As their parents follow the seasonal rhythms and roam with their herds across northwest China's Gansu Province searching for lush new pastures, the children of migrant herdsmen are now staying put in comfortable spacious classrooms.
The classrooms are in new boarding schools built in grasslands to replace the open-air schools that used to follow the herdsmen's tents and were called "schools on horseback."
As one of the five largest grazing regions in China, Gansu boasts 16 million hectares of natural grassland. It is the home of 3.2 million herdsmen of several ethnic minority groups such as the Tibetan, Hui, Mongolian, Kazakh and Uygur.
In previous years, the herdsmen's children only received intermittent elementary education while they traveled.
To improve the educational environment in the country's vast grazing regions and make sure all school-age children receive the quality education they deserve, pilot boarding school programs have been introduced in the province's Aksay Kazakh Autonomous County.
Each of the province's 116 villages engaged in stockbreeding now has a boarding school for school-age children of the ethnic minority herdsmen.
In addition, each of the province's 10 counties - where the local economy mainly relies on animal husbandry - now has a high school for boarders.
Ba Jiankun, a local educational official, said: "Boarding schools have permanent grounds and that has saved traveling by both staff and students."
A long-term investment program aimed at improving the educational environment and the quality of education in grazing regions is now being put into practice.
According to Ba Jiankun, over 3,000 school heads and teachers have been trained for animal-husbandry regions in the province over the past few years.
During this year's summer holiday, a course jointly run by China and New Zealand will train head teachers for boarding primary schools.
All primary and high schools in the Aksay Kazakh Autonomous County have been equipped with computer-assisted teaching facilities and language-teaching equipment.
The boarding schools have adopted a flexible management system because of the nomadic lifestyle in the grazing areas.
If the school is close to grazing areas, the pupils are granted regular leave once a month to spend time with their families. If the school is too far away, longer leave is given every few months.
(China Daily June 19, 2002)
