School shutdown couldn't be good-willed
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People's Daily, September 1, 2011
By tearing down 24 primary schools and more than 70 kindergartens attended by poor children with no official urban residence permits, or "Hukou"in Chinese, the Beijing municipal government has done something that is too outrageous and paranoid, if not illicit.
The city authorities said the forceful shutdown or demolition of mostly makeshift schools in suburban Beijing was "humane and good-willed", because safety measures there were rare or inadequate. In April this year, a fire engulfed a three-storey residence in southern Beijing and a dozen migrant workers were killed or seriously wounded in the blaze.
It sounds righteous to pull down those precarious school walls and roofs for the city has taken care of the students and children's safety. However, Beijing has failed to choreograph plans to resettle more than 14,000 who will have no school rooms to attend as the autumn semester begins in September.
When asked by reporters, a local government's official in charge of education murmured, saying they are contemplating measures to seek rooms for the students and children who have moved in to the city together with their hard-working parents. The answer is hardly satisfactory, smacking of dereliction of public duty, because so many children cannot find a school in Beijing, the capital.
Prior to ordering bulldozers and demolishing the schools and kindergartens which they determined as unsafe and unregistered -- meaning illegal, the city authorities should consult with the children and their parents, and earmark sufficient funds and land to enable the children a place called school.
China's nine-year compulsory education law rules that all the children shall have access to free education from grade 1 to 9. The 14,000 migrant students could make a case with the city government for failing to providing them due education, though they are supposed to study at their rural hometowns.
It is heart-wrenching to see the migrant children lose their classrooms and languish in distress. Their predicament contrasts sharply with the urban counterparts who are often chauffeured in limousines to schools of modernity. It is a grotesque abdication of responsibility on the part of the city government.
The migrant workers are protesting against school shutdown, for they are concerned with their children's future opportunities if education is stripped. Driving the poor workers onto the ropes is immoral and dangerous.
China's Central Government should quicken its pace of reforming the decades-old urban and rural "Hukou" residence system, which was meted out in Chairman Mao Zedong's time and excessively discriminatory towards the rural residents.
The benefits attached to the urban "Hukou" holder – including retirement pensions, nearly free medical care and children's rights to attend urban schools – should be extended to the rural residents, because all Chinese nationals, wherever they are born and whoever they are born to, are entitled to the same and equal treatment.
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