Xie Hailong rushed up and after inquiry he knew that the girl was eleven-year-old Liu Xiaohuan. She had a year of education and then dropped out due to financial difficulty. Now, she came here to carry bricks to earn some money for her tuition fees. Every time she needed to carry sixteen bricks as heavy as forty jin and walked one hundred and forty meters away.
Xie Hailong asked, "How many times have you carried today?"
"Four times."
"How much have you earned?"
"Over one jiao[8]."
Xie Hailong took out a pencil and some paper, "Can you write?"
Liu Xiaohuan nodded.
Xie Hailong said, "Just write down what you want to say."
Liu Xiaohuan thought for a while and then wrote down four Chinese characters which meant "I want to go to school!"
Old Picture Five:
Xie Hailong met Mao Kefeng in the Yimeng mountain area.
Walking into Mao Kefeng's yard, two ragged quilts with patches were hanging on a line and some black cotton inside was exposed outside. Several bowls on the kang table had chipped edges.
Mao Kefeng was a sensible child and had helped her parents todo farm work since she was little. After school, she would carry bamboo baskets to herd sheep meanwhile to collect firewood. She knew her family was poor. She collected pencil stumps to do her homework and stapled waste paper together as exercise books. Under such difficult circumstances, Mao Kefeng at the age of fourteen finally finished Grade Four with study that was on and off at various times.
It had been a period of time since Grade Five started. But Mao Kefeng still didn't scrape enough money for the tuition fees. Facing the sad look of her parents, she couldn't say anything while meeting the teacher in charge of her class she dared not to raise her head.
On that day, her father set farm work aside and rushed to school. He took Mao Kefeng who had to leave school home.
After dropping out of school, Mao Kefeng insisted on wearing the red scarf even though she went to the fields every day instead of going to school…
5.The Birth of Project Hope
Although more than twenty years has passed, we can still feel the wise man's worry and anxiety in his following words:
"The heart of the realization of modernization is the advancement of science and technology. Without the investment and devotion to education, science and technology can never gain any progress. Empty talk can never realize modernization. We must rely on knowledge and talents."
"From a long-term perspective, we must attach great importance to education and science and technology. Otherwise we would waste another twenty years. We have wasted twenty years and we cannot bear the consequence of another twenty years."
"We should make every attempt to resolve the problem of education even if we have to tolerate multiple aspects or lower the speed of economic development by a little bit."
"The most serious mistake in the ten years of reform is that education hasn't gained enough development."
That wise old man was Deng Xiaoping, the leader admired by all the Chinese people. Within a few years, Deng had continually given sincere advice on education for several times. He must have seen the problems and potential crises lying in our education status at that time.
In March of 1989, Li Tieying, the Director of the State Education Committee announced the following numbers at the press conference for Chinese and foreign reporters:
"The number of illiterate people in China is 220 million.
Among 220 million students, one third can only complete primary school, one third can complete middle school and less than one third can complete high school.
The average length of education is less than five years."
According to UNESCO statistics, out of 890 million illiterate people in the world, 229 million are Chinese, which means that out of every four illiterates, one is Chinese.
At that time, the outflow of primary and middle school students continued increasing. According to the statistics issued by National Statistic Bureau in March 1989, the number of dropouts from all the levels of schools in the national education system reached 7,577,000; an increase of 34.5% compared with that of 1987 and an increase of 38% compared with 1986. From 1980 to 1988, 37 million pupils and middle school students dropped out. What was more heartbreaking was the fact that out of 4 million students, 1 million dropped out because of poverty. These children who shouldn't have been illiterates became a part of this illiteracy.
The backward economy and the heavy population severely hindered the development of education of our nation. We had 220 million students at school which were more than the total number of the students in America, England, France, Japan and the former Soviet Union. Taking the year of 1988 as an example, the state financial grants for education was 32.1 billion yuan plus 10.2 billion yuan raised by other means and the total amount was 42.3 billion yuan. However, the per capita amount was less than forty yuan. When it came to 1990, the per capita education budget was only fifty-two yuan, about ten dollars. Out of other countries, these statistics placed China towards the end. In the developed countries, per capita education budget had reached thousands of dollars.
If the national average level was like that, then in those impoverished regions, the basic educational conditions were even worse (at that time, 679 impoverished counties were defined as key regions that need support from autonomous regional governments, provincial governments and state government. 328 counties were state-level impoverished counties and required support from the state).
In the winter vocation of 1991, under the organization of China Youth University for Political Sciences, a "counties investigation group" consisted of 119 university students thoroughly investigated the basic educational conditions and the dropouts status in 113 state-level impoverished counties.