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“Why do we have so few male teachers?” asks middle school student, Li Tie, who lives in Shijiazhuang, the capital of northern China’s Hebei Province.
That’s according to a report in the Hebei Daily Wednesday. The paper reports that when the student recalled his kindergarten, primary and junior high school days, he found him surrounded by women.
Li Tie’s experience is not uncommon. When you visit Chinese kindergartens, primary or middle schools, you may be surprised to see there are very few male teachers on campus.
Why is this so? In order to explore the issue, the newspaper interviewed some teachers, students, and parents in the provincial capital, Shijiazhuan, which lies some 200 kilometers south of Beijing.
A mother surnamed Zhao said that her fifth-grade son was very excited one day last autumn when he reported that he had a male head teacher for the new semester. Several months later, the boy appeared a little different, becoming more active in class, and showing more confidence, the mother told the newspaper.
One primary school in the city has more than 100 teachers, but there are only seven men amongst them. Why do we have so few male teachers, both students and parents frequently ask?
In China, very few male high school students want to join teacher-training programs at the country’s normal schools. In a class of 50-60 students majoring in education, English or music, there might be only 6-7 boys, sometimes even fewer.
The Hebei Daily believes social prejudice has prevented an increase in the number of male teachers in schools, as few parents or students have an ambition to become teachers.
Provincial authorities make a rough estimate that the male to female ratio in teaching schools in the province stood at 1:2 in 1987. By 1995 it was 1:3. And the situation is getting ever worse in China’s normal schools.
The Hebei Daily says that some people look down upon primary school teachers, especially male teachers, and also note that schoolteachers are not very well paid, which is another major reason cited for the shortage of male teachers.
Cheng Jun, an expert on primary and middle school education in Shijiazhuang, says that the imbalance between male and female teachers is a dominant feature of primary and secondary schools worldwide. Many countries, however, have begun to address the problem. Cheng Jun cites the example of the UK, where some schools have hired retired police officers for teaching positions, with the hope that the male officers would exert a positive male influence on children.
China has been suffering from a shortage of male teachers for a long time, and the problem has got more serious in recent years, the Hebei Daily quotes Cheng Jun as saying.
A child’s character would be normally be fixed before the age of 14, the expert says, so it is no good for children to be surrounded by female influence, from kindergarten to primary school. Like children from single parent families, school children without male teachers are likely to encounter some character problems.
The expert calls on more boys and young men to join the teaching staff at primary and middle schools, saying the shortage of male teachers isn’t in the interests of the Chinese nation.
(CRI November 16, 2005)
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