Professor Roscoe is one of the most respected economists. He speaks fluent Chinese and came to China to study rural issues more than 40 years ago. Ten years ago, he started the REAP "Rural Education Action Plan", and spent half his time conducting field surveys in the poorest rural areas of China to study rural education in China through first-hand data. It is no exaggeration to say that his understanding of rural education in China is deeper than that of most China scholars.
In his research, he found that the most important reason why so many rural children can't go to high school is that their cognitive ability is far behind from the beginning. Through the comprehensive test of thousands of rural children's data, it shows that the cognitive ability of rural children is half a standard deviation lower than that of urban children when they enter kindergarten. This is mainly because a large number of rural children are left-behind children, often brought up by grandparents with very low education level. Even if a small number of children's parents stay in the countryside, it is often difficult for them to play games, toys, tell stories and listen to music for their children like urban parents. Heckman, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, found very early that the communication, interaction, companionship and play of caregivers are very important for children's early intellectual development, and this early cognitive gap will not narrow with the growth of age, but will evolve into a huge educational gap in the later period. Therefore, the cognitive ability of rural children will obviously lag behind that of urban children by the age of three, which will eventually lead to the failure of most children to complete high school.
So how to solve the education problem in rural areas of China? This seems to be a long-standing problem. Rural education is short of everything, money, teachers, students and advanced educational concepts. To solve this problem, of course, it is best to let rural children live with their parents as much as possible. Rural parents can hardly find jobs in rural areas. In order to make a living, they have to go to work in the city and only go home on holidays. Professor Roscoe's solution to this problem is to set up an early education center in rural areas to help and coach rural parents, grandparents and other people who are actually in charge of guardianship and teach them how to play games, toys and tell stories for their children. Professor Luo has built several early education centers in Shaanxi and other places. The preliminary experimental results show that these early education centers can obviously improve the cognitive ability of rural children.