Recently, the provincial Discipline Inspection Commission reported ten typical cases of infringing on the people's interests. Liu Yanwen, principal of Guangzhou Dongfeng East Road Primary School, ranked first on the list with an involvement of 35.75 million yuan and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Similarly, Zheng Xiaohui, principal of Po Tou No.1 Middle School in Zhanjiang City, and Pang Xiangpei, vice-principal, illegally collected a total of more than 1.571 million yuan in fees for school selection, review classes, and tutoring, and privately deposited 1 million yuan of public funds. Liu Yanwen, Zheng Xiaohui, and Pang Xiangpei are not the first principals to fall because of school selection fees, and as long as these fees are not abolished, there will be more principals who suffer.
Students usually have a reverent attitude towards teachers, partly due to the atmosphere of the campus and classroom, and partly due to the intentional support from parents and society. This reverence helps maintain classroom order and aids students in receiving knowledge from their teachers. Therefore, adults, even if they know that teachers are ordinary people who can make mistakes, avoid speaking ill of teachers in front of students. In Chinese terms, this is called "respecting the superior and concealing for the virtuous."
It is unclear what impact the frequent reports of principals and teachers involved in corruption might have on children, but at least it would cause great shock among the students of those schools. Knowledge can be self-studied in isolation, but values must be learned through interpersonal interactions. To prevent children from developing harmful value orientations, adults deliberately purify the social environment that children can come into contact with, sometimes even resorting to fabrication. Whether it's the Chinese tradition of respecting superiors or European fairy tales, the motives for fiction and falsification are consistent. Western children usually learn by the age of 11 that Santa Claus does not exist. It is said that there have been complaints from parents when elementary school teachers informed students in class that Santa Claus doesn't exist, and I support the parents' complaints. To keep children immersed in the fairy tale world, real-world police and firefighters are not allowed to enter Disneyland.
In a sense, primary and secondary school campuses are similar to the fairyland worlds like Disneyland, isolated from the adult world. The central government has already realized the harm caused by school selection fees, not only issuing repeated orders but also prohibiting schools from charging such fees in multiple articles of the published "Compulsory Education Law." If strictly enforced according to this law, almost all principals of prestigious public schools could be arrested without exception. How can "lawbreakers" face their students? If students know that their principals and teachers are suspected of breaking the law, how can they develop habits of abiding by laws and regulations?
Taxpayers and the government spend enormous costs to establish respect for teachers and keep children away from noise and disturbances, which cannot be ruined by school selection fees. Regardless of how many practical reasons there are to defend school selection fees, for the sake of protecting children's minds, they should be completely rejected. On the contrary, the soil upon which school selection fees survive should be eliminated one by one.
By evenly distributing educational resources, school selection fees lose their basis for survival. Developing the economy may not necessarily be the government's forte, but egalitarianism is something the government excels at. It may be difficult to achieve balance nationwide or across a province, but achieving balance across a city is not hard. Some schools are too popular; they can be privatized. The key is that after resources are balanced, the influence of connections loses its value, making it harder for influential individuals to hold on to them. It is hoped that the experiences of Liu Yanwen, Zheng Xiaohui, and Pang Xiangpei will encourage other principals outside prison walls to stand up against school selection fees, promote educational system reforms, and avoid waiting until they are inside before seeking public understanding and forgiveness.
—This article was published on December 7, 2009, in the *Xin Kuai Bao*.