Key Elementary and Secondary Schools Should Not Be Abolished

Of late, newspapers and radio stations at both central and local levels have published different opinions over the issue of key elementary and secondary schools. Some newspapers carried articles that concentrated on the "drawbacks" in running key schools and demanded that they be abolished so as to "let all elementary and secondary schools compete." As a pedagogic study and discussion, the move was beyond reproach. According to the report of some newspapers, however, a few provinces and municipalities even went so far as to declare the abolition of key elementary schools and the method for key middle schools to enroll the better qualified students. As we all know, it was Vice Chairman Deng who first proposed that key elementary and secondary schools be run after the smashing of the "gang of four." For this purpose the Ministry of Education convened a special conference, issued relevant documents, and has not yet made any decision concerning the abolition of the key school system. Under such circumstances, publishing in the newspapers the decision to abolish key schools has thrown people into confusion. Some people called or wrote to demand that the educational departments quickly declare the abolition of key schools, and some schools of nonkey status asked for backbone teachers from key schools. There were also people who even considered a redistribution of the facilities owned by key schools. Thus a tension has been arbitrarily created between society and the educational departments, and between key schools and schools of nonkey status. And the teaching order in many schools has been affected. All this undermines stability and unity and hampers the readjustment of educational undertakings. Personally, I believe our current endeavor to run key elementary and secondary schools indeed involves quite a few problems and conscientious efforts should be made to address them. However, all this boils down to a question of how experience should be summed up and how further efforts can be made in order to run the key schools better; under no circumstances should we thereby arrive at a conclusion that key schools should be abolished. There are several reasons for this.