Jack Ma proposes rural education reforms to help “left-behind” children

Alibaba founder promotes rural boarding schools and urges fellow entrepreneurs to give back to their home provinces

At an event held by his charitable foundation on Sunday to honor teaching excellence in China’s village schools, Jack Ma spoke to a room of more than 80 entrepreneurs about the urgency of rural education reform.

Alluding to the eight-year-old “Ice Boy” from Yunnan — whose hour-long trek to school in subzero temperatures earlier this month went viral, raising awareness for the plight of “left-behind” children — Ma advocated for merging small rural schools in resource-starved areas into boarding schools.

“In the countryside, children live, on average, 5.4 kilometers away from school,” he said. “Many of them have to go to great lengths just to get to school. Some have to take a boat to class. Others have to climb mountains and wade through rivers.”

Ma lamented the inefficient allocation of resources in rural schools, many of which serve fewer than 100 students and struggle to attract good teachers. He believes the solution is to merge failing schools and promote boarding schools, with buses to transport students home for the weekend.

“Some areas are really resource-deprived, but we cannot allow the future to pass these children by,” he said, challenging his fellow entrepreneurs to give back to their native places by donating buses and helping to build dormitories.

A country’s educational outcomes should not be weighed by the number of excellent universities and secondary schools it boasts, he suggested. Instead, its merits should be judged by the quality of its worst schools.

“Only when rural education is strong can our education system truly be strong,” Ma said. “Only when the rural farming class thrives can China truly evolve. If our worst schools are reformed, then our country will have the opportunity to transform itself.”

Ma also detailed his personal reasons for being so invested in the cause of rural education. He was born into a family of teachers and studied education pedagogy in college. His greatest guilt, Ma told the crowd, was that he only spent six years teaching after graduation before pivoting to entrepreneurship.

“Most of my classmates from college are still teaching in rural areas. So I thought to myself when I left the school to become an entrepreneur, If the day comes when I am able to succeed, I will invest a lot of energy in giving back to school teachers,” he said.

Though it is an admirable sentiment, some doubt the viability of his preferred approach to rural education reform. Li Tao, a researcher at Northeast China Normal University’s China Rural Development Institute, suggested that merging rural schools might be more complex than Ma realizes, particularly if it entails mixing students from different cultural backgrounds.

By H.A. Platt