Press Trust Of India
Beijing, Jan 6: China’s over three-decade-old one-child policy has resulted in the closing down of five high schools in the last four years in a county that has been proud of being a pioneer in implementing the controversial norm that has been blamed for the looming demographic crisis.
The number of high schools in Rudong county in east China’s Jiangsu province has come down from nine to four in the past four years, a cruel but irreversible trend, Chen Jian, deputy head of the county’s education bureau said.
“There are not enough students. Keeping all these schools open would have wasted a lot of resources,” he told state-run China Daily. Chen taught English at the Rudong Senior High School, one of the county’s two best senior high schools, before becoming its principal.
“Five or six years ago, our school had a maximum of 27 classes in one grade and each class had nearly 70 students,” Chen said. The numbers were swollen by students from outside the district whose parents used every means available to enable their children to attend the school in hope they would learn how to score high marks in the gaokao, China’s annual national college entrance exam and attend a top institution.
But that’s all history now. This fall semester, the school’s 10th grade has only 17 classes, each of which has only about 50 students, he said. It is a sad story for a county that prides itself as a pioneer in implementation of one child policy.
Although China’s family planning programme started in the 1970s, Rudong voluntarily introduced the policy in the 1960s. The move resulted in a low birth rate in the 1970s.
