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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Opinion -> 
Shared education promotes social equity
    2016-04-11  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

    Wu Guangqiang

    jw368@163.com

    RECENTLY, a piece of news made headlines that, in my view, is spoffish.

    A physics teacher from Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province, made 18,842 yuan (US$2,890) in an hour teaching classes online, but educational authorities are calling for a ban on this teaching model, according to China National Radio.

    Wang Yu’s tutoring course on high school physics has had 2,617 students enroll; each lesson costs around 9 yuan.

    With the online portal running the course charging Wang 20 percent, the teacher earned an average of 18,842 yuan per hour.

    Online education services are booming in China. A well-known tutoring site claims to offer eight middle and high school courses with 15 million registered student users.

    Online teachers are overjoyed with the extra income. A college English teacher said she earned about 50,000 yuan in two months, with the largest class attracting 1,700 online students. A math teacher pocketed a staggering 40,000 yuan an hour. According to the founder of one tutoring site, some of his teachers can earn over a million yuan a year.

    But this has displeased local educational authorities. An official from the Education Bureau of Nanjing said the city bans teachers from offering paid tutoring to students, including online services.

    Currently, Nanjing’s educational watchdog’s ban is justifiable because the Education Ministry stipulates that in-service teachers of primary and secondary education be banned from getting involved in paid tutoring to students either at school or off campus.

    To some degree, the ban is reasonable and necessary as past experience showed that some teachers who were busy making money in extracurricular classes no longer took their school teaching seriously. Some even intentionally lured their students to attend their paid courses.

    As for non-in-service teachers, there is no restriction on their income levels.

    But some adjustment to the ban is called for to meet new conditions. Globally, sharing economy is emerging and it will help distribute limited resources in a more even and efficient way, thus making societies fairer. China has also made “sharing” one of its new ideas for economic growth, along with “innovation, coordination, green and open.”

    Sharing is not a new concept. Limited resources left people no choice but to share certain goods or services. It was a tradition for old Chinese farmers to share things, from farming tools to labor.

    Three major drivers enable the sharing of resources for a broad variety of new goods and services as well as new industries. First, customer behavior for many goods and services changes from ownership to sharing. Second, online social networks and electronic markets link consumers more easily. And third, mobile devices and electronic services make the use of shared goods and services more convenient.

    Car sharing and accommodation sharing are becoming increasing popular around the world, for instance.

    

    In China, however, the sharing of educational resources will be more relevant and urgent because of the extremely uneven distribution of the educational resources.

    With its vast territory and unbalanced economic development levels, China suffers from a stunning gap in terms of education levels between urban and rural areas, between eastern and western areas, between coastal and hinterland areas, between the Han and minority groups, and even between schools in the same city.

    Given such factors as the huge amount of investment in construction of education infrastructure and the amount of time it takes to train teachers, the gap can hardly be narrowed in the foreseeable future, not to mention to be filled completely.

    Yet the sharing of educational resources can make a big difference.

    Take for example the above-mentioned online tutoring courses on physics and math. For attendees, the cost of 9 to 23 yuan is the equivalent of a bowl of noodles, which is affordable for most parents. But what the students learn from an experienced teacher could be invaluable.

    The significance of shared education cannot be overstated for China. Educational authorities should act immediately to readjust policies to promote this new mode of education.

    (The author is an English tutor and freelance writer.)

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Shenzhen Daily E-mail:szdaily@szszd.com.cn