Hundreds of parents who bravely protested the planned closure of a private school, Fengyi Elementary School, in the Hebei Province of China have won a victory, for now, against local officials (“Mass protest by parents prompts reversal of private school closure in China,” Radio Free Asia, May 15, 2025).
The school is successful. Because of high demand, a lottery system is used to determine who may enroll. Meanwhile, says one parent, the public schools to which local bureaucrats had planned to send the children ousted from Fengyi Elementary have “a reputation for chaotic management and high turnover of teachers.”
High quality, so…
The parent says that the government “saw that the school had high educational quality and that parents with financial means sent their children to Fengyi Elementary School, so they wanted to close it down.”
RAF notes that the closure “appeared to be part of a broader government effort that began several years ago to scale back private education and boost state-run schools….
“In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to scale back private education and bring private schools under state control with the justification that it would promote fairness in education and reduce costs for parents. However, it has more recently eased restrictions on private tutoring.”
Sounds like the Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. National Education Association are reading from the same script. The very fact that private schools, because of their often better quality and greater effectiveness, are luring students from troubled public schools is supposed to prove that the private schools are competing “unfairly” and must be gotten rid of. Such presumptions are grounded in egalitarian and communist horsepucky, not fact. In fact, better things really are better.
The RFA story doesn’t indicate whether a desire to more easily brainwash children helps explain the Chinese government’s antagonism toward private schools in Hebei. Often, this motive dominates. For example, the goal of molding young minds to be more “patriotic” along Party lines is the government’s main and perhaps only reason for closing many Tibetan schools and carting the displaced children to Party-controlled boarding schools stripped of Tibetan language and culture.
