reduction policy began in June 2021. "I think the policy was introduced at a very timely moment. The double reduction policy requires reducing excessive homework burdens on the one hand, and reducing excessive off-campus training on the other. The essential meaning behind these two things is to reduce the excessive control of teachers and parents over children."

After implementing the "anti-involution" education experiment, Wu Liming once tried to weaken the performance indicators. This was also the fundamental reason why the principals of rural schools at that time were able to let go and explore more interesting and rural-oriented project-based courses. Once the assessment mechanism is relaxed, each principal will play to his or her strengths.

However, in the larger trend of the times, rural schools are disappearing collectively, which has become the most critical straw that broke the camel's back for the Jinyun model.

Behind this, there is both the trend of urbanization and the reality of a declining birth rate. Public data shows that from 2001, when the "closing schools and merging schools" policy was implemented, to 2020, a total of 328,672 primary schools disappeared across the country in 20 years, an average of 45 schools per day. Most of these disappeared schools were rural schools.

At the same time, in 2023, there will be 17 million primary school-age children nationwide, and four years later, this number will drop sharply to 10 million. In addition, as rural students continue to flock to county towns, a large number of rural schools will be forced to close due to lack of students. Since the state allocates education funds for schools with less than 100 students based on 100 students, when more and more "sparrow schools" are created, not only will too many teacher resources be occupied, but more education funds will also be needed.

Jinyun is no exception. Tian Xiaoxiang, who works in the teaching and research section of the county education bureau and was once the principal of a local primary school, said that in Jinyun, schools are divided into three categories according to the number of students: A, B, and C. Primary schools with more than 1,000 students are classified as Class A, those with more than 300 students are classified as Class B, and the rest are Class C, which are basically all rural primary schools.

"Last year, there were 43 primary schools in Jinyun. This year, there are 34, and next year there will be even fewer," said Tian Xiaoxiang. "The nine schools that have disappeared are all rural primary schools. They will be transformed from primary schools into teaching sites and will no longer have principals. They will gradually disappear over time. At the same time, there will be more Class A schools."

Most of the rural schools that made innovations in the Small and Micro Alliance have now disappeared and become history.

Another future

In 2023, Zhao Weijin was very unhappy when he learned that the primary school he worked for would be cancelled and changed into a teaching site. He was preparing to organize the curriculum exploration experience of the rural architecture museum and other projects in the past three years. The topic was called "How can small schools inherit the excellent local culture?" He wanted to promote such experience nationwide because he had seen the smiles of the children after participating in these courses, as well as their rediscovery and recognition of the countryside.

"Give me one or two more years, that would be enough." But he didn't have time. Next, he would be transferred to Shuangxikou Primary School as principal, another small rural school that was about to disappear.

Ma Xinfei called to encourage him: "Nine rural schools have been converted into teaching sites. Eight of the principals have become vice principals of other schools. The younger ones have been transferred to the city, but you are still the principal. This is a recognition of you by the bureau."

It took him five minutes to figure it out - "I am still in Xiaowei, and I can still do what I originally wanted to do, right?" Before the age of 40, he thought his life would be like this - responsible for political and educational work in a school, integrating into the life of the county, gradually gaining weight, and gradually becoming able to see the future decades later. But now, he starts to exercise every day, and every night he thinks about how to run a school. Sometimes he gets up in the middle of the night and writes down ideas in a notebook for fear of forgetting them. The ideal of education has changed his life.

Like Zhao Weijun, those who participated in the reform back then were all changed by the light of educational ideals.

Yin Yiqing, the principal who taught students to build wooden bridges, was transferred to a larger primary school as vice principal. The conditions of this primary school are much better than those of the rural primary school he was in. When I met him, he took me to visit the school's 3D printing activity classroom. There were more than five 3D printers in the activity room, one of which was printing. The three walls of the classroom were filled with 3D printed works. The cost of this classroom alone was 200,000 or 300,000 yuan, and the consumables cost 80 yuan for each work printed.

Yin Yiqing finally doesn't have to rack his brains like he did in the past to save money to buy materials that everyone can play with for students. But he doesn't like it here very much. "3D printing is just a skill, and what is printed is just decorations." The children in the village school used playing cards, paper cups, and waste materials to build towers and cars, which is creativity.

Ma Xinfei, who led students to do the school gate project, may be the only one among all the principals who went to a larger school to be the principal. He went to a Class B school with more than 800 students. His educational ideals have not changed. "The people we train are all the same. They all need to have emotional connections, aesthetic abilities, strong sense of social value, and good health. It's just that the resources are different. Maybe the city has aerospace models, warships, airplanes, etc., but we have rural ways of playing. We have fields, water, plants, and animals."

Ma Xinfei is a man who dares to think and act. In the new school, he led the students to raise sheep, rabbits, ducks... and even planted watermelons in the school. "It happened that there was a vice principal who knew how to plant watermelons, so I asked him to develop a project course to lead students to plant watermelons. No students knew how to plant watermelons before, but now they know. For example, when the vines grow, two main trunk seedlings must be left, and fertilizers cannot be applied randomly. He found that every time after class, there were children walking around to observe the growth of watermelons, which shows that the students are very interested."

This summer, every class had a good harvest of watermelons. The class with the most watermelons grew more than 20. "After that, there were a series of activities, such as cutting the watermelons into watermelon hats, making fruit platters, holding watermelon eating competitions, watermelon carrying competitions, etc." Finally, culture, folklore, sports, nature and other subjects were integrated together.

But there is also an obvious trend that when it comes to academic performance, almost all principals are moving towards a more moderate direction.

"After all, the current environment in China still relies on academic performance, and reality and ideals must go hand in hand." Ma Xinfei said, "The Education Bureau evaluates principals based on school performance, so I am indeed making reforms now, but I can't abandon academic performance. If I do, I think all my efforts will be wasted." In terms of training direction, he has different ideas, "I don't want to train students who study hard. I hope to train smart students. Even if they can't get good grades, we can still help them open up other paths."

This is also consistent with Ma Xinfei's own life path.

Now, Zhao Weijin, the principal of Shuangxikou Primary School, has also focused on improving grades. "If my previous school's grades were above average," Zhao Weijin pointed to the shoulder level with his hand, "then my current school's grades are right here. Some teachers don't even prepare lessons." His hand suddenly dropped to his legs.

"Since I'm here, I have to find the most important thing and break through it first, so as not to ruin the whole dish, right?" He came up with a solution and joined forces with two nearby primary schools to organize a "three-school joint research" and paid for retired teachers from famous schools to come and listen to classes and help school teachers. "We invited this retired teacher to be our chief supervisor. She was very anxious for a while because she found that the teaching quality of the school was so poor, so we asked the teachers to start from the norms of marking homework and the basics of lesson preparation."

Zhao Weijin also knew some "shortcuts", such as asking sixth graders to stay after school for self-study, or taking up some time from other courses. "As long as you work hard, your grades will go up, but doing so would go against my original intention, and I don't want to do it." At the same time, he also introduced the lively courses he had developed before to the school. For example, he developed a course on picking and selling cherries produced locally. Students went to the streets to sell cherries. One of the students who stuttered also sold several boxes. In the end, only two boxes of cherries were left out of 30 boxes, and Zhao Weijin bought these two boxes himself.

In a sense, the Jinyun education experiment has entered the "post-reform era". Judging from the new explorations of these principals, although the small and micro alliance has gradually declined, everyone is continuing the concept of the past in their own way.

Zhao Hongzhi, former director of the Rural Center of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, believes that today, there are fewer and fewer rural schools, and the scale of primary schools is getting larger and larger. This may be a period that must be experienced. "Observing primary schools around the world, the number of students must be less than 300 to have their own school characteristics. If the number of students exceeds 300, they can only be standardized. Now domestic schools are in a period of standardization because they were too non-standardized in the past. Only after going through this standardization process can we move forward."

"The reality of over-emphasis on grades is indeed impossible to eliminate, because the whole society is anxious. Parents will also ask schools for grades. I sent my child to you, but he didn't get any grades. It's not realistic for him to play like that every day. But now, the education department has begun to pay attention to this issue, and many counties and cities have also started new management systems. Because the talents we really need are not produced by tests," said Zhao Hongzhi.

Although he has left the education system, Wu Liming is still busy with education. On July 2, he met with two old colleagues. Like before, he spent about 40 minutes explaining his new music education concept. Compared with the previous larger and wider educational experiments, he now wants to start from the small things.

Kindergarten principal Chen Weifei also talked about the recent activity of letting children "listen to the rain". This made Wu Liming feel that the flame of the "Jinyun Model" seemed to have not been extinguished.

Chen Weifei prepared a raincoat for each child, and then the class teacher sent out an invitation to such an experience rain activity in the group, and it was up to parents to bring their children to participate voluntarily. In the end, more than ten children participated. Some parents who followed along in the rain were also moved by the children's closeness to nature. "Director Wu, you didn't see that day, my pants were all wet, and I fell twice, with mud all over my buttocks and knees, but I was also very happy that day, and the happy atmosphere of the children will infect you."

That day, the children wore rain boots and jumped into puddles like Peppa Pig. When water got into their rain boots, they took them off and dumped them out, then continued to look for puddles. Some children shook the trees, and the water on the trees fell down. The adults tried to avoid it, but the children raised their heads and let the rain fall on their faces. Other children used plastic buckets to collect rainwater and the small insects and snails that crawled out.

At that moment, the whole world was filled with the sound of rain and children's laughter.