 Attending
school is what every child aspires to. In China
all children reaching the age of six can enter a
primary school for study. In areas where junior
middle school education is basically available to
all, all primary school graduates can go on to junior
middle schools without an entrance examination.
China follows the system of nine-year compulsory
education among its 200 million children. In January
2001, China met its goal of conducting nine-year
compulsory education in areas with 85 percent of
the national population, with the middle school
attendance rate reaching more than 85 percent. As
the next step goal, China will strive to achieve
the 12-year compulsory education. In the urban area,
the proportion of middle school graduates going
to high schools rose from 60 percent at present
to over 75 percent in 2005, and the goal of 12-year
compulsory education is met in 2010. In the rural
areas, certain areas will be encouraged to conduct
12-year compulsory education, with the proportion
of middle school graduates going to high school
reaching 65 percent in 2005, over 75 percent in
2010, and basically achieve the goal of 12-year
compulsory |
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education in another five years.
Before
1949, China was very backward in elementary education.
In 1949, China had only 1,300 kindergartens, 289,000
primary schools, and 4,266 middle schools. In
the early years of the founding of the People's
Republic of China, faced with only a 20 percent
rate of school attendance among school-age children,
the government adopted the principle of popularizing
education in a planned and step-by-step way. In
August 1951, the Ministry of Education convened
the first national conference on primary education
and teacher education. At the  conference,
it was proposed to basically popularize primary
school education in ten years and train a million
primary school teachers in five years. The government
encourages varieties of ways followed to run schools,
and at the same time manages to improve the salaries
of the primary school teachers. This helps boost
the elementary education in the country. But,
given China's social and economic conditions at
the time, primary school education was not popularized
as fast as people expected.
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