Six students, four grades: This is the enrollment of Mengjiashan Primary School, built and designed for about 100 students, in the landlocked province of Gansu in northwest China.
"There is nothing else worth worrying about. My only anxiety is dwindling student numbers," school principal Chen Aibang said. "It would be a great pity for such a good campus to have no students at all."
Mengjiashan is not an isolated case. In China's rural areas, the most humble elementary schools have been gradually bidding farewell to dilapidated buildings, thanks to heavy government funding in recent years, but rolls keep falling.
Gansu alone is now home to more than 3,700 schools with no more than ten students each.
STAFF ARE THE KEY
Despite plentiful government funding for rural education, the gap between urban and rural areas has not be bridged.
"The teachers are the critical element in ensuring quality teaching, the core of social equality," said Chu Zhaohui, researcher with the National Institute of Educational Sciences.
"A lack of teachers leads to substandard education, making it hard to curb the outward flow of students," he said. "Many rural schools have become 'pretty yet humble' as a result."
A low-rise mud-brick structure, built in the 1980s, nestles quietly among the two-story houses in a village in Fengqiu County, one of the poorest areas of central China's Henan Province. It is the residence of four members of Du Chengfeng's family. Du has taught for more than 20 years at the village middle school, earning a little over 2,000 yuan (314 U.S dollars) a month.
"If a teacher's welfare and status are the lowest in a village, how can he make his students to appreciate the value of knowledge?" the veteran pedagogue asked.
With a meager monthly wage of less than 2,000 yuan, rural teachers in Du's county moonlight as taxi drivers, work on construction sites during summer vacations or become street vendors during festivals, to make their ends meet.
Du is one of 3.3 million teachers in 150,000 schools for over 40 million rural students. These teachers play an invaluable role in the country's education system.
