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Perhaps you still have some memory of this news: At the beginning of this year, a fire broke out in a dormitory of a boarding primary school in Nanyang, Henan Province. The accident killed 13 children. They were all third-grade primary school students with an average age of only 9 years old.

Dong Shihua, vice president of the School of Education at Tongren University in Guizhou Province, has been studying the boarding system in rural primary schools since 2012. He has been following the follow-up of this news, wanting to know: if only one dormitory caught fire, why couldn't the 13 children escape? Does the school have enough life teachers? In the event of an accident, are there any teachers to provide night care for the children?

According to the Ministry of Education, in 2022, there will be more than 9.67 million primary school students in my country who are boarding, and about 9.5 million of them are rural children. Dong Shihua has calculated that despite the continuous decline in the birth rate in recent years, the boarding rate of primary school students is still rising, and it is also extending to lower grades. This is because many children flock to towns to go to school, far away from home, and have to board, but the primary schools in towns have not expanded dormitories and canteens to cope with it in advance.

This brings about a series of problems: the children are not yet able to take care of themselves completely. Apart from the basic needs of eating and sleeping, they have difficulties with many details of life such as brushing their teeth, washing their faces and doing laundry.

In Dong Shihua's opinion, the reason for this situation is that most boarding primary schools are operating based on the model of junior high schools, while ignoring the young age characteristics of primary schools. "They should be regarded as children first, and students second." Some children who enter the collective life of boarding too early live in a tense state of "fear of not being able to keep up with the pace." Without sufficient funds and staffing, it is difficult for boarding primary schools to recruit enough high-quality and young life teachers, and it is difficult for boarding children to get good care.

Although boarding has many problems, Dong Shihua said that boarding education is still the best choice for children in remote rural areas. Some energetic and thoughtful principals have explored the advantages of boarding. Overall, we still have a long way to go to make boarding children live better. Education cannot forget the life status of children. "No matter how fast or slow we go on the road of development, we must remember to take these children into consideration."

The following is compiled based on Dong Shihua’s narration and books.

Text｜Cheng Jingzhi

Editor:Populus

Picture｜Respondents provided

The number of 9.67 million

I have been paying attention to the issue of boarding for young children for many years, but I didn’t expect that what touched me most recently was such a small matter as whether the school should remove the iron guardrail.

It was a small boarding school in the northern plains. When I walked into a single dormitory, I found that the space, which was originally designed to accommodate 8 people, was occupied by 14 people at most. The bunk beds were put together in two rows on the left and right, making it very crowded. A batch of bunk beds were also cleared out of the dormitory. The teacher said at first that they were for repair, but I saw that the beds were in good condition. After asking them, they secretly told me that a fire had occurred in a boarding primary school in Nanyang. The education department was quite nervous and decided to conduct inspections at grassroots schools. They were afraid of being pointed out that it was unsafe to have too many people living there, so they moved out the bunk beds and persuaded some of the boarding students to go home first.

The bunk beds are easy to move, but the iron guardrails are difficult to remove. The dormitory building of that school has three floors, all with iron guardrails. From the outside, the students are like living in a huge "pigeon cage". These guardrails were originally welded on to prevent students from jumping off the building. However, if the iron guardrails are sealed in case of a fire, the students may not be able to escape. Grassroots teachers are discussing whether to remove the iron guardrails or not. They feel it is difficult to do.

The final solution adopted by the school was to demolish the second and third floors first, but not the first floor, even though there was no case of jumping from the first floor. It was absurd and sad, but this was the reality faced by primary boarding schools at the grassroots level.

In addition to safety issues, from a larger educational perspective, the boarding situation for young children has also been in a complicated situation in recent years.

Let me start with a number. In 2018, the Ministry of Education counted more than 10 million young children in boarding schools. By 2022, this number remained at more than 9.67 million. As you know, our birth rate is declining, and many schools have begun to be impacted by the "low birth rate". The total population of primary school age has decreased, but the number of boarding students has not decreased much. In other words, the denominator is small, but the numerator is about the same. The result of the calculation is that the student boarding rate has shown an upward trend in recent years, and it is also extending to lower grades.

The increase in the boarding rate is related to the "closing of schools and merging of schools". In the past, the people opposed the closure and merging of schools because it was inconvenient for their children to go to school, but this time, they agreed with the government's choice. There were too few students in village primary schools and teaching points, and the teaching staff could not be guaranteed. Everyone felt that it would be better to close the schools that could not be run than to maintain them.

A new round of village primary schools are quietly disappearing, and young children are pouring into towns, making many town primary schools bigger and bigger, with a student population of one to two thousand. At present, many areas are seeing the coexistence of large-scale urban primary schools and hollow rural primary schools. According to this development trend, in the future, primary schools will gradually form a basic education pattern of "one school per village" like junior high schools.

To some extent, these phenomena are in line with the current law of population change, but the problem is that when rural children go to school in town, the distance becomes longer and they have to choose to live in boarding schools. However, the primary schools in town have not expanded dormitories in advance to cope with this. It is like a heavy traffic coming before the road is widened. The extra students have to be crammed into the original buildings. Compared with many years ago, the dormitories look more beautiful, but the area for a single person has become more crowded.

In addition to funding, this situation is also caused by the fact that many local governments have no advance planning and clear layout for the number of boarding primary schools to be opened. It is not that if a school is to be closed in the second half of the year, we will first come up with a plan and quickly build dormitories. Instead, we will notify the school at short notice that it will be closed and merged with somewhere else. When the children are about to enter school, we find that the conditions of the schools that will be taken over are not mature in all aspects, so that even the simplest sleeping becomes a very difficult problem.

In the boarding primary schools I have investigated, some dormitories were not enough, so the teachers were asked to squeeze into a room with five or six people, leaving some rooms for the children to use; some primary schools did not have dedicated dormitories, so the children slept in remodeled classrooms. There was another school that was even more exaggerated. When the children moved into the dormitory, the wall was only half built. Later, the budget for repairing the wall was insufficient, so the work was stopped. It was because the parents felt that it was unsafe for their children to live like this, so some of them contributed money, and some contributed labor, and finally the wall was built.

According to the Ministry of Education, the area of ​​a single dormitory in a boarding primary school is 20 square meters, and it can accommodate up to 8 students. However, of all the boarding schools I have visited, only half of them can meet this requirement. In the data statistics I have made on 16 boarding primary schools in 6 provinces, the average number of people in each dormitory is 10.9, and the largest dormitory even has 54 students.

I remember very clearly that there was a boarding school on the bank of the Yellow River. In recent years, it has taken in students from several nearby villages. The playground, which could only accommodate about 200 people, now has to accommodate more than 700 people. Students do exercises by "marking their positions" on the ground and barely lining up, but their arms and legs still cannot stretch. The dormitories are not enough, so the school had to build a layer of board houses on the roof of the dormitory building. Students took off their shoes outside the door and went in to a large bunk bed, which saved aisle area and allowed more people to sleep.

Compared with the situation of insufficient accommodation, some urban primary schools do not even provide boarding, which has also led to a new phenomenon that more parents accompany their children to primary schools in many places. For example, this year I went to a primary school in the urban-rural fringe area of ​​Sichuan. It has a scale of more than 2,500 people, and 70 to 80 percent of the students are rural children. There is no accommodation in the school, so parents have to rent a house nearby to accompany their children to study. In theory, these children must be included in the scope of compulsory education, but the consequences of the destruction of the teaching ecology in the village and the increase in the cost of going to school in the town have become completely borne by the children's parents, that is, ordinary people.

Because there was no advance prediction of population changes, there is another phenomenon: large-scale urban boarding schools do not have enough dormitories, while small-scale schools have built dormitories but have no students.

This phenomenon often occurs in some immigrant towns. When people move down from mountainous areas, the education department rushes to apply for projects to expand dormitories and teaching buildings to prevent a possible influx of students in the future. When the project is approved, it is found that the children do not go there to study, and the original source of students is also decreasing. However, the project money has been approved, and the houses are still being repaired even if it is known that no one will live there.

A child first, a student second

I first started paying attention to the boarding system in 2012. At that time, boarding for young children was still a relatively unpopular topic because there were not many primary school students who attended boarding schools. However, my doctoral supervisor had been conducting research in the field of rural education for many years, and he predicted early on that as the policy of closing schools and merging schools was implemented nationwide, rural teaching sites continued to disappear, and the situation where young children could not go to school nearby would become more and more common.

As a result, as my tutor said, in the past 20 years, the total number of primary schools in our country has shrunk from nearly 500,000 to more than 160,000, a decrease of two-thirds. At the same time, the number of boarding primary schools has "expanded rapidly." In addition to the problem of long distances to school caused by mergers and closures, the left-behind children caused by parents working away from home, the long-term "urbanization" of the population attracted by urbanization, and the decrease in school-age children caused by the continuous decline in birth rates have jointly boosted the demand for boarding primary schools, creating a special group of nearly 10 million young boarding children today.

When running boarding primary schools, most regions focus on how to extend learning time and improve teaching quality. However, for young children, can the school take on the responsibility of taking care of their lives? Are the children happy in school, eat well, and sleep well? Whether in the past or now, these issues have not received enough attention.

For example, eating is similar to accommodation. Boarding primary schools generally have cafeterias that are not up to standard, and even have insufficient dining tables. I have seen that some boarding primary schools do not have enough tables and chairs, so students eat in batches, and it takes at least several rounds to finish a meal; some schools only have a simple cafeteria and can only make do with what they have, using unused desks as dining tables; and some schools allow students to eat outdoors. When it is time for dinner, they squat here and there on the playground. When encountering bad weather, it is like a war. Children rush with lunch boxes and hide in classrooms or dormitories.

The one that impressed me most was a boarding primary school in a central province. The school had a kitchen for cooking, but no canteen. The children usually ate on the playground, but they were most afraid of rainy days in winter. For fifth and sixth graders, the students on duty carried the food to the classroom, and for lower graders, the teachers on duty distributed the food to each person's lunch box. However, due to the low temperature and the distance between the kitchen and the classroom, the food was often not hot by the time it arrived in the classroom, and sometimes the children would have diarrhea after eating.

In recent years, although the canteen environment has improved and many boarding schools have implemented a nutritious lunch plan, the quality of meals is still not high. Some canteens have good weekly menus, but they do not actually provide meals according to the menu. For example, in the first half of this year, I went to some school canteens in the north and saw that the swill buckets were full. There were two or three dishes, accompanied by a large bowl of spicy soup. The children thought the dishes were not tasty, so they threw away the dishes and soaked the rice with the soup, or ate instant noodles and spicy food. I felt very sad. Now the living conditions are much better than in the past, but because the food is not to their taste, the children still can't eat enough. Some children told me that they would feel hungry in the middle of the night.

Apart from sleeping and eating, a big problem with boarding primary schools nowadays is that most of them are run based on the model of junior high schools, while ignoring the characteristics of young children. Especially for children in grades one to three, they should be regarded as children first, and students second. They left their parents to live in boarding schools early, and their physical and mental development is not mature yet, and they even lack basic self-care ability. If the school does not provide enough daily care, they will encounter difficulties in brushing teeth, washing face, washing clothes, drying quilts, etc.

Around 2018, I conducted a questionnaire survey of more than 50 township boarding primary schools in six provinces and found that nearly one-fifth of the children had no habit of changing clothes at school, and almost the same proportion of children often forgot to wash their feet, and 6% of children did not know how to brush their teeth. Taking a hot bath and drying quilts were considered a luxury. One child told me that the school dormitory manager not only did not arrange for the quilt to be dried, but also scolded him for making a request.

Among all the life problems, the children think that the biggest difficulty is "going to the toilet at night." Many young children have the habit of getting up at night, but because they are afraid of getting up, the toilet is too far from the dormitory, and it is cold in winter, they will wet the bed without an adult to accompany them to the toilet. When they get up the next morning, they will feel ashamed and embarrassed to tell the dormitory manager, and they have to keep it secret from their roommates. One child said that in order to prevent his roommate from finding out, he would secretly use a napkin to absorb some of the urine, then fold the quilt, press it to the position of the bedwetting, and then continue to sleep at night.

Because they are not good at taking care of themselves, many children are afraid of not being able to keep up with their peers and live in a state of tension every day. They are required to get up quickly when they hear the whistle in the morning, fold the quilt into squares, lay the towels in a line, and then rush to the classroom within the specified time. Some children can't find the front and back of their clothes in a hurry, and some can't tie their shoelaces properly. This is an age when they should be naughty, but many schools stipulate that children are not allowed to visit each other's dormitories at night, and they must go to bed immediately and quietly after turning off the lights, otherwise they will be scolded by the dormitory manager.

Our school treats these children with a sense of management, rather than a sense of service and care. What is particularly typical is that almost all boarding primary schools will formulate a "Daily Routine for Boarding Students", the words and tone of which are the same as those I saw in junior high schools, full of "adult" flavor. Young children may not understand it and can only follow the practices of older children.

On the surface, it seems that many children in boarding primary schools are in step with each other in their lives, well-behaved and impeccable. However, these originally lively and cute "little elves" have gradually turned into cautious "little adults" in their every move. You always feel that something is missing from them.

Core contradiction

In fact, the other side of strict discipline directly points to the most core contradiction in boarding primary schools - there are not enough life teachers and their quality is not high, so the orderliness of collective life can only be guaranteed through the system.

Our country does not have a unified regulation on the ratio of life teachers in boarding primary schools. Schools in each county are free to allocate them. Schools with poor conditions can just assign one person to guard the school. Schools with slightly better conditions can assign one dormitory supervisor to each floor. In the survey of more than 50 boarding primary schools as samples, I made a special calculation on the ratio of life teachers. The result is that one life teacher is responsible for an average of 63 boarding students, and another 10% of them have to take care of more than 100 students.

What results will this lead to? For example, I took a graduate student to a boarding primary school in Guangxi for research. The graduate student made friends with a child, and the child told him that his lunch box had been lost for three days and he didn't dare to tell the teacher. The life teachers were understaffed, and no one noticed that the child had no lunch box and had been eating instant noodles and snacks for several days.

Insufficient life teachers are also directly linked to safety issues. For example, fire is a major safety hazard in dormitories. Most boarding primary schools will pay special attention to it, put fire extinguishers outside the dormitories, conduct escape training, and be more cautious to avoid fires that may be caused by electrical appliances. They will not even install sockets in the dormitories. It can be said that after so many years of research, the "Nanyang Fire" is a very rare incident, and the reason why the children did not escape is still unknown. Generally speaking, primary school dormitories are basically three or four floors. If there are enough life teachers, under the care of adults, even if a dormitory catches fire, the children can successfully escape.

Compared to fire, the most pressing safety issue for most boarding primary schools is children's sudden illness at night. Young children do not know how to take care of themselves, and it is common for them to get upset stomachs and catch colds. However, rural boarding schools basically do not have medical clinics, especially in mountainous areas, which are a certain distance from county hospitals. If no one is there to take care of the children in time at night, the probability of problems is higher.

During the survey, a principal said that once at 1 a.m., a child suddenly had a high fever of over 40 degrees. The student went to call the dormitory manager, but the manager was unable to solve the problem. Fortunately, the principal did not leave that day and sent the child to the hospital in time, but the principal was scared when he thought about it, because similar emergencies would occur several times a semester.

We went to talk to the life teachers, and they also felt powerless. There was a boarding primary school with 192 students, but only two life teachers. One of the teachers said that apart from maintaining basic dormitory hygiene and bedtime order, they simply did not have the energy to take care of sick children, let alone whether the children had brushed their teeth, washed their feet, or changed into clean clothes.

Some schools are not equipped with enough life teachers, not because of lack of funds, but because of lack of awareness. For example, this year I went to a boarding primary school, the hardware conditions are already very good, equipped with a bathhouse with a shower head, and hot water can be supplied by inserting a card. We thought it was great, the children finally didn't have to take a hot bath like in the past. But after asking the children carefully, I found out that they were too young and would not take the initiative to take a bath without the guidance of a life teacher. As a result, such a good shower head was placed there brand new, but it became a decoration.

In addition to the problem of insufficient number, most schools do not have a high position on the design of life teachers, thinking that it is enough to manage bedtime discipline and do night patrols. But as mentioned before, to do a good job in the formation of children of young age, it is necessary to equip life teachers with professional knowledge. I have visited some vocational high schools to learn that there is a childcare major that offers courses such as education and psychology, and the students trained are very suitable. However, although those students have difficulty finding jobs after graduation, they are not willing to work as life teachers in boarding primary schools. First, there is no establishment, and second, the salary is not high. The position is completely unattractive to them.

At present, the average monthly salary of dormitory managers, security guards and other service staff in many township boarding primary schools is about 1,500 yuan. Young people are not recruited, and most of them are older. However, a paradox is that some county education bureaus also set an age limit of 45 years old when recruiting service staff. For those who exceed the age limit, the county finance department will not be responsible for paying the salary, and the school will find a way to bear the cost.

Many boarding primary schools cannot afford more money, so they choose to hire older villagers from the surrounding area to be dormitory managers at a low price. This seems to ease the conflict, but in fact there are certain hidden dangers. Because the salary is too low, some villagers only regard dormitory management as a part-time job. When the children fall asleep at night, they lock the door and run home to feed the chickens and pigs. These villagers do not consider the various accidents that may happen to the children, nor do they think they have the responsibility to ensure the safety of the children.

Some schools do not have enough dormitory management staff, so they adopt the method of "senior students take care of junior students", arranging fifth and sixth grade students on the upper bunks and first and second grade students on the lower bunks, pairing up to help each other. Some schools try to arrange brothers and sisters together, letting the older brothers and sisters act as substitute parents to urge the younger brothers and sisters to brush their teeth and wash their faces. Other schools break the boundaries of classes and arrange children from the same village or who play particularly well together in the same dormitory to take care of each other.

In fact, our country has a staffing position. If it is used to recruit life teachers, it will help to form a long-term stable and high-quality team. When I visited the education department, I talked about this issue. The education department responded that many places are now reducing the staffing, and the classroom teachers are replaced by temporary staff, so there is no time to take care of life teachers. They consider it from a long-term perspective. The population of primary school age in many areas is declining, and the number of students will only decrease in the future. If they still recruit so many regular teachers, they will not be able to handle it in the future.

The education department's concerns are not without reason, but my opinion is that children cannot be delayed. Since boarding schools have taken over the care responsibilities originally provided by families, they must take good care of the children.

Some scholars have advocated other methods, such as school bus transportation, in an attempt to fundamentally solve the problem and prevent young children from having to live in school.

But it is difficult to achieve. I remember there was an urban and rural boarding primary school in the northwest region, with more than 3,000 students in the school, of which more than 1,800 were day students, walking 6 to 10 kilometers to and from school every day, and more than 1,200 were boarding students, who were farther away from home. Some of them even had to stay in school for a whole semester before going home. Later, the school received 14 school buses donated by the society and tried to run them for a while, but the school buses had to be equipped with dedicated drivers and had to be paid, and the maintenance of the vehicles also had costs. In the long run, the school could not afford so much money, and eventually all the school buses worth more than 4 million yuan were stopped.

In addition to economic factors, distance is also a problem. Most rural areas in central and western my country are scattered. Even though cement roads are now better built, reducing the probability of school bus accidents, it is unrealistic to extend school buses to every household, as they only pick up children in the morning.

In summary, there are still problems with boarding, especially for young students, but boarding education is still the best option for children in remote rural areas. Especially for the large group of left-behind children, it can solve other problems derived from the absence of parents and grandparents' raising.

Children's footsteps

In an environment where the quality of boarding education urgently needs to be improved, I have also met some energetic and thoughtful principals who have changed some local climates and stimulated the advantages of the boarding system.

The one that impressed me the most was the Fanjia Boarding Primary School in the deep mountains of Guangyuan City, Sichuan. Because the school was run so well, it was called a "miracle in the mountains". When I went there to conduct research a few years ago, there were only more than 80 students left in the school. If the student population continued to decline, it would be doomed to be closed down. However, a principal with more than 20 years of teaching experience came to this primary school and saw that several nearby schools were also facing a shrinking situation. He came up with the concept of a "small-scale school alliance", where several boarding primary schools united to share resources to run schools.

In 2016, there were only three music teachers and two art teachers in the 14 rural schools near that area. The principal of Fanjia Primary School invited these schools to form an alliance, and teachers used the Internet and "mobile teaching" to teach. After finishing the class in one school, they drove to another school. The teaching staff of various subjects was guaranteed, parents were willing to let their children stay, and teachers also enjoyed the state of moving around.

The principal also reformed the classroom. He saw that some children hung their heads in class and thought the class was boring, so he discussed with the teachers how to make the children feel that the class was interesting. He first removed the rows of desks and chairs and asked the students to sit in a circle. The number of students was not large to begin with, so the teacher organized them to have a free discussion, and everyone was able to speak, and gradually the class became active. After that, the principal and the teachers discussed together to make the teaching method closer to the students' lives. For example, when learning the chapter on circles in mathematics, the teacher gave an example that instead of using the Ferris wheel that the children could not perceive, they could use the waterwheel commonly seen in rural areas.

Outside the classroom, the principal spent less than 20,000 yuan to contract more than ten acres of wasteland nearby indefinitely, and led all the teachers and students to plant flowers and identify wild vegetables in the fields. The school is surrounded by mountains, so he let the children experience nature in the mountains and find a balance between the "closed management" and "free activities" of the boarding system. Later, the school became famous, the quality of boarding continued to improve, and public welfare organizations also joined in, installing a small radio in the school to play short stories from "One Thousand and One Nights", so that children could fall asleep every night listening to the stories.

The principal of another boarding primary school in Xingren County, Guizhou Province is also very interesting. At its lowest point, the school had only 78 students, the grades were not improving, the classrooms were shabby, and it was about to close down. The principal was a bit of a "broken pot" person. His philosophy was that since the children were not good at studying, they should at least have fun. He wanted to provide more entertainment for the children, but there was no money, so he and the teachers dug the ground to expand the playground. When digging the ground, they encountered a small hill. They couldn't afford an excavator, so they suddenly had an idea to turn it into a rockery, so that the children could play there after dinner every day.

The principal has done a lot of things around "food, accommodation, entertainment, and learning". As there are few students, he directly eliminated the political education department and the class teacher in the management structure, and the vice principal directly manages the grade. Everyone in the grade is a class teacher, but no one is the class teacher. The purpose is to mobilize the enthusiasm of each teacher and everyone is responsible for the students together.

Unexpectedly, the children had a lot of fun, their liking for the teachers increased, they were more willing to learn, and their grades improved while playing. While other rural boarding primary schools were gradually declining, this school had a good reputation, not only retaining children from the village, but also attracting children from neighboring villages. After the reputation spread, the government attached great importance to it, and social funding gradually came, and a chess gallery, dance room, and football field were built. By 2018, the school had more than 1,000 students.

Every time I visit a boarding primary school, I pay special attention to what the children do during the long period between 4:00 p.m. when school ends and when they go to bed at night.

I was deeply impressed by the children of a boarding school. The school playground was very small and there were no recreational facilities. A group of children gathered on a flat concrete ground and splashed some water to make the ground slippery. The children took off their shoes and skated from one end to the other like ice skates. Some of them slipped on the concrete ground, making their clothes and faces dirty.

The ground was worn very smooth, which showed that the children often played like this and had a lot of fun. But when I saw that scene, I seemed to see the shadow of myself playing small games in boarding school when I was a child. After so many years, our children still don’t have more entertainment resources and stay at the stage of enjoying the most primitive happiness. I feel an indescribable sadness in my heart.

Later, I went to other schools. Because they were overly concerned about the safety of students, they strictly implemented closed management and behavior control. Some schools stipulated that children were not allowed to play, chase or fight on campus after dinner and before evening self-study. Some schools gathered children in the auditorium and assigned a teacher on duty to watch over them, letting them watch TV for several hours. Some schools let children study in the classroom like junior high schools. There was not so much homework in elementary schools, so children just sat in their seats. I felt even more sad. Compared with the previous school, more boarding children were "confined" in the school, and even the most primitive happiness was lost.

At the beginning, I said that what touched me most recently was a small matter like whether a boarding primary school should remove the iron guardrail. In fact, I have seen a more extreme school, which sealed the entire dormitory building with iron guardrails, leaving only a hole to build a hanging ladder. Students use the hanging ladder to go to the second floor, and then from the second floor to the third floor. This is how the psychological safety emergency measures are made.

It can be felt that sometimes, our education forgets the life status of children. Education seems to be alienated into a tool with only one function of selection and screening. But education itself is not like this. Children nowadays are much more tired than we were back then. I joked that children of our generation had everything they needed except food. But children nowadays lack everything except food.

In fact, our country has been running boarding schools for several decades. In the early days when there were more children than mothers, life was very difficult, but many boarding schools were run very well. I remember when I was looking up literature, I saw a boarding primary school in Wuhu, Anhui, which housed 76 students and also faced the difficulties of lack of food, accommodation and teachers. But the school was willing to find a solution, and finally cooperated with the nursing home to let more than 20 elderly people work as childcare workers in the school, guiding the children to do one hour of labor every day, helping the children wash clothes, covering them with quilts at night, and taking good care of their food and daily life.

But in the 21st century, we have carried out a series of reforms in the education system. The most influential ones are the reform of the "county-based" management system and the tax and fee reform. After 2006, schools were no longer allowed to collect miscellaneous fees such as tuition, textbook fees, and fire fees. In areas with weak financial strength, many rural schools were in urgent need of funds. Basic education faced a severe economic situation. In order to pursue economies of scale, the curtain was opened on closing schools and merging schools and frantically opening boarding primary schools.

It is easy for us to understand that centralizing schools is cost-saving, but the question is, is centralization necessarily a good thing? Can the money saved after mergers and closures be returned to education?

Boarding education is actually a high-cost education. We have calculated that the cost of training a boarding student is about 3 to 5 times that of an ordinary day student. It is precisely under this high cost that we feel that we are unable to respond to issues such as the hardware facilities of boarding schools and the living security of students.

Sometimes, it is in those small-scale boarding primary schools facing a "student shortage" that we can see the harmonious relationship between teachers and children. A year ago, I went to a boarding primary school in the northeast. More than 70 students were basically left-behind children, and the ratio of teachers to teachers was about 1:5. The school no longer needed so many teachers, especially some teachers were old and their knowledge was relatively outdated, so the school arranged for some people to transfer to become life teachers, and their wages were still paid according to the original standards.

With sufficient life teachers, all aspects of the children's lives were taken care of, and extracurricular activities became richer. The school had a large area, so they built a vegetable garden inside. Each class had its own plot, where they could grow corn, tomatoes, lettuce, and peppers. After school, the children could go to the vegetable garden to turn the soil, weed, and water the vegetables. When the vegetables were ripe, they would pick them and send them to the cafeteria. They were very happy, and a public school also had the flavor of nature education.

Such examples also give us some hope. Of course, there are still many aspects to consider in the future development of rural boarding primary schools. No matter how fast or slow we go on the road of development, we must remember to take into account the pace of these young boarding children.