In this edited extract, he's in Yunnan Province in China's south-west. Where education matters Teachers have a role and a status in China they don't have here. But education matters far more and is taken far more seriously. At 9.30 pm we would be walking around in the streets of the towns and a gush of students would emerge from the school gates where they all would have been doing their homework. In the shopfronts, families would be supervising the work of younger children.
Education is a family responsibility.
Both the child and the parent must protect the future of the family through educational success. Language and education Because of the nature of the language, becoming literate in Chinese is a quite different sort of task from becoming literate in English. The 'Thousand Character Mass Education' movement began in, of all places, France during the First World War among the Chinese labourers working behind Allied lines. One of them, James Yen, decided to do something about the illiteracy that plagued this group. Recognising the difficulty of, and length of time required for, coming to terms with and memorising this many characters, Yen devised a limited vocabulary of 1000 characters closely corresponding to the language actually used by this group of workers.