Anhui is proud of two things, tea and teaching. In this episode we discover just how tough it is to excel in the Chinese education system – even if you go to a school with a top-class record.
We follow headmistress Mrs. Zhang from Ping Min Primary School, as she heads deep into the Anhui mountains in order to recruit new children to start on their long march through the Chinese education system. As a charitable foundation, her school is able to offer a chance to some of the Province’s most disadvantaged children and give them the chance of a better life. For these very poor children, a good education is theirs and their family’s best way out of poverty, so the stakes are incredibly high.
At Haiyang Middle School, 16-year-old Liu Xiang is fighting to get the grades he needs to get him into the town’s best school, and equally desperate to learn how to drive his dad’s taxi. As an only child, the pressure on him to pass his exams is immense, but if he can get the grades, dad has promised he can also get behind the wheel.
And at the town’s best school – Xiuning Senior School – 17 year old Wu Yufei is also under enormous pressure of her own. She’s thought to be the smartest student in the school’s 100 year history, has the hopes of the town riding on her shoulders, and is the entire focus of her parent’s attention. Mum has given up her career in order to cook and look after her daughter, and her teachers all expect her to excel. But success won’t come easily, and studying until midnight and beyond is the norm.
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Visit the BBC/Open University Chinese School Series Website
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About Chinese School
There are 350 million children enrolled in further education across China, but ‘Chinese Schools’ takes as its subject one small town in rural Anhui, and focuses on the lives of a group of families, teachers and children during the course of a single academic year.
They are schools like many thousands of others across this vast nation, but through the individual stories of hardship, joy and success, an extraordinary portrait emerges of a Nation, a town and a group of children in the midst of enormous change.
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