Family Education: Key to Ending Inter-generational Poverty
Text by Zhu Wenzhang
My mother is a teacher. Once I stayed with her for several days when she was teaching in a mountain village in an extremely poor county. It was during the short stay that I was shocked by the poverty the local villagers suffered.
There, the locals primarily lived on natural resources that they could get from nearby mountains and rivers. Incapable of doing heavy labor, for example, the elderly and children fished carps in the Yellow River flowing by their village, and then trekked miles to the highway to sell their catch to passersby. In big cities, wild carps from the Yellow River were priced very high at dozens of yuan per 500 grams. At such price, though, carps were still in short supply. However, the locals sold each carp (which weighs 1-1.5 kilograms) at a price of only 7 to 8 yuan.
In villages like this, it seems that poverty, like a genetic disease, is inherited from one generation to another. However, education – both school education and family education – is the key to changing the economic situation of the villagers.
The most important is to make the younger generation aware that they themselves can change their poverty situation. Inadequate education may result in negative impact on a person’s mind and affect his future development. Therefore, it is particularly important for national authorities to relocate excellent educational resources to areas where they are most needed.
Apart from undeveloped elementary education, the lack of family education is another cause for inter-generational poverty. To ensure that “left-behind children” in poverty-stricken areas get sufficient and healthy family education, the first thing is to solve the employment problem of their parents, so that they don’t have to leave their homes to seek jobs in far-away towns, and children will enjoy better family education.
As an employee in an internet firm, I am keenly aware of the tremendous changes that the internet has brought to our lives. If we build a good database for precision poverty alleviation on the basis of internet thinking, we can facilitate the information communication between the supply side and the demand side; and, people in poor areas will know what natural resources their hometowns have and can be explored and utilized. With the internet as a platform, they will be thus connected to the outside world and will earn incomes without leaving their homes. When the younger generation shakes off poverty, the entire village will have a better development in the future.
In a word, as a new and efficient tool, the internet will definitely help China’s poverty-relief undertakings make breakthroughs and bring hopes to the impoverished areas for a bright future.