Lanxi

Inspiration

This August, Barkley and Jason went with a team of 10 Yalies and 40 Chinese college students to teach at a rural high school in Shanxi, a mountainous province in central China isolated from the metropolis. Because less than 5% of students at the school pass the grueling gaokao exam, most teachers and principals have lost hope. During a team meeting, the principal called his students “left-behind children”, the dumb kids who will never leave their villages. Sure, some of these expectations came true. Our students live in poverty, under a suffocating education system that often sours their goals. However, as we talked to students for hours and heard their stories, our initial patronization turned into inspiration. One girl’s parents both work in the province capital to send money home, and although she misses them, she works hard in hopes of getting into college and helping her family. The night before we left, another student gave us a handwritten letter saying that these 10 days were the best 10 days of his high school experience. We had doubted what impact a short-term teaching trip can actually make, and never imagined hearing such touching words. Whether it’s teaching sex ed or mental health, having ukulele jam sessions, or bonding over 1 a.m. conversations about their dreams of seeing the world beyond their village, our students fuel our drive to fight for education equity. Instead of being pessimistic and incapable, the students we befriended were driven and resourceful, overpowering financial pressures and family instability with persistence. The high school in Shanxi is only a tiny corner of the problem, which has immense scope and dire implications. According to the Stanford Rural Education Action Program (REAP), rapid urbanization has “left-behind” 60 million children in Chinese villages to be raised by relatives. This lack of parental mentorship is detrimental to keeping kids in school. Some 3 million teenagers in villages drop out before earning a high school diploma. The numbers in urban versus rural education are egregious: in 2013, Beijing spent over 28,000 RMB ($4,250) on every high school student, compared to only 5,500 RMB ($835) in the poor central province of Henan. Reflecting upon our field experience this summer, we strive to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds reach their full potential. We cannot stay complacent with one successful trip and hope to tackle the problem with a more sustainable, efficient, and impactful solution.
We gathered at HackHarvard to create a social enterprise that leverages Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs) to foster youth empowerment and cultural connection. Our web platform, Lenxi, will connect high-achieving students from rural China with Mandarin language learners abroad through affordable tutoring. Using free communication applications such as Skype, Whatsapp, or WeChat (almost all Shanxi students we taught had access), rural students will serve as paid peer tutors for Mandarin learners in America. Through our field partners in China, we will personally identify interested high-achieving rural students and post their tutor profiles on the website. Next, Mandarin language learners can search for criteria such as time availability, language level, and mutual interests to match with a peer tutor. Some possible services include video speaking practice, proofreading, translation, and curriculum-based discussion. Our project differs from traditional pen-pal programs in that the rural Chinese tutors receive financial reward for their service.