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Six students, four grades: This is the enrollment of Mengjiashan Primary School, built and designed for about 100 students, in the landlocked province of Gansu in northwest China.
"There is nothing else worth worrying about. My only anxiety is dwindling student numbers," school principal Chen Aibang said. "It would be a great pity for such a good campus to have no students at all."
Mengjiashan is not an isolated case. In China's rural areas, the most humble elementary schools have been gradually bidding farewell to dilapidated buildings, thanks to heavy government funding in recent years, but rolls keep falling.
Gansu alone is now home to more than 3,700 schools with no more than ten students each.
Staff are the key
Despite plentiful government funding for rural education, the gap between urban and rural areas has not be bridged.
"The teachers are the critical element in ensuring quality teaching, the core of social equality," said Chu Zhaohui, researcher with the National Institute of Educational Sciences.
"A lack of teachers leads to substandard education, making it hard to curb the outward flow of students," he said. "Many rural schools have become 'pretty yet humble' as a result."
A low-rise mud-brick structure, built in the 1980s, nestles quietly among the two-story houses in a village in Fengqiu County, one of the poorest areas of central China's Henan Province. It is the residence of four members of Du Chengfeng's family. Du has taught for more than 20 years at the village middle school, earning a little over 2,000 yuan (314 U.S dollars) a month.
"If a teacher's welfare and status are the lowest in a village, how can he make his students to appreciate the value of knowledge?" the veteran pedagogue asked.
With a meager monthly wage of less than 2,000 yuan, rural teachers in Du's county moonlight as taxi drivers, work on construction sites during summer vacations or become street vendors during festivals, to make their ends meet.
Du is one of 3.3 million teachers in 150,000 schools for over 40 million rural students. These teachers play an invaluable role in the country's education system.
In central China's Hunan Province, the average monthly salary of rural teachers is 2,483 yuan, far below the wages earned by migrant workers of the same age group and with similar educational backgrounds, and even below the income of local carpenters. Underpaid, with low social status and dim prospects, many are asking themselves if they should move on.
Urbanization: the wrong kind
A report by the Research Institute of Rural Education at Northeast Normal University late last year showed 65.7 percent of rural teachers wanted to teach in cities, 90.3 percent of teachers in towns hoped to teach in cities, and 93.4 percent of village teachers hoped to teach in areas at or above township level.
In April, the government took steps to support rural teachers, noting that education in remote and poor areas in central and western regions is the weakest link in the modernization of the education system.
Xu Yubin of the Henan Institute of Education said, "Rural education still does not allow every child to receive fair, equal and quality education, nor does it stop poverty spreading to the next generation."
"Improvements in infrastructure and facilities barely gloss over the gap in teaching quality. The dearth of teachers has become the most sensitive point in current rural education," Xu said.
An army of aged educators
A greying teaching staff is another problem, as poor, alpine villages in western China are generally not regarded as the best places to nourish the dreams of bright young college graduates.
In Hengshan County, Hunan, elementary school teachers at 50 or older account for 41 percent the total staff, while those at 30 or younger account for only 15 percent. In Jiyuan of Henan, rural elementary school teachers at 56 or older constitute 20 percent of the staff, while teachers who have returned to work after retirement are the main teaching force in some remote schools.
With an enrollment of 30 students, Dahenan Primary School in a village in northeast China's Liaoning Province has only three teachers. They are 53, 57 and 60.
Making a difference
Fortunately, a five-year plan to improve living standards of rural teachers and recruit an army of younger, better-qualified teachers for rural schools was unveiled in June. The document included favorable policies for village teachers concerning professional rank, training and an honor system. Educationists, however, point out that unless the plans are executed fully and accurately targeted, they will make very little difference.
"Rural teachers must be well enough paid to make others envy them," said Meng Lanfeng, a deputy to the national parliament and a veteran teacher of nearly 30 years' experience in Hunan.
Meng wants the government to expand channels to recruit rural teachers, unify rural and urban staffing standards and introduce policies favoring rural teachers in conferring professional ranking.
"Only by these means can teaching quality be improved in these 'pretty yet humble' schools and the outward stream of students be stemmed," Meng said.
