REAP News

Glasses askew and gray hair tousled, Scott Rozelle jumps into a corral filled with rubber balls and starts mixing it up with several toddlers. The kids pelt the 62-year-old economist with balls, and squealing, jump onto his lap. As the battle rages, Rozelle chatters in Mandarin with mothers and grandmothers watching the action. 

Elsewhere in this early childhood education center in centralChina, youngsters are riding rocking horses, clambering on a jungle gym, thimbing through picture books, or taking part in group reading. Once a week, caregivers get one-on-one coaching on how to read to toddlers and play educational games. The center is part of an ambitious experiment Rozelle is leading that aims to find solutions to what he sees as a crisis of gargantuan proportions in China: the intellectual stunting of roughly one-third of the population. "This is the biggest problem China is facing that nobody's ever heard about," says Rozelle, a professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Surveys by Rozelle's team have found that more than half of eighth graders in poor rural areas in China have IQs below 90, leaving them struggling to keep up with te fast-paced official curriculum. A third or more of rural kids, he says, don't complete junior high. Factoring in the 15% or so of urban kids who fall at the low end of IQ scores, Rozelle makes a stunning forecast: About 400 million future working-age Chinese, he says, "are in danger of becoming cognitively handicapped."

"This is the biggest problem that China faces that no one knows about. This is an invisible problem," said Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) at Stanford University, "China has the lowest levels of human capital (out of all the middle income countries in the world today). China is lower than South Africa, lower than Turkey. We think that's related to when they were babies, they didn't develop well.”

Following the formulation of the UN’s “sustainable development” goals in 2015, governments worldwide have committed to expanding access to primary care services. Experts believe that primary care can address about 90% of health problems and it has been found to be related to higher life expectancy and lower child mortality rates. However, experts are concerned that a lack of access to primary care and the poor quality of health services will be incapable of meeting the growing burden of chronic illness in poor countries. 

The WHO calculated that about 400 million people globally are unable to access “essential health services,” such as antenatal care and treatment for tuberculosis. However, this figure does not take into account the global burden of non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease. Non-communicable diseases are expected to account for over 70% of deaths in developing countries by 2020, but findings from the World Bank and WHO demonstrate that access to treatments for these diseases are severely deficient. For example, it is estimated that more than half of individuals in developing countries with hypertension are not aware they have this condition, and between 24% and 62% of individuals with diabetes do not receive treatment.

Rural Chinese children have a significant delay in their cognitive development compared with their urban counterparts, researchers have found, which could potentially hinder the country’s economic development.

Possibly the single most important of the tensions stoked up by President Trump is the rivalry between the United States and China. Economic strength will be the ultimate determinant of this struggle for the position of Top Nation.

The annual output in China is currently around $10 trillion a year, compared to the $17 trillion in America.

Hongbin Li, Prashant Loyalka, Scott Rozelle, and Binzhen Wu recently published a piece in the Journal of Economic Perspectives particularly worth flagging. It touches on one of the hotter social debates in China over the past few years: whether the massive expansion of college education since 1999 has created an over-supply of graduates, or is just the beginning of the necessary transformation of the education system to meet the needs of a modern economy.

The outlines of China’s demographic challenge are well-known: By 2050 almost 27 percent of the population will be 65 or older, up from around 10 percent in 2015. Less recognized is that the crisis will hit hardest in rural villages.

The Lancet reckons that 43% of under-fives in poor countries, in other words about 250m kids, will fail to meet their “developmental potential” because of avoidable deficiencies in early childhood development (ECD).

Children in rural areas of China suffer from slow cognitive development due to a lack of proper parenting and nutrition, casting a shadow over the future of the country's economy, a Stanford University study shows.

Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Stanford University Rural Education Action Program (REAP), told Caixin that more than half of the toddlers 24 to 30 months old and about 40% of the infants 6 to 18 months old scored below average in IQ tests. The average IQ score for these age groups should range between 90 to 109.

The winners of the Clearly Vision Prize will share cash prizes totalling $250,000 to help them accelerate their progress and move us another step down the road towards a world where everyone can see.

The Rural Education Action Program (REAP), an impact-evaluation organization, aims to inform sound education, health and nutrition policy in China. Since 2011, REAP’s five randomized controlled trials have shown that quality vision care is the most cost-effective intervention for improving child welfare, and leads to large and sustainable increases in learning and school performance, along with positive spillovers to children who don’t have poor vision.

The US-based startup has partnered with eyewear company Luxottica OneSight to help scale eye care to ten million people in China that do not have access to affordable services. According to research conducted by Stanford University, only one out of six rural children in China has a set of glasses and most rural students have never had an eye exam. The for-profit ran a pilot operation in conjunction with the Chinese Academy of Sciences before launching in the provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu, where it distributes low-cost glasses, trains doctors and teachers, and constructs clinics. Teachers can test vision directly in classrooms and use mobile phones to automate patient referrals and prescriptions. Smart Focus argues the nonprofit route would never have been a sustainable or scalable way of helping the number of children that need eye care.

The sprawling National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) in China is one of the world’s largest bureaucraies. Its reach spreads from the bustling supercities on China’s eastern seaboard to the remote villages that dot the country’s vast rural interior. For decades, NHFPC officials had responsibility for enforcing China’s One Child Policy. In their relentless drive to keep fertility low, these officials sometimes fined noncompliant families into a state of poverty or even subjected women to forced abortion or sterilization procedures.

China can improve its higher education system by introducing incentives for students and teachers so they take learning more seriously, a Stanford professor says. Under the current system, college students are essentially guaranteed a diploma, offering little motivation to excel.

参考消息网8月14日报道 美媒称，中国的教育系统向来会引发最激烈的讨论。对其持批评态度的人表示，它是一种执迷于考试的官僚体制，培养出的学生擅长死记硬背，但在其他方面却无过人之处。持肯定态度的人则认为，它让孩子具备了格外扎实的技巧，尤其是在数学和科学方面。

据美国《纽约时报》网站8月8日报道，斯坦福大学经济学家罗思高在中国组织了一个农村教育项目，同时，他发表的一项新研究针对一些有关中国学校的流行观念提出了挑战。在最近的一次交谈中，罗思高讨论了中国教育制度的优缺点，以及他给该国领导人提的建议。以下为《纽约时报》记者赫海威对其的采访摘要：

问：你的研究发现，中国学生在进入大学时具备的部分批判性思维技巧是全世界最强的，远超美国和俄罗斯的同龄人。但两年后，他们失去了这个优势。究竟是怎么回事？

答：这里面有好消息也有坏消息。好消息是：无论他们在高中做了什么，不管你认可与否，他们都在让大量的孩子学习数学、物理和某种类型的批判性思维技巧。但让我抓狂的是，他们在大学里什么都不学。孩子们没有努力学习的动力，人人都能毕业。

问：高中为什么比大学做得好？

中国的学校系统向来会引发最激烈的争论。对其持批评态度的人表示，它是一种执迷于考试的官僚体制，培养出的学生擅长死记硬背，但在其他方面却无过人之处。还有一些人则认为，它让孩子具备了格外扎实的技巧，尤其是在数学和科学方面。

香港——中国的中小学常常被人批评，认为它们是使学生精疲力尽、以考试为主的机器，培养出来的学生只会死记硬背基本事实，几乎没有深度推理的能力。

但是，一项新的研究暗示，中国在培养世界上一些批判性思维能力最强的学生。

关于中国的学校是否比美国的学校做得更好，这一意外发现也许会改写这一争论，为以前显示中国学生在阅读、数学和科学等科目上的表现优于全球同龄人的研究作补充。

但是，这项斯坦福大学研究人员做的新研究还发现，中国学生的批判性思维能力在大学期间失去优势。这表明，中国迅速扩张的高等教育系统中存在问题。随着经济增长的放缓，中国政府正把促进增长的希望寄托于高等教育。

这项将在明年发表的研究发现，中国计算机科学和工程专业的新生入学时，其批判性思维能力比美国和俄罗斯的同类新生的水平高两到三年。这些能力包括识别假定、验证假设，以及找到变量之间的关系。

BEIJING — Chinese primary and secondary schools are often derided as grueling, test-driven institutions that churn out students who can recite basic facts but have little capacity for deep reasoning.

A new study, though, suggests that China is producing students with some of the strongest critical thinking skills in the world.

Recently, an academic consensus has emerged that China should focus its human capital development in rural areas. Rural residents receive only an average of 9.6 years of education, which leaves them ill-prepared for high-skilled work. Yet with the increased mechanization of factories, manufacturing jobs will likely move offshore, or revert back to the West. This is a great risk for an economy transitioning from low-income to high-income status, such as China.

Around 8 per cent of rural children in China take college entrance exams, compared with 70 per cent of urban children. Reap officials believe this is due to a woeful lack of mental stimulation for rural youngsters between birth and the age of three. They say this is the crucial period for neurons to connect in the brain and set a path for a child’s mental ability later in life.

NO CAR may honk nor lorry rumble near secondary schools on the two days next week when students are taking their university entrance exams, known as gaokao. Teenagers have been cramming for years for these tests, which they believe (with justification) will determine their entire future. Yet it is at an earlier stage of education that an individual’s life chances in China are usually mapped out, often in ways that are deeply unfair.

For 30 years, Yu Huajian visited villages in rural China to remind couples to have just one child, to abide by the law and help the economy. He also pursued violators of the much-hated policy and oversaw abortions.

Since the one-child policy was abandoned in October, Mr. Yu and some of the half a million other family-planning workers have knocked on rural doors with a different message: How to play with children, read to them and raise them with better skills.

The shift was abrupt, but Mr. Yu said he has always done what he and leaders thought was best for the country.

Two-year-old Liu Siqi is curled up on her grandmother's lap, complaining of a tummy ache. A man tries to divert her with a squeaky plastic duck.