Simon Lichtenberg, a Fudan alumnus who has been trying to unleash the potential of preschool education in once impoverished Butuo County, Sichuan Province, with the simple wish of “doing a good job in education charities”. The 100 preschool classes he helped to set up are benefiting more than 4,600 children every year.
Simon Lichtenberg was enrolled at the International Cultural Exchange School of Fudan University in 1987. He is the founder of the Trayton Group and the Rural Early Education Development Fund(REED).
He was presented the Magnolia Gold Award in 2019 and the Magnolia Silver Award in 2006 by Shanghai Municipality in recognition for his outstanding contributions to the city.
Teenage Simon Lichtenberg in Africa (R)
Simon was only 13 years old when he moved to Zimbabwe with his parents who volunteered to teach in Africa in the 1980s. Since many countries in Africa were in war at that time, the turbulent life of 600 African refugees he was living with made him realize how hard their life was as a result of shortage of food and supplies.
“At that time, my parents thought that Africa needs them more than Denmark and they can make a big difference in Africa. So they chose to teach there,” Simon said.
In poor countries like Mozambique, many people do not want to go back to their home in backward rural areas once they are qualified to teach in the cities. However, about 80 percent of illiterate Mozambicans live in the countryside. Without teachers, literacy improvement is impossible there.
“A town in Chinamay be regarded as a city in Africa. In the rural areas of Africa, you will find people simply living in scattered straw huts,” Simon said.
Simon’s parents therefore set up a school (similar to normal university in China) in Africa to train teachers in rural areas and persuade them to stay and teach there. Over the past 35 years, tens of thousands of teachers have graduated from the school founded by Simon’s parents.
Simon believes that his parents’ teaching experience in Africa and his own life experience in Africa have made him learn to endure hardships and inspired him to be a part of charity work.
With an enterprise to manage, Simon cannot not work full-time in the countryside like his parents, so he chose to establish REED in China to carry forward his parents’ ideal of what rural education should be like.
The fund helps the local bureau of education to improve the quality of early childhood education for preschool children aging from 3 to 6 years old and offers training for local teachers, with the donation from business people and with the support from Shanghai Charity Foundation and many other organizations.
In the early stage of this fund, Simon encountered many problems, among which the most urgent one was to decide whom he should help first.
Referring to the theory of Mary Young, a professor at Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, who believes that the age between 3 to 6 years old is the most critical in human development, thus decided to invest in preschool education for children aged from 3 to 6 in China’s poverty areas. He had once spent a lot of time doing policy research in developing countries, with a focus on education in China’s poor areas, so he hopes to use the limited resources he has to realize targeted poverty alleviation.
After preliminary investigations, Simon chose Butuo County, which is located in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest of Sichuan Province.
In recent years, China has been investing huge sums in paving roads, building houses and improving infrastructure in poverty-stricken counties. It also aims to build at least one kindergarten for each village.
However, the overall quality of preschool education in Butuo and even the whole Prefecture was far from satisfactory. The lack of educational resources, shortage of professionally trained teachers and poor economic situation were the barriers for children to get into school.
“I learned that some locals believed that clothes would be spoiled if washed, that taking showers would make one sick and that one couldn’t open windows when lighting a fire in the house,” saidSimon, who thinks the main reason for such beliefs is the lack of education.
“These local beliefs are not entirely untrue, as the average temperatures of -10°C in Butuo and an altitude of 3,000 meters may increase the risks of illness when people take a bath or open windows at home. But no showering or ventilation at all is a terrible health and safety hazard,” Simon said.
He found children in Butuo a bit smelly when he entered their classrooms for the first time, as some locals went with the habit of living with animals and the children rarely took showers – because in some places there was not enough water, and mostly only cold water – but also because of lack of this habit. They looked sooty and sometimes even got poisoned when making fire indoors without opening any window.
Simon holds that children taught with good habits at school will ask their families to wash hands, take showers and open windows when lighting a fire at home.
In addition to developing good living habits, teaching children to speak Mandarin is a top priority for his charity project. Butuo is home to the largest population of the Yi ethnic group in China and Yi (language) is widely spoken among children. However, Mandarin is the only language used in China’s primary school education.
Simon found through interviews that some first-grade pupils could not understand their teachers because they couldn’t speak Mandarin. He was therefore determined to make a change and build their confidence by helping them learn Mandarin.
A few years after the project was implemented, Simon conducted a survey through which he found there is a big difference between children who have attended preschool classes and those who have not. Children who have received preschool education not only get higher scores in primary school, but also have better physical and mental development. “They are able to grow up without a sense of inferiority as well.”
In 2019, Simon was in Huoluojue Village, Butuo County, a preschool education center sponsored by REED.
In the first four years, Simon devoted a lot of time and money to the training, coaching and supervision of teachers. Due to the low salary, graduates with bachelor’s degrees often left Butuo to work in big cities. But for those young high school graduates who stayed in Butuo to teach, the low salary fails to motivate them to give their best at jobs and some of them would even skip work, which is very detrimental to the development of children.
The core task ofSimon’s team at that time was to intervene in preschool education through supervision and management. After reaching cooperation with the local government, both the requirements and welfare for the teachers have been enhanced with stricter management systems and codes of conduct set up. The attendance of the teachers is now under supervision and teachers with good performance will be given rewards.
The project has developed some good tools for the teachers to help them prepare better lessons, e.g. a “POF Teachers Logbook” which has been used with success in many other counties. (And beside logbook also tools for improving management and avoiding rote learning in preschools)
Over the past six years, Simon has scaled up its support, from 6 classes to 100 classes, covering 60 villages. Simon, together with his 10 team members, not only has completed training and supervision of more than 200 teachers, but also dealt with the problems of transportation, water, electricity and dropouts that were common in the mountainous areas on a regular basis.
Classrooms of firstgraders and secondgraders in primary schools were usually located in larger villages and counties, while preschool classrooms were scattered in different villages. Students and their parents usually had to walk several kilometers to get to school, so many local parents were reluctant to send their children to school.
While the temperature fell below zero in winter, many children came to school with summer shoes and no socks. Simon’s team has helped to distribute lots of winter clothes, blankets and shoes to the children in the cold mountains of Butuo.
At first, the parents didn’t take preschool education seriously, so Simon’s team told these parents that as long as their children attended preschool, they would be offered free nutritious lunch with meat, soup and vegetables, rather than having potatoes baked in pits for every meal as they did at home.
When parents saw the practical benefits and the growth of their children in the preschool classes, their attitudes began to change. Gradually, preschool education has drawn greater attention from and even welcomed by the local parents.
“Now many more parents are willing to attend the parent-teacher meetings,” said Simon.
With the help of Simon, over 4,000 children each year have been able to receive good quality preschool education, more than the number of employees in his company. His goal is to help a lot more children in places like Butuo to receive good quality preschool education.
