Going to School in China
Class is in session, its English class. Repeat after me.
I bet the girls picked this one!
Lets learn about this middle aged English couple.
Smartest kid in the class :)
Some Math, some English..
Some Art.
100 + 100 = 200. Not. 100 + 100 = 200. Not.
We visited a school in one of the shanty towns of China, on the outskirts of Beijing. It was close to zero degrees, and the school was unheated. No one seemed to complain except the peering foreign eyes. There were classes till the 6th standard, after which the children went to a nearby higher secondary school. This was a private school, which meant that the students paid a nominal fee, which helped to pay for the infrastructure and the teaching staff (though I suspect some of them were volunteers).
I put these up to serve as a visual context for my current reading - James Tooley’s, The Beautiful Tree - A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.
The schools’ physical structures were indeed mostly ramshackle, but they were assembled no worse (and often far better) than the homes of the neighborhood children who learned in them. The owners seemed responsible and often caring, the teachers engaged and capable. And the parents Tooley met were adamant that the tuition they paid—between $1 and $2 per child, per month—was money well spent. They would never send their kids to the local public schools, they said, where facilities were fancier but teachers were truant.
These organic educational institutions captivated Tooley. Over the last ten years, he has labored to learn more about them, to publicize their existence and their successes, and to battle against the idea that they are insignificant. He passionately recounts this decade-long study in The Beautiful Tree, a book that should shake up adherents of traditional wisdom on education.
This is good review.
