Bringing Hope to Country Schools

In today's China, there's a huge gap in educational opportunities between students from rural areas and those from developed cities, like Beijing or Shanghai. One study shows while nearly 80 percent of students from China's developed urban areas will have the opportunity to attend college, only 5 percent of students in underdeveloped regions in China will enroll in university. China's primary and secondary rural education systems are struggling due to a lack of qualified teachers, as young graduates scorn the poor incomes and rough lifestyle of being a country schoolteacher.

In order to help students in remote rural areas and reduce the educational imbalance in China, Teach For China, a nonprofit organization established in 2008, has been working as a bridge to send over 1,000 graduates from top universities in both China and the West such as Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Tsinghua, Peking and Fudan, to teach in rural areas that have a hard time attracting good teachers. 

In this interview, Hao Linshuo, a teacher for Teach For China from 2010 to 2012, talks about her journey as an English teacher at a middle school located in Songgui county, a rural village in Yunnan Province and shares her unforgettable experience of living and interacting with local students. 

"In those two years, I came across many students who are just as hard working and smart as their peers in the cities." says Hao Linshuo, "I hope that we give the students more of sense of possibility that they can be as successful as their urban counterparts."