Chinese President Xi Jinping's speech at China's national conference on education, which highlighted innovation, talent cultivation, and the all-round development of students, has resonated with teaching staff from across the country.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, met individuals and groups who have excelled in the education sector ahead of the conference held in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday.
He extended his Teacher's Day greetings to teachers and others working in the education sector across the country, emphasizing the need to enhance innovation in the education sector, and promote the development of basic and emerging disciplines and interdisciplinary subjects, as well as the cultivation of top-tier talent.
Teacher's Day is marked on Sept 10 in China.
"As teachers, we have a particularly deep understanding of what the general secretary said about the number, caliber, structure and everything else related to the talents needed by the country. The students we are nurturing should be able to play important roles [in national development]. They need to adapt to the drastic changes in the future by building a solid foundation for themselves and become the main driving force for the country's independent innovation endeavors," said Li Junfeng, dean of Xingjian College at Tsinghua University.
"Our vocational education pays more attention to the integration of education and industry. It is safe to say that the technical and skilled talents trained in vocational schools are those especially needed in the national construction process. We hope that our students can become high-caliber technical and skilled workers after graduation," said Yang Yang, a professor at Chongqing Industry Polytechnic College.
Xi also stressed the need for nurturing a new generation of capable young people with sound moral grounding, intellectual ability, physical vigor, aesthetic sensibility, and work skills, which was echoed by Huang Hong, a teacher at Beijing Bayi School.
"We will make sure to get the students with problems like childhood myopia, or who are overweight or physically weak, to participate in actual physical exercise, and teach them about what winning or losing means in the process. Getting them to know how to win and how to lose is the best way to develop their minds," said Huang.
Some representatives from rural schools were inspired by Xi's emphasis on the need to develop high-quality and balanced compulsory education and narrow the attainment gap between urban and rural areas.
"I was born and bred here. I learned from the teachers in this village and they helped me leave the mountains where I was raised. After I graduated from teacher training college in 1996, I made up my mind and returned to my hometown. We have been making every effort to let all children here have equal access to a quality education. I want to bring children from my hometown out of the mountains to see the outside world," said Peng Yusheng, a teacher at Pengjiagou Primary School in Longshan Township in Danjiangkou City, central China's Hubei Province.
"We don't want any children to fall behind, so we persuade them to go to school. Now some newly recruited teachers would like to stay in rural areas, and they are highly qualified. They inject much vitality in to rural education," said He Laihu, vice principal of Linhe District No. 2 Middle School in Bayannur City, in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
China will take action to alleviate the shortage of teaching staff in the next step, according to Yu Weiyue, director of the Department of Teachers' Affairs at the Ministry of Education.
"We will launch a campaign to strengthen teachers in thought by promoting the spirit of educators, continuously improve their teaching capacity, coordinate teaching staff management and teaching resource allocation and effectively resolve the structural shortage of teachers, and the teacher shortage in different stages and regions," said Yu.
Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, education has been a strategic priority in China's development, and academic and support staff across China have been dedicated to making the country more powerful in education, in accordance with the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core.
Xi's speech at national conference on education resonates with teaching staff
