Learning To Enjoy Study Will Boost School Attendance

He said this can be solved by increasing the diversity of teaching content and students' evaluation indexes, which is part of the State Council meeting's decision.

"Currently most students feel discouraged by their poor performances at school mainly because of bad results in exams, feeling they have no hope of getting into high school or universities," Chu said. "But if we can make the education content more diversified and not too exam-oriented, students are likely to find that studying is actually fun, regardless what score they get in exams."

The premier said at the July 19 State Council meeting that the government "should not only guarantee the basic living standards of the public, but also ensure that eligible children, especially those from poverty-affected families, receive compulsory education to help eliminate poverty among those families", stressing that poverty should not continue from one generation to another.

Chu said another major reason for those school dropouts is these students have difficulty adjusting to boarding school.

China started an overhaul to establish centralized school buildings in the late 1990s, canceling a number of schools with very few teachers and students in rural areas. These students were then put in schools in townships and counties with better education resources, teachers and equipment. Yet a consequence, Chu said, is that many students with homes in villages have to board due to long distances. But many were too young, he said.

"We did field investigations on the reason why many students decide to quit school back in 2011 and visited a number of primary boarding schools in Hebei province as well as the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. And we noticed that many children at the age of 7 or 8 at boarding school can barely take care of themselves, such as getting up on time, sleeping without their parents and washing clothes," Chu said.

He suggested that an appropriate age for students to go to boarding school is 10.

"At the same time, schools need to have dorm teachers who are, in particular, responsible for taking care of children's daily lives for those under 10," he suggested.