As in any new movement, mistakes and trials abound,
compounded by the constant fear that officials will crack
down. To combat the problems, educators and pastors
are training teachers, writing curricula, and setting up an
independent accreditation agency. Courageous parents,
more concerned about their children entering the king-
dom of heaven than entering top-ranked Peking University
or Tsinghua University, are plunging headfirst into this
counter-cultural move.
JASMINE ZHU, a petite and soft-spoken mother of a
6-year-old (I’ve changed Zhu’s name and others so as
not to help persecution-minded officials), is one of those
parents. She spent her formative years in the atheistic
public school system, where teachers call belief in God a
mere superstition. When Zhu first heard the gospel, the
idea of a living, all-powerful God was difficult to grasp: it
contradicted everything she had ever learned. As she grew
in her faith, married, and became a mother, she wanted to
raise her daughter to love God and knew that sending her
to public school could sabotage that.
When Zhu’s daughter was two, a woman from her
church in Eastern China attended a Christian teacher’s
training and excitedly returned to tell a group of Christian
parents what she had learned. Those six or seven couples
became the school’s original “board of directors.” With one
trained teacher and another mother, they started an unof-
ficial kindergarten class for their 3-year-olds. (That’s when
Chinese children go to kindergarten, which includes what
Americans call preschool. Since kindergarten is not part
of China’s nine years of compulsory education, starting a
private kindergarten is easier than opening an elementary
or middle school.)
Zhu, a public school teacher herself, quit her job to teach
at her daughter’s school two years later. At first, she wasn’t
sure what Christian education entailed, but she learned on
the job as she attended training courses and prayed: “God’s
grace exceeded what I asked for.” The starkest difference
she saw between Christian and public schools was the
relationship between teachers and students. Public school
teachers worked to control the kids outwardly—often
through shame and fear—without caring for their internal
problems. She saw Christian teachers loving students,
and for the first time since becoming a teacher, she began
examining how teachers could change lives and not just
shovel information.
Her school has faced difficulties throughout its four-year
existence. It has changed locations every year due to visits
from officials, expensive rent, and safety issues. This fall it
will move to a larger space on the outskirts of town that
will give children room to run around, but the new build-
ing is too far for some of the parents to make the trek. As
a result, money is tight as the school only has 19 students
enrolled and 11 instructors teaching kindergarten and first,
second, and seventh grades.
“Maybe we are doing this imperfectly, and there are still
areas that need to mature,” Zhu noted. “But this is better
than knowing we could start our own school, yet still
sending our kids to public schools because of the world’s
standards.” The choice is a permanent one: parents who
send their kids to Christian kindergartens can still enter
the public school system, but if they pull their kids out of
the system after first grade, the students can never get back
in, save for connections with high-level education officials.
IN THE 1800s Western missionaries found evangelism
hard going and tried to reach the Chinese by building
hospitals and schools. By one count, China had 6,000
Christian schools by 1925; but when Communists gained
power in 1949, they expelled missionaries and shuttered
Christian schools unless they secularized. Some schools
moved to Taiwan, and others completely shut down.
John Liu, a Christian education leader in contemporary
China, says dependence on Westerners contributed to the
failure of the schools. Sitting in a McDonald’s, Liu used
plastic coffee lids to show how missionary schools rarely
developed deep roots in Chinese soil: once the foreign-
ers were gone—Liu brushed the caps aside—so was the
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