The Economist: Not Educating the Masses.

In the Economist the reader is intrigued by only the title because there are not images.

My curiosity was caught by the article: Not Educating the Masses. Indeed, reading the title, I thought about my future, so I wanted to read it.

Considering what was written in the subtitle, the proportion of rural students at university has dramatically declined.

The article is about China’s university, where admissions are based only on the points scored in one exam. In the first paragraph, the writer started to present the problem saying what government did at the beginning. It comprehended proportions and data about test did at universities in China. Government has taken its first tentative steps towards reforming the system. It would move towards an evaluation process where the test did not make up 100% of the score and it would include subjective assessments of extra-curricular activities. Some educators have seen it as a good reform to help getting into university students from poorer, rural areas.

In the second paragraph, the intelligent reader could find other data that are about the proportions of rural students at universities. The writer also explain why there is a problem with the proportions of rural students.

While in 1970s the proportion of rural students at university was of 50%, in 2010 was down to 17%.

In many classes there is not one student from rural China. There are many reasons for that. The first is that urban education is better financed; the second is that many of the best high schools are full of the children of local officials and some students are admitted because of who they are.

At the end of the article he summed up the geographical problem and the educative problems. After that he also explained what government was trying to do to solve the problem.

Geography counts too because universities set quotas for the number of students they will admit from a certain province. As education has become more competitive, it has become more commercialised. In big cities students have better opportunities. The government is trying to tackle the problem by requiring them to increase the quotes of rural students.

This is a scientific article because he had statistic data and he was about an important theme that is still discussed. It is about a problem for the society that is stuck in this situation where a lot of young are not admitted to university because they arrive from rural areas.