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Charity Brings Cutting-Edge Education to China’s Most Deprived

In the country’s hinterland, the Adream Foundation is helping rural schoolchildren study their way out of poverty.

This article is the first in a two-part series on an education charity in China.

In late June, I sat with Wang Fuqiang, a 13-year-old Tibetan boy, on the roof of his family’s cottage in Songgang, an ethnic minority village in Barkam City, located in southwestern China’s Sichuan province. From Monday to Friday during the school year, Wang lived at a boarding house for primary school students, a 10-minute walk away from home across a potato field blooming with blue flowers.

In a tattered T-shirt and a jacket missing a zipper, Fuqiang sat in the sunshine alongside a visitor, a Han girl called Yang Yiyan. The youngest daughter of a Beijing-based property developer, Yiyan is four years younger than Fuqiang, but a little taller. She and her parents had come to Barkam with Adream Foundation, one of China’s most highly regarded education charities, as part of a summer camp for generous donors and their families.

Their respective fathers, Yang Zhongguo and Wang Songbai, chatted downstairs. Unable to bear the crushing poverty of family life any longer, Songbai’s wife divorced him when Fuqiang was little. The government found Songbai work as a security guard in the nearby county-level town, a job that took him away from Fuqiang for long periods at a time. Fuqiang was left in the care of the village primary school: Free boarding is available for all students from grades one through nine in Barkam, along with a monthly 170-yuan ($25) state grant, as long as they stay at school from Monday to Friday.

Fuqiang, who is in the sixth grade, will graduate from Songgang next year. A lover of basketball, his dream is to one day become a coach; at just under 5 feet tall, he says he can’t become a professional player. Too poor to afford new sneakers, he tears across the court in a pair of well-worn old ones. “When I’m happy, I come up here and sleep on the rooftop,” Fuqiang says. “When I’m feeling down, I go and play basketball.”

After a while, the two teenagers come down from the roof and head out toward a patch of ground in the village so that Fuqiang can show Yiyan his backflip. Downstairs, Yiyan’s father tries to cheer Songbai up, encouraging him to find a new wife and make the family whole again. Later that evening, after dinner with the city’s local officials, the Yangs come back to the cottage with gifts: a basketball, a pair of sneakers, and a tracksuit for Fuqiang.

Underprivileged children are often exposed to evidence of a vast, but isolated, world of wealth — one which they are locked out of from birth.

Ten years ago, Adream’s founder, Pan Jiangxue, came to Barkam and set up a well-stocked reading room in the local middle school. Dubbed the “Dream Center” and outfitted with computers and internet access, it became an oasis to a generation of students who otherwise had little opportunity to read anything other than their textbooks. Fuqiang attends one class a week at another Dream Center in Songgang Primary School. Aside from sports, he loves reading and writing.

A decade later, nearly 2,600 Dream Centers has been built across the country. They are used by around 3 million students, mostly in inland China. In addition to donating books and refitting classrooms, Adream has brought new courses and teaching methods to Barkam. The foundation has developed more than 40 “Dream Classes” showing kids how to plan trips, exercise thrift, perform first aid, and even make a fashion show out of scrap newspaper. Backed by local government support, the foundation has trained more than 60,000 teachers at its partner schools.

For many years, Chinese charities have focused on education as a means to bring social equality to future generations. Back in 1989, the China Youth League launched Project Hope through its affiliate, the China Youth Development Foundation, which aimed to lower student dropout rates and improve school facilities. Within two decades, Project Hope raised enough funding to rebuild 13,000 schools and support nearly 3 million students who would otherwise have dropped out of school due to poverty.

However, Project Hope’s work began to decline when the Chinese government guaranteed nine years of free education for all rural students in 2006. At the same time, the rural student population began to shrink, as more and more families migrated to the cities in search of work. Now, many of Project Hope’s countryside schools lie deserted.

Drawing on the lessons of Project Hope, Pan has ensured that Adream has evolved alongside the changing face of education in China. Twenty years ago, the country’s education charities aimed to get every child into a classroom. When Pan started Adream a decade later, it was to build better schools with high-quality facilities. Today, the goal is to inspire a sense of confidence, composure, and dignity among future generations.

Local students dress up in Tibetan costume during a celebration marking 10 years since the founding of the Dream Center at Barkam No. 2 Middle School in Barkam County, Sichuan province, June 26, 2017. Courtesy of Adream Foundation

The first Dream Center in Barkam, built just 10 years ago, is now a museum. Next to it, a sixth-generation Dream Center is preparing for the fall semester, equipped with tablet computers, virtual reality classes, and 3-D printers. Barkam’s local Party secretary, Zhang Peiyun, is also of Tibetan heritage. Along with local education officials, schoolteachers, and the students themselves, he took part in a ceremony to mark the opening of the Dream Center’s latest incarnation.

During the ceremony, four sixth-graders — whose parents are long-time Adream donors — from an international school in Shanghai performed as a string quartet. Sitting on the floor in front of them, the local students, none of whom had been taught music, looked on. Later, a Shanghai-based music teacher gave each local student a colored bell, instructing them to hit it when he called out a certain color. Forty minutes later, the well-drilled local students were providing a splendid accompaniment to the quartet’s version of the famed Chinese song, “Jasmine Flower.”

Donor families take pride in their good deeds and often encourage their children to be philanthropic, too. It is equally important for children from different parts of society to interact with and learn from one another. Most kids from donor families are either studying abroad or preparing to do so. They sit on the opposite side of the wealth gap from their counterparts in Barkam, many of whom can only dream of the luxury of living in a rich, modern metropolis like Shanghai.

In China, the word “underprivileged” used to have a tangible relationship to material poverty: no food, no clothes, and no school. In some places, that definition still stands, but in others, underprivileged children are often exposed to evidence of a vast, but isolated, world of wealth — one which they are locked out of from birth. This is why charitable projects like Dream Centers are so important, for empowering every child to think bigger and casting off the strictures of poverty is key to giving every Chinese student a fair education.

Editor: Matthew Walsh.

Bringing Creativity to Middle China’s Stifled Classrooms

NGO that strives to level the playing field for rural students faces uphill battle.

This article is part of a series that explores life along the Hu Line, an imaginary diagonal line across China that has vast demographic, environmental, and political significance.

SHAANXI, Northwest China — Qishan County School 702. Its name — or rather, its number — speaks volumes about the typical state of teaching in China: cookie-cutter, devoid of individuality, pragmatic in its mission to deliver the most basic education.

In China, rote learning aimed at landing students high exam scores still holds considerable sway, and admission to a good university represents a golden ticket to a better life. This is especially true in the countryside, where the yawning urban-rural gap in education is particularly apparent in the quality of school facilities and teacher training.

But at this rural combined primary and middle school housed within an automotive machinery factory compound, efforts are underway to implement curricula that develop skills like creativity and teamwork, in an attempt to put pupils on equal footing with their peers in the country’s developed coastal areas.

Our teachers are the front-line workers, and we don’t have the ability to change the system.

Leading the battle to bring greater educational opportunities to the countryside are people like Ma Rong. Pacing the classroom wearing a headset, she looks more like an energetic TV presenter than a teacher. The 42-year-old educator at School 702 begins her class with a series of games: In one, small groups of adolescent students line up according to height or the length of their hair; in another, students hold hands and must find a way to unravel their arms through careful coordination.

While the games might seem too childish for soon-to-be teenagers, they belong to a range of creative activities that have been added to the traditional school curriculum with the help of nongovernmental organization Adream Foundation. School 702 is just one of 2,500 schools around the country that are taking part in activities initiated by Adream, which focuses on addressing inequality in China’s education system.

According to founder and chairwoman Pan Jiangxue, Adream’s core aim is to complement schools’ official curricula with classes to help boost the confidence and creativity of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Throughout the compulsory education years — grades one through nine — students at schools in the Adream program can participate in up to 300 of these creative classes that foster concepts like self-awareness, teamwork, and love and respect for nature and the arts.

Qishan County lies west of the imaginary Hu Line, which slices China diagonally into a densely populated, more developed eastern part and an expansive, thinly populated western area. Many regions west of the line suffer from grinding poverty, and access to quality services like education is often lacking.

In rural areas, almost two-thirds of students drop out of school by grade 12, according to surveys of 24,931 secondary school students conducted by the Rural Education Action Program, a collaboration among the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Stanford University, and other universities. Only half of middle school graduates go on to high school, the study found.

Students told the researchers that they had left to find work or had been inspired by their peers who had already quit school. “If dropout rates continue as they are today, increasing unemployment and widening inequality could hinder economic growth and stability on a national scale,” the researchers wrote.

Qishan sits beside another important geographical divider: the majestic Qinling Mountains, generally thought to split China into north and south. Nearby is the Wei River, the site of the Zhou Dynasty’s first capital in 1046 B.C. and home to the “Rites of Zhou” — an ancient text on organizational theory that contains a chapter about education.

Yet contemporary China leaves small rural towns few opportunities to employ leading pedagogical techniques. In contrast, wealthy metropolitan cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou boast well-resourced public schools and plenty of private sector educational institutions offering top-notch teaching to families who can afford it.

In Shanghai, per capita expenditure on education and recreation by private households in 2015 was 4,046 yuan (just under $600) per month, almost double Shaanxi province’s 2,201 yuan a month.

Government funding differs, too. According to official 2015 statistics, the average public expenditure on education in rural areas was roughly 11 percent lower than the national average for middle schools and 7 percent lower for elementary schools.

The country’s most highly trained teachers typically flock to developed coastal areas to work. Many of those who remain in the countryside are under significant pressure and have neither the time nor the power to influence the rigid curricula mandated by education authorities.

At School 702, 43-year-old teacher Zhang Jun says the Adream program involves only a small proportion of teachers and does not affect regular classes, in which traditional teaching methods like rote learning persist. “If we want to change the whole [system] completely, it should start from the top down,” says Zhang. “Our teachers are the front-line workers, and we don’t have the ability to change the system.”

With a population of just under half a million, Qishan is known as a hub for industries like machinery manufacturing, building materials, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, textiles and garments, and paper printing. Though teacher Ma’s instruction style would hardly be considered groundbreaking abroad or even in more developed parts of China, it is a novelty in areas like this, where students and their families tend to underestimate the importance of education.

Supplementary creative classes may be a good start, but teachers, students, and experts alike agree that these measures have little effect on the overall system. Students in less developed parts of the country still struggle to secure social mobility, Pan tells Sixth Tone, and while she believes Adream’s classes are one of many steps necessary to improve education quality in China’s countryside, she concedes that the classes’ impact on students is “weak.”

Students stand in rows for a group photo at No. 3 Middle School in Qishan County, Shaanxi province, May 17, 2017. Zhou Pinglang/Sixth Tone

At Qishan County No. 3 Middle School — which is about a 30-minute drive from School 702 and is also part of the Adream network — a 12-year-old student surnamed Duan describes the creative classes as only “so-so.” The school’s deputy principal, Su Hao, welcomes Adream’s “open” approach to teaching but remains pragmatic about students’ grades. “Scores are still important,” he says. “Our high school entrance exam results are among the top in Qishan County, and the ultimate goal is to gain admission to a good school.” Around 380 of the middle school’s 1,200 pupils are first-year students taking Adream’s classes.

Teachers who are impacted by us can change the way they teach in their compulsory courses.

While student enthusiasm for Adream’s efforts appears subdued, the NGO has clearly invigorated rural teachers. On a recent morning, Lu Liqiang, a 47-year-old physics teacher at No. 3 Middle School, stands in the middle of a bright orange Adream classroom decorated with paintings and handwritten student essays — a stark contrast to “regular” classrooms, which tend toward the drab.

Lu says that before he underwent training through the Adream program five years ago, his classes lacked active learning. Now, he says, participation is key. On the day Sixth Tone visited his class, Lu started off with an open-ended question on Bernoulli’s principle — which describes the relation between a fluid’s speed and pressure — followed by hands-on activities involving straws and cups of water to demonstrate the effect.

Ma from School 702 — who attended her first Adream training session during the summer of 2014 — agrees that the new techniques she has learned have breathed life into the school’s classrooms. She and her colleagues were initially uninterested in the training, she says, but they became “absorbed” and motivated after learning about the benefits of a more playful approach to education. “The sense of long-term job burnout faded away,” Ma says.

According to Pan, Adream plans to reach more teachers in the future by working with local education authorities. “Teachers who are impacted by us can change the way they teach in their compulsory courses,” she says.

Students play on the grounds of School 702 in Qishan County, Shaanxi province, May 17, 2017. Zhou Pinglang/Sixth Tone

Ma herself attended School 702 and remembers her own teachers back then simply reading aloud from a textbook. “They didn’t really care whether we understood or not,” she recalls. Being exposed to creative learning techniques like the ones she employs in the classroom now “would’ve been delightful,” she says.

Still, rural schools continue to lack appeal among parents. Even Ma doesn’t want her 12-year-old son to attend middle school in Qishan. Baoji, the nearest big city, offers better education, she says, adding that it has become customary in China for people to move to more developed areas — from village to town, or from town to city — in pursuit of a better life. “I wouldn’t want my child to come back here to work,” she says. “I hope he can spread his wings and fly out into the vast world.”

Additional reporting: Huang Wan; contributions: Lin Qiqing; editors: Denise Hruby and Jessica Levine.

Over the coming weeks, Sixth Tone will publish stories, videos, photo galleries, and social media posts that chronicle our road trip across China along the Hu Line, as well as an interactive multimedia platform in the fall.

(Header image: Ma Rong speaks to students through a headset at School 702 in Qishan County, Shaanxi province, May 17, 2017. Zhou Pinglang/Sixth Tone)

Why I Quit Banking to Revolutionize Rural Education

2017-05-04in Adream News /by adreamweb

A brush with disaster convinced me to set up a charity teaching much-needed life skills to deprived country schoolkids.

I was visiting the United States in September 2001 when the attacks on the World Trade Center happened. Just days before the blast, my job in investment banking had taken me to New York City, where I stayed in a hotel right next to one of the twin towers. Fortunately, I had moved on to Washington, D.C. by the day two planes were flown into the buildings. When they came crashing down, the hotel next door was buried beneath the rubble.

By a hair’s breadth, I avoided an early death at the age of 30. At the time, I was working as a senior executive at China Merchants Securities in Hong Kong. My reflections in the aftermath of 9/11 made me question the value of remaining in my profession, when much more pressing social issues were raging around me — not least the question of how poverty could turn people away from respecting diversity and toward violence against one another. By 2007, I had had enough. I gave up the high-flying job, converted to Buddhism, and became a career philanthropist.

My foundation, Adream, was created as a nonprofit education organization based in Hong Kong. The idea was to furnish impoverished Chinese schools with “dream centers”: converted classrooms equipped with books, computers, and audiovisual facilities. Our first two dream centers were built in the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in southwestern China’s Sichuan province, an area where education infrastructure was sorely lacking. It was also, coincidentally, my Buddhist mentor’s home prefecture.

In the 10 years since then, Adream has raised 400 million yuan (around $60 million) to build dream centers in more than 2,500 schools across China. We have more local outlets in the country than McDonald’s, not to mention the 100,000 teachers and 3 million students we have helped along the way.

More than two-thirds of the schools we serve are located in poor areas of China’s western hinterland. Key to our success has been the fact that we care as much about what we teach to our children — and how we teach it — as we do about whether China’s schoolkids have the raw materials to succeed academically.

To ensure that rural students could learn in a supportive, inspiring environment, we drew up a tailored “rural curriculum” with Cui Yunhao, an educationist affiliated with East China Normal University. A year after Adream was established, Cui told me that over 99 percent of the country’s school-age children were attending school . Indeed, against the backdrop of rural-to-urban migration, rural Chinese schools actually have more than enough capacity to accommodate the shrinking student population.

The news forced us to shift our attention away from getting kids into school and toward what they actually learned inside the classroom. I believe that a rich, varied, and inspiring curriculum is essential to quality education. Central to Adream’s ethos, then, is the aim of supplementing the official curriculum with one conducive to helping children from poorer backgrounds build confidence and lead dignified lives.

So far, we’ve developed 24 classes on self-awareness, teamwork, respect for nature, art, drama and performance, and computer skills. In all of our partner schools, every child from first to ninth grade will take one such class per week. By the end of their compulsory education, they will have had 300 hours of exposure to diverse, tolerant, creative, and imaginative teaching. We have also helped students visit their parents who have migrated to the city for work.

Throughout Chinese imperial history, education was a key means through which those from poorer backgrounds could elevate their social status. Parents enrolled their kids in schools in the hope that one day, they would pass the rigorous civil service examinations and be given a job at the imperial court. To a certain extent, this tradition even persisted beyond the collapse of dynastic rule. As late as the 1990s, university graduates were habitually considered for work in the state sector, a field that promised job security and social prestige.

However, a significant rise in the number of students enrolling in universities has put an end to that trend in recent years. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of Chinese college graduatesincreased sevenfold. Many rural families who lived frugally for years so that their children could go to college saw them graduate without a secure job with which to support the family. Others have chosen not to go on to higher education at all.

The system works so long as educational achievement is linked to better job prospects, but with more and more graduates falling into unemployment or menial labor, we have lost sight of what we are educating our children for. Concerned by an ever more competitive job market, schools are teaching to the test instead of incentivizing students to explore their interests. Students memorize answers but don’t ask questions. They are told to earn as much money as they can, but not to find jobs they enjoy. They have access to one of the largest economies on the planet, but live in only the 84th-happiest country in the world.

Most kids enrolled in Adream classes are part of a generation of emotional orphans, marooned in the countryside far away from their migrant worker parents. I fear for children deprived of the happiness that comes from a secure, stable family environment, and I worry that many of them will limit their life goals to mere subsistence instead of realizing their dreams, no matter how modest or high their ambitions are. That is why Adream classrooms encourage children to be true to themselves, to love one another, to recognize the beauty and diversity in the world, and to find fulfilling future places in it for themselves.

As Adream does not have the resources to staff every classroom ourselves, another key aspect of our approach is teacher training. We currently have 100,000 so-called dream coaches on our books, all of whom are full-time teachers at partner schools. We encourage them to embrace alternative teaching methods so that their classes are action-packed, child-centered, and free from the drudgery of rote learning that permeates most kids’ school days.

Part of our success has stemmed from the fact that our curricula are designed to dovetail with existing education regulations. In 2001, China scrapped tight central control of the school curriculum and devolved powers to localities and individual schools, allowing them to have more say in what they teach local students. In each new location we reach, Adream first visits the local education bureau. Once we have the bureau’s support, we target the neediest schools and lay down plans to build and sustain dream centers over five years.

Unlike other organizations, we deliberately leverage government support to realize our goal as a charity. This is not to surrender our autonomy as an NGO, but to ensure the long-term stability of our work. Our willingness to supplement, not replace, existing curricula takes the risk out of local government decision-making. After all, which government would choose to deliberately prevent local kids from getting the best education possible?

Intentionally courting official support has allowed Adream to build a 2,500-strong network of dream centers stretching across the country. Not only that, but municipal education bureaus in cities like Zunyi and Qidong — in southwestern China’s Guizhou province and eastern China’s Jiangsu province, respectively — have added us to their public procurement lists. This means that the local governments cover all the costs of setting up dream centers, allowing us to reach more schools in their jurisdictions with the revolutionary curricula we promote. This tactic has also allowed us to make the transition from being a Hong Kong-based private fund to being a Shanghai-based public fund, which has broadened our access to partnerships and donations.

To me, any charitable donation is an investment in the future. Focusing on the years to come is especially important in the context of a Chinese education system struggling to prepare its students fully for the challenges ahead. While Adream’s impact on education is only in its infancy, I feel confident that in 20, 30, or 40 years, today’s most disadvantaged children will look back on our work and say, “Yes, they helped make me the happy, fulfilled person I am now.”

Editors: Lu Hongyong and Matthew Walsh.