Education Will Help Rural Children Realize Dreams

Zhi Yueying, 57, became a teacher at the age of 19 at a primary school in her home county of Jinxian in Jiangxi.

Later, Zhi came to her current workplace under the invitation of a former classmate, though it is located deep in the mountains of another county in the eastern province with an altitude of about 1,000 meters.

Since then, she has never left the school or local students.

Zhi's care for her students is not limited to the classroom. When she noticed that some girls had stopped attending school, she visited their parents and convinced them of the importance of education. Moreover, she helped impoverished students pay for their tuition fees, even though she could barely make ends meet herself.

She has been conferred with many awards and titles, including China Central Television's annual "Touching China" awards and the National Model Teachers awards over the past few years in recognition of her decade-long contributions and sacrifices to the development of local education.

With respect to the further development of primary education in rural China, Zhi proposed that relevant authorities should continually improve the structure of faculties in rural areas, pilot a flexible retirement scheme, appropriately increase the percentage of male teachers, raise the quality and competence of rural teachers, mitigate the shortage of arts teachers through the expansion of recruitment in the national college entrance exam, and introduce more concrete policies to boost their income and help them stay there. She made those suggestions when she joined a panel discussion of the Jiangxi delegation on the sidelines of the first session of the 13th NPC on March 7.

She said in the interview, "I will continue with teaching as long as my health allows since the school has already become another 'home' of mine."

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