Message from juliedavis

[Anonymous]

Country Teachers (1993); China

Country Teachers is about a young woman who accepts a position teaching in a poor rural mountain school in China. She lives in the country with her parents, but she has failed her college entrance exams twice. Since she has limited opportunities, she asks her uncle (who has important connections) to get her a job. She is disappointed that the only thing he can offer her is a teaching position at a country school with minimal resources, but since she lacks proper certification, she is not qualified for a position in an urban school, where she feels she would have a better chance of succeeding.

Upon arriving at the school, she meets her three male colleagues, all of whom also lack proper certification but have many years of teaching experience. After observing her colleagues’ classes, she is entrusted with her own pupils, and she shows great promise as a teacher, although she and her colleagues do not know if or when they will be paid for their service, as they must wait for a visit from the government. She helps prepare the children for the government’s visit, but she is shocked when she hears her colleagues falsify their educational statistics to secure funding and salaries. After telling the government the truth, she is shunned by her colleagues. Finally, she is able to save face and they even nominate her for certification when the opportunity arises.

This movie is a great companion to a recent NPR broadcast on rural teachers (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5413877). It would be a great resource to show students how a good education can help people escape poverty. All of the children who attend the mountain school in the movie come from poor families, and many have to stop attending in order to go to work in the fields to help their families. Many students in LAUSD can relate to this, and it would be a great tool to show the struggles of children everywhere to get educated. The young teacher in the movie also illustrates this quite well, as she comes from a poor family who pushes her to excel. They are very disappointed that she has not passed her exams after two tries, and they reinforce the idea that education is the key to escaping poverty. The movie also shows how much many of these parents and teachers must sacrifice in order to educate these children properly. The teachers pass up opportunities to teach in the city where they could earn a better income, because they have become attached the cause of educating the poorer children. This demonstrates how education becomes more of a community endeavor if people are truly going to be “educated.” In addition, the movie explores government involvement and the struggle to fully fund education.