Away from China’s bustling cities,
a crisis is mounting in rural areas
that will impact the entire country.
By the time China’s children reach working age,
⅓ of them will be intellectually stunted.
In rural China, 50% of 8th graders
score below 90 on IQ tests.
According to the 2010 census,
only 24% of China's labor force attended high school.
With China’s booming economy placing new demands
on its workers, economist Scott Rozelle asks:
“ What do you do with 400 million people
in your labor force who can’t learn?
"That can't switch jobs?"
"This problem of healthy cognitive development,
especially among China’s rural population,
which is about 60-70% of its babies,
is the biggest problem that China faces
that no one knows about.”
To tackle this problem, Rozelle established
collaborations with researchers
and institutional partners to form:
The group first tried to boost test scores
by improving children’s health.
They conducted surveys in rural areas
and found that 27% of children were anemic,
which is an indicator of malnutrition,
37% had intestinal worms
and 20% had myopia.
The researchers realized that any one of these factors
would obstruct education.
If you’re sick how can you learn?
REAP provided students with vitamins,
de-worming treatment, and corrective glasses--
Sure enough, their math scores improved far more
than their peers who didn’t receive interventions.
These findings helped convince China’s
central government to establish
a school lunch program in 2011
that now benefits more than
20 million rural students daily.
There’s a giant body of evidence showing that
it's the first 1000 days that sets the stage for later
educational achievement and adult health.
So, Rozelle’s team started focusing on children
in the earliest stages of life.
In 2013, they tested 1800 babies
from 348 villages in impoverished areas
of the Qinling Mountain Region.
49% were anemic and 29% scored below normal
on a standard intelligence assessment for babies
called the Bayley Test.
But this time, when the team intervened with vitamins,
test scores didn’t improve.
They're entering a time when they should be
starting to learn other things but with
very low levels of cognition.
That’s when Rozelle turned to parenting
as the possible culprit.
In 2014, REAP started asking caregivers how they parented.
Just a ⅓ reported playing with or singing to their child,
11% had told a story to their child the previous day,
and less than 5% had read to their child.
REAP then studied 513 child/caregiver pairs.
Half received in-home parental training,
which involved weekly coaching for 6 months.
The study found that the training brought Bayley scores
up to normal but only when the mother was present.
With many mothers leaving
rural homes to find jobs in cities,
30% to 40% of rural children are raised by grandma.
When a grandmother received
the in-home training however,
the child’s Bayley score barely budged.
The trainers had trouble reaching the children
and their mothers in these remote regions
and the process was time-consuming and expensive.
The in-home visits did little to relieve
the isolation of kids,
whose mothers weren’t in the picture.
What’s more, a questionnaire filled out by the mothers
who did remain with their children suggests
40% of them showed signs of depression.
To overcome these obstacles REAP has embarked
on its most ambitious experiment yet.
The team has targeted 100 villages in
The Qinling Mountain Region and set up
early childhood education centers in half of them.
There’s free play, group activities, reading,
and one-one parent training.
They are following 1200 baby/caregiver pairs
to see how a stimulating environment
and effective parenting
shape the intelligence of young children.
“ We went in one generation from everyone raising
who they thought were to be subsistence farmers
and now we need to raise college kids.
And that’s true in Latin America,
it's true in other middle-income countries.
Unless you get zero to three right
there’s going to be huge huge problems.”
The first assessment of the childhood
education centers will be completed in early 2018.
If their interventions are successful,
Rozelle and his team hope to convince
Chinese authorities to scale up
and establish early education centers nationwide.