“IF their grandparents are not at home, they go hungry the whole afternoon.”

Sitting across a table, dark-skinned Li Xiaolong, 24, smiled wryly as he spoke with a cadence common among people from China’s northwest.

As a village teacher, Li was referring to some students at the Miaomiaohu Primary School in Pingluo County of the northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, where he teaches.

The school closes at 12pm for a one-hour break, during which students head home for their afternoon meal. The school provides no lunch.

During his first days on the job, Li was surprised to see many students back at the closed gate well before 1pm. The lunch break is usually much longer. His surprise grew into consternation when the students told him they didn’t have lunch since neither parents nor grandparents were at home to prepare a meal. And they had no money to buy food.

Having only recently graduated from a normal university in a region comprised heavily of the Hui ethnic group, Li teaches math at the school, which is located in a parched and sandy county with a population of about 250,000.

As part of a national migration scheme, his school was relocated years ago from the mountainous south of Ningxia to the flatter land where it now stands. In the process, an estimated 1,000 households also decamped to new homes near the school. But many newly-settled arrivals were left without a job or a plot to till.

Lured by better economic prospects, many of these transplanted people have flocked to cities in search of work, leaving behind large numbers of children and the elderly. “Roughly seven out of ten students at my school are left-behind children,” Li told Shanghai Daily.

As is typical of remote rural villages, Li’s school is considerably understaffed. Indeed, Li himself, in addition to teaching math, also teaches popular science and radio technology.

A tremendous workload is one aspect of the stressful life led by village teachers in some of China’s most far-flung and poverty-stricken localities. Altogether they number an estimated 3.3 million.

Li’s concerns about left-behind children are echoed by Zhang Xiaoxia, also a rural teacher in the hilly city of Qionglai in southwestern Sichuan Province. Half of the students at her nine-year school have at least one absent parent working in a city. In China, a nine-year basic education is compulsory and in some areas primary and middle schools are mixed.

Zhang became a teacher in 1997 at the age of 20. She has since taught ethics in a school where there are about 40 teachers for 500 students.

Like Li, she is often obliged to teach courses besides her own. Last semester a colleague took maternity leave. As a result, Zhang taught Chinese in her stead to a few classes of 1st and 3rd graders. The lack of a replacement will likely keep her in that post for a while.

She communicates often with her students, many of whom have psychological problems, especially puberty-age adolescents left behind by their parents. Some of them start to feel inferior when they reach the 7th grade. Many experience the shame of poverty and bitterness toward their absent parents, she explained.

The lives of village teachers like Li and Zhang offer a glimpse into the plight of millions of village teachers who staff some 150,000 schools in the country’s backwaters. For more than 40 million rural children, education is their only ticket out of poverty, and these teachers are seen as agents of hope and change.

Probably with this in mind, starting this year, the Ministry of Education implemented an initiative under which 2.15 billion yuan (US$338 million) will be devoted annually to financially supporting and training village educators.

Unattractive job

But village teaching remains an unattractive job, not just because of hard living conditions, poor pay and low social status. Lack of upward mobility and career advancement opportunities, among other things, has prompted many village teachers to turn their backs on rural education. Those who stay tend to be either very old or poorly educated themselves ­— or both.

This is despite the fact that every year Chinese normal universities graduate 400,000 more students than needed, many of whom are unable to land jobs as teachers in cities yet are unwilling to teach in the countryside, according to a report recently published by the Paper, a mobile news app run by the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post.

For young teachers like Li, higher pay would certainly be desirable, but not so much as the factors that really accentuate his job pride and keep him dedicated to his work: a full-fledging social campaign to invest in human capital.

Over the past few years, social organizations, businesses and charity foundations have pitched in with efforts to boost basic education coverage.

No longer content with merely donating money to build schools, they have rolled out initiatives to train village teachers on their own.

Li and Zhang are beneficiaries of such initiatives. In mid-October, they and another 18 village teachers chosen from schools in Ningxia, Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan, were treated to a five-day study trip to Shanghai, where they visited local schools to become better acquainted with modern educational ideas and practices. The trip was sponsored by Bosch China, a subsidiary of the German supplier of automotive parts and systems.

“It really broadened our horizons. We felt how far behind we lagged our urban peers in terms of understanding education,”Zhang said. She was particularly amazed at the ways in which their Shanghai counterparts encourage students to open their minds. At her school, left-behind children often keep to themselves and shy away from communication. “It’s hard to get them to confide in the teachers,”Zhang said with a sigh.

However, she recalled seeing a game at Shixi Primary School in Shanghai that is designed to foster communication. Students are meant to fold a piece of paper several times and then cut a hole based on teachers’ instructions. Invariably, the holes come in different shapes due to miscommunication.

“This kind of education through playing games is entirely new to me. The moral is that as teachers and students we are supposed to show empathetic understanding for others’ perspectives,” said Zhang.

In the opinion of Zheng Huili, director of the Bosch China Charity Center (BCCC), developing teachers’ knowledge and mentality are equally important and should go hand in hand. “A big portion of our training programs catered to rural teachers are centered on communication and self-development,” she said.

The extent to which these modern educational practices can be emulated in a totally different environment remains unclear, but Zheng was confident they could inspire change. “They can bring back what they learned here and apply it to their daily work,” she said.

Yao Wen, deputy secretary-general of the government-affiliated China Youth Development Foundation, said that such well-meaning corporate efforts as Bosch’s are the missing piece of a puzzle.

Although education authorities have instituted measures to offer training opportunities to village teachers, many failed to percolate to the level of townships or villages. Hence, “the kind of workshop run by Bosch is in itself a huge incentive,” as teachers are keen to be updated on the latest developments in education. “This really matters a lot to them,” Yao told Shanghai Daily.

So far Bosch China has hosted its workshop twice, and a third time is coming next year.

According to Zheng, head of the BCCC, since its inception in 2011 the entity has sponsored the construction of schools and school canteens in central and western China. It has also been behind a movement to install heating facilities in Tibetan-populated areas to help herdsmen fend off the cold.

In continuing that philanthropic tradition, Zheng envisions a future where more resources will be channeled into building up mental infrastructure — namely, informed approaches to education — alongside physical infrastructure.