Rural areas

Indonesia: Addressing the new normal for schools in rural areas

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Asia/ Indonesia/ 16.06.2020/ By: Sylvia Beiwinkler/  Source: www.thejakartapost.com.

Around 45 million students in Indonesia have been out of class for as long as three months due to COVID-19 fears. As a result, the education sector has changed dramatically with the rise of online learning, which requires students and teachers to continue their learning and teaching process remotely and on a digital platform.

The adoption of online learning is relatively manageable for students in urban areas as their access to connectivity is far better than in rural areas. Rural areas, especially in eastern Indonesia, lag behind when it comes to accessing quality education as facilities and resources are mostly limited. From uneven teacher distribution and shortage of school facilities — which makes the distance to school too far for many students — to inadequate learning space.

The role of education in rural communities is a crucial step to eradicate poverty. Happy Hearts Indonesia (Yayasan Hati Gembira Indonesia), a nonprofit organization dedicated to rebuilding schools in underprivileged areas and in areas affected by natural disasters, foresees that the first step to improving students’ education is to make sure they go to school in the first place, so they can have an equal opportunity to study.

Providing safe and healthy school buildings have a profound impact on improved learning outcomes both academically and interpersonally. Providing school facilities is also beneficial for parents and community members as it strengthens rural livelihoods, so adults can focus on rebuilding their lives and returning to work while their children are attending school.

The return to productivity allows a community to begin generating income more efficiently. To date, Happy Hearts Indonesia has rebuilt over 190 schools around Indonesia, benefitting more than 60,000 children and 300,000 community members.

With the current situation that forced schools to close and children to stay indoors, educational inequality is more visible than ever before. Despite the Education and Culture Ministry’s effort in cooperating technology-based online learning platforms to enabling students to continue their education, their effort is unavailing in rural areas, as many households are still unelectrified and preparedness for digital learning is rather poor.

According to the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry, over 1.1 million households in Indonesia did not have access to electricity in 2019, with East Nusa Tenggara province at the lowest electrification rate of 73 percent.

As what Bauhaus School founder Walter Gropius once said, “limitation makes the creative mind inventive”, and with compassionate hearts, teachers from the schools that Happy Hearts Indonesia has rebuilt took the initiative on how they addressed the distance-learning barrier amid the pandemic.

Sister Macrina, a kindergarten teacher in Ligouri in Southwest Sumba, visited her students’ houses twice a week to keep them engaged and learning. By doing so, Sister Macrina’s initiative can help prevent chronic absenteeism, which is associated with a permanent school dropout.

As a librarian, Ibu Novi is also keeping students at Masehi Elementary School (SDM) Rua and preschool Kamaru Kaba in Sumba enthusiastic by dropping off learning books at their homes from the community library.

In Flores, Catholic Elementary School (SDK) Roe’s head of school teaches in her house with less than five students a day, and when most students are too eager to study, she reopens the school with a social-distancing classroom setup and limits the sharing of materials within teachers.

Access to sanitation and clean water is also ensured in the school that we have rebuilt. Teachers are also trained on how to do proper hand-washing and now it has become a strict routine that teachers and schoolchildren have to practice to promote healthy standards amid COVID-19.

The adoption of this sincere initiative is indeed inspiring, but if this continues too long, this can only magnify inequities for students in rural areas as the school week is shortened. There is a lack of readiness to adopt remote learning and inadequate relevant tools to carry out remote teaching. Online learning cannot replace the dynamic of a classroom.

School itself is the equalizer to ensure children have equal opportunities to succeed in life. Even though we do not know when this pandemic will end and things get back to normal, the Education and Culture Ministry needs to find ways to promote remote learning without widening the gap of educational inequality.

Source of the news: https://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2020/06/13/addressing-the-new-normal-for-schools-in-rural-areas.html

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Japan: Programs aim to keep youth in rural areas

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Asia/ Japan/ 28.01.2019/ Source: www.japantimes.co.jp.

A two-day event on topics related to satoyama (mountains and woods shared and maintained by residents of the adjacent rural communities) was co-hosted by the Japan Times Satoyama Consortium, the Chugoku Region Governors Association and the town of Jinsekikogen in Hiroshima Prefecture at the Jinseki Kogen Hotel on Oct. 20 and 21.

In the second panel discussion of the first day, Retsu Fujisawa, the representative director of RCF, an association that specializes in coordinating social projects in collaboration with diverse stakeholders, led the discussion as a facilitator. Three panelists shared their insights on regional promotion and the role of education with about 200 attendees.

Masahiro Ohnishi, a regional revitalization consultant who heads an organization called Socio-Design, puts entrepreneurial education as the core of the regional revitalization in the town of Kamikatsu in Tokushima Prefecture.

Ohnishi thinks that a local high school is an important asset in a rural community.

“If children have to leave their hometowns and live elsewhere to attend high school, it becomes difficult for them to come back after graduation, making it harder to put an end to the depopulation trend in rural areas,” he said.

According to Ohnishi, it has been a conventional fear shared among the people in rural villages that educated young people who have grown up in remote areas tend to move to cities.

“People have to let go of that fear and make the community itself into a school where not only teachers, but everyone in the community is responsible for educating children,” he said.

Ohnishi emphasized that it is important for children to learn to create answers rather than always being given choices to acquire skills to start their own businesses wherever they are.

“Spending at least 12 years of school in your hometown helps nurture pride and attachment to the place,” he said.

Career Education Designer and CEO of Jibunnote Inc. Keiji Ohno is based in Suo Oshima, an island in Yamaguchi Prefecture. Ohno provides original career education programs designed to foster entrepreneurship based on regional resources.

“Families differ greatly, but everyone can learn equally at school,” he said.

At one of the junior high schools where he offers his entrepreneurial program, second-year students work in groups to set up four imaginary companies to create and sell products or services using local resources. Each company makes presentations and they sell their company shares for ¥500 per share to their parents and neighbors.

“We have been doing this every year for seven years. The longer we continue, the more people we can involve, gradually changing the whole community,” Ohno said.

It has been almost 15 years since Ohno returned to his home island from Tokyo where he had worked. He found that only three out of 13 former classmates from his junior high school were still living on the island.

“I hope that starting a business will be one of the options for those children who are now experiencing the fun of taking on new things in the community,” he said.

Yoshinori Irie, the mayor of Jinsekikogen, said, “I believe it’s the role of local governments to offer an environment where everyone can take on new challenges.”

The town supports various educational projects including the Namazu (catfish) Project conducted by a group of students at Yuki High School. The catfish grown in ponds the students created with the help of area residents on abandoned farmland are cooked and served at local festivals and at professional baseball games in Hiroshima.

The town also collaborates with the Keio Research Institute at SFC in a project called the “Jinsekikogen Drone Academy Organized by Yuki High School Students” launched last autumn.

“When people gather to work on the drone project, for example, they won’t talk only about drones the whole time, they’ll talk about all sorts of other things. It is from such conversations that people’s connections form and new ideas sprout,” Irie said.

Fujisawa concluded the session by saying that it is important to provide the kind of education that helps people notice and think about how they can use the existing resources in the community to try new things in their own ways.

Source of the notice: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/satoyama-consortium/2019/01/27/satoyama-consortium/programs-aim-keep-youth-rural-areas/#.XE4sJVUzbIV

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China: Pku prof suggests reviving Mao-era rural education camps

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Asia/China/09.07.18/Source: www.atimes.com.

Peking University professor has stirred a commotion with his call to re-establish education centers in China’s vast rural areas, like the camps that existed from the 1960s until the Cultural Revolution intended for ideological remolding of educated urban youth, after Mao Zedong decreed that re-education by members of the proletariat, in particular peasants, was a must for college and high-school graduates.

Yu Hongjun, a professor of finance and microeconomics at PKU’s Guanghua School of Management, said in an opinion piece that “to solve college students’ employment issue, educated urban youth should be sent to the countryside or rural areas” for re-education.

Yu is also a deputy secretary of PKU’s party committee, the university’s top governing body.

He first broached the matter back in 2009, when he said that “starting the campaign in the new period” could not only alleviate employment pressure but also enable youngsters from cities, who were usually spoiled, to know about their country better.

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Yu Hongjun

Yu Hongjun, a professor of finance and microeconomics at PKU’s Guanghua School of Management, said in an opinion piece that “to solve college students’ employment issue, educated urban youth should be sent to the countryside or rural areas” for re-education.

Yu is also a deputy secretary of PKU’s party committee, the university’s top governing body.

He first broached the matter back in 2009, when he said that “starting the campaign in the new period” could not only alleviate employment pressure but also enable youngsters from cities, who were usually spoiled, to know about their country better.

Deng Xiaomang, a professor at the Wuhan-based Central China University of Science and Technology, is one of the few who have openly echoed Yu’s idea. “Young people experiencing rural life can enrich [their own lives]. I even consider it a ‘compulsory course,’ not to be carried out on a voluntary basis,” Deng said.

Under Mao, the tens of millions of postsecondary and high-school graduates mandated to spend their prime years plowing cornfields or pasturing cattle in China’s countryside were collectively known as zhiqing, or rusticated youth.

Current Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping was one of them, having spent seven years working the land in Liangjiahe, an impoverished village in the central province of Shaanxi, before he enrolled in Tsinghua University’s department of chemistry in 1975.

Many people cut their teeth in the harsh living environment and became experts in agriculture or rural studies, when the majority of rural China was still in penury. Yet the consensus even among today’s party cadres is that Mao’s whimsical edict led to a tremendous waste of the nation’s young talent. Graduates were deprived of tertiary education or employment opportunities in his “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” movement, an integral part of his ideals of the Cultural Revolution that wreaked havoc on China.

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The ordeal of their zhiqing years is still so vivid that it’s unsurprising to see the hefty backlash to Yu’s remarks, in particular from those who were told to go to the countryside in their teenage years or early 20s.

Even the Beijing-based nationalist tabloid Global Times noted in its report that reviving such camps would simply be “incompatible with the times.”

Not a few of these zhiqing stayed behind and spend the majority of their lives in villages and counties where they had been randomly assigned to go, even after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms ultimately rescinded Mao’s policy at the end of the 1970s.

Source of the notice: http://www.atimes.com/article/pku-prof-suggests-reviving-mao-era-rural-education-camps/

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