He wanted to stay in China

In 1997, Lu Anke taught German at a school for the disabled in Nanning, and was fined 3,000 yuan by the Public Security Bureau for failing to get an "employment license"; in 1999, he returned to Guangxi from Germany, and became a junior middle-school teacher at a county middle school in the Hechi area. In 1999, he returned to Guangxi from Germany and went to a county middle school in Hechi area as a junior high school teacher. In order to be able to work for free as a teacher in these poor schools, Lu Anke set up an office in 1999. "The office was approved by the Guangxi Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation Commission, the Education Bureau can't control me, and the schools I go to don't have the right to hire foreign teachers, but I have the right to legally engage in education and can do research on educational practices."

Beginning in a small mountain village

In July 2001, Lu Anke moved his office to Guangla Team, Lin Guangtun, Jiankai Village, Polla Township, Donglan County, Guangxi, a remote village with no telephone or highway access, where villagers speak only Zhuang.

"Are they not suitable for the school, or is the school not run for them at all?"

"What kind of lousy kid is this, dyeing his hair this color!" The old man from the countryside said when he first met Luank because he had never seen a foreigner before.

When he was a teacher at Donglan County's Aidong Junior High School, Lu Anke enjoyed visiting his students' homes in the mountains.

"People over there were very nice to me. No matter which village I went to, people already knew I was teaching their children for free." Luanke sends himself down there as a teacher in the name of the office and doesn't charge any money. The homes of the students he went to were the kind of houses that housed people on top and animals on the bottom, and basically had no televisions. Because of the lack of beds, he had to squeeze into a bed with a student for the night. "For the 5.1 long vacation, I was walking in the mountains the whole week, about two hours of walking every day, and staying at my students' houses in different villages every night." Luanke found out that in the countryside, 50 percent of kids don't make it to middle school.

The middle school class he teaches is also missing a few students every few weeks. Especially when it came time for term exams, some suddenly disappeared without saying anything.

"My students go to school for the midterm exam, and if they can't score more than 90 points in each class on the midterm exam, they can't go to high school. I tried filling out the 2001 English paper for the SSC exam and I don't think I could even get 80 points. Teachers' salaries depend on students' performance. Teachers, for the sake of their own salaries, only take care of students who have hopes of going on to higher education. There are no students in ordinary classes who can get into high school, they have given up on high school. Although they are still in school, the students themselves are not sure what they are studying for. Life in school is separate from their life at home, and the parents' message is that there is no point in going to school if they can't get into college."

Impressions

Luanke, who worked as a teacher in Guangxi for several years, has an impression of Chinese education: education, which is only to satisfy a standard recognized by society, is not for the sake of children. The child, in the process of satisfying this standard, is divorced from his nature, from his life ...... "Is education only about winning? I don't want to keep running with my students in this race - this race that keeps rushing along and ends up running a path that I don't even know if it belongs to me. My students, who feel they can't be what their schools and parents expect them to be.

Education Determined

'Standard People', they not only can't meet the standards, they can't afford to pay the fees required by the school. So they are afraid to say anything when they leave our classes. Students who continue to stay at the school also often say to me, 'Go home and graze the cows!'" "Are they not a good fit for the school, or is the school simply not run for them? I no longer want to participate in this 'elimination game' and I don't want to see my students dwindle. They can only be eliminated anyway, and the only way I'll ever find them again is if I go to their homes."

Loanke ran to the Linh Quang Tun Quang La team himself and rented an unoccupied mud house from his students' fathers for the office's new location. He paid two years' rent at a time, at $10 a month. After signing the contract, Luank rushed back to Donglan, the county seat, to return to school.

It was raining heavily and the floodwaters were so high that it was impossible to cross the river. By the time he crossed the river to get to the highway, the road was again cut off by rain. It took three days of tossing and turning before he returned to the county.

The students were a bit worried and attached after not seeing their teacher for 3 days. "I asked for their forgiveness and said: my office has moved to your hometown and I am going to start teaching your brothers and sisters who cannot go to school, in June 2002."

"Education is inseparable from the teacher's life, and education is inseparable from life itself."

The Guangla team in Lin Guangtun is a natural village with only 150 people.

"What kind of education can you have in that barbaric place? All the people there do is drink and fight, and you can't even understand them," the county man said of Luank.

I asked him: if you wanted to do educational research, why did you have to come to such a place?

He said, "The problems there are particularly obvious and clear. The education I want to study is how to utilize human creativity, and it's particularly difficult to do so over there. If I can succeed there, then I can certainly succeed elsewhere."

Cadres in the county were extremely reluctant to have him, a foreigner, come to live in such a remote and backward village. "I think it's important not to let the leaders know yet." Luanke had moved to Tunli in secret.

He now teaches students who have never even been to elementary school. "These kids who can't go to school, they need me more, and I have more freedom to work when I go down to the bottom. I want to specialize in the question of what kind of education will give children physical, mental and spiritual health." "What do you think is the main reason this place is poor?" I asked.

"In Zhuang, there aren't even words like 'teacher' or 'school', like 'change', 'change' and even less words like that." Luanq replied.

"And what words are commonly used?" "The most common ones are those that talk about food!" "What do they eat?"

"Meat for sure, but rarely. Eat greens, and sometimes no greens. Eat sweet potatoes and also sweet potato leaves, and wild vegetables sometimes. When bamboo shoots first came out, I would eat bamboo shoots for a few weeks in a row. When other things come out, they will eat other things, and they will not change for a few weeks. The old folks say: you can eat meat, but you can't live without lard."

Tunis find raising pigs too tiring and don't want to grow so many vegetables, so Luanke eats lunch at the student's house, with only rice to eat, no vegetables, and only one kind of vegetable, like sweet potato leaves, in the morning and evening.

"You can get used to living here?"

"People here always have to eat, don't go to bed on time, and show friendship by drinking, which I'm not used to, but everything else. It's a wine culture over there, where families make rice wine and some people get drunk every day. The heads of children here are beaten by bored people every day. And little kids, who have long since accepted this unreasonable life, are used to being beaten."

The little child, in turn, found Luanq strange and asked, "Why don't you beat people?"

"I don't like hitting people." "You're so tall, you should like to hit people." "No, I don't hit."

The villagers' "enthusiasm"

In the beginning, the villagers used to come into the classroom and tell Luank that it was important, telling him to stop class immediately and go help. He went along and found it was nothing more than a big meal. "I was angry inside, but I couldn't show it in my temper because I was too shy."

"When I came back from going out on the small mountain roads, I was often not allowed to go home, and demanded that I, a 'good thing', must go to his house for dinner first. But when I went, they would get very nagging and it would be dark and I could not go home for classes. Only if I stayed in a regular place and didn't go out did I get a chance to actually do something."

He also found that the people in the village were particularly gregarious and were afraid of being "bored," and that they were afraid of him being "bored." Because of their fear of boredom, people here like to get restless all over the place in their homes. In their essays, the students say that they like this kind of chaos the most. Villagers can walk into Luanke's room at any time and mess up his things and work as well.

Seeing him alone on a hill or in a field, admiring the quiet of nature while writing a book, the villagers assumed he was bored and came over to talk to him and "help" him relieve his boredom. "How can I be bored? I have to think about a lot of issues every day and consider how I can change society and the environment through education. I'm not afraid of being bored, but I'm afraid of not being able to find the quiet to do my research. I think that only because they don't like to think about problems, they are bored. In an atmosphere of disorganization, one can't do any reasoned thinking."

Loanoke explains, "Human beings developed, in the earliest days, without individuals, that is to say, with individual bodies, but without individual minds, consciousnesses, and people were dependent on the environment, on groups. That's still the way people are here. If you ask a student what do you want? He will not be able to answer. They are all dependent on the environment, and they are what the environment is, and don't believe there can be any change."

Changing all this trouble

I asked him, "You're one person, and they're a group of people with thousands of years of customs and traditions, and you don't speak the language, so how can you change them?"

"You can't change them if you just rely on educational means. The way I can change them may be to live with them, I have to show them that in the same environment, I can do something different from the environment. They probably never thought that a person could do something different from their environment. They see it and wonder why he can do it and I can't. For example, I was writing a book while they were drinking and playing cards."

After three months, people in the village no longer invited Luank to miss school to go drinking. Those who were drunk would be embarrassed every time they saw him and say, "Heh, I've had enough!"

On one occasion, because of the matter of dividing up the land, the people from another canton beat up the people from Lin Guang canton. Luanke happened to come back from the outside that day, and saw the beaten man lying in the field, drenched in the rain, and not reacting to anything. His relatives came and just covered him up. Luanke asked, "Why are you leaving him here, get him to the hospital. If there's no money, I'll pay." The others said they would leave the man for evidence and said they would not decide until some leader came. "Seeing that they spent eight hours discussing loudly and still hadn't done anything, I was anxious in my heart and didn't see the person they were waiting for come. It was only when it was almost dark that they agreed to take the injured person to the hospital with me. I felt that day how life could be less than face."

"Afterward, we discussed the incident, and our views could not have been the same. But they have learned that their view, which is not the only one, was not the only one, and before they could not think of any other. Through my lifestyle, I was able to change them a little bit more. Education is inseparable from the teacher's life, and education is inseparable from life itself."

"I think the task starts at puberty, and the task is something that each person only discovers for themselves."

A few matters

For fear of misunderstanding by the old folks, before starting the class, Lu Anke had written a few matters to the parents of the students:

To carry out educational activities is not to run a school, and the children who participate in the activities can't get any graduation certificates; the teacher doesn't accept any fees, and all that's needed is to give Lu Anke a meal (no meat). In addition, the activities do not directly benefit the children who participate in the activities in any financial way;

The educational activities carried out are not about the teacher giving lectures, or the students listening to lectures, or taking separate and different classes. The activities carried out are projects to be practiced by everyone, and the projects are the dreams that the children come up with on their own;

The purpose of the study is for the children to discover their own talents, so that they can find practices and tasks in life according to their individuality, so that they can do things according to the needs that they have discovered ......

Problems with classes

The ones who come to class are all girls who have never been to school and don't understand Mandarin, only Zhuang, and Luank doesn't understand Zhuang, only Mandarin. For the first few days, there were adults to help translate, but they couldn't understand Lu Anke and always told the students, "Look, how great Mr. Lu is, he came here to live with us, to solve the problem of illiteracy and make our village rich."

"I'm not here to help the poor." Lu Ank said. "If we only help them to earn money and come back, the changes the village gets are just that: they don't have to work so hard from morning to night, the previous tasks of life are gone, and the new tasks that might give meaning to their lives are not there again. As a result, their hearts will grow empty, weak and unhealthy."

Loanoke asked his new students, "What are your thoughts, what are your dreams?" It turned out that the man translating for him flipped it to, " You are all going to sit here while the teacher teaches you over there, and you listen to him well."

At first, when they heard that Luannke was always asking these kinds of questions, the students complained to the village, saying, "Ugh! One hour of class is better than 10 hours of work, and classes are too tiring!

Since Luanke started the class, his home has become a "hot spot" in the village, and it's been very noisy.

"For the first month, adults from inside and outside the village came to see what I was up to. Adults I didn't know stood around during my classes, talking loudly and talking down to my students. The adults told the students that this method of teaching did not work. When my students and I asked the adults to be quiet, they added: we are from this village, let's be casual! The quietest person in our 'classroom' is probably me. Even in my classes, I often don't get a chance to talk, and sometimes, we have to leave class early because the drunken people in the classroom are so loud. If we changed places, they followed us."

To get his students to be brave enough to speak from the heart, he didn't let them sit down and look at the teacher, but gathered together around a large table. The adults came and said, "That won't work, you can't sit at a table with the students. You have to use the blackboard so it looks like school. Where are the textbooks? You can't hand out textbooks without them!"

"I said, "If I use textbooks that have already been completed, our learning process can never become the students' own feelings and experiences. In my classes, it often turns into an argument between the adults and me. Seeing that the time I had with my students to learn at ease was being lost, I whispered more and more to those adults, "I'm not trying to run a school, I'm trying to do quality education." It was also difficult for Luank to find interpreters who weren't drunk and didn't smoke when classes were in session. Luckily, a boy who graduated from elementary school later became Luanke's regular interpreter and right-hand man.

Teaching Mandarin and composition

It took two months for the adults' curiosity to pass, but his students' interest grew. Luanke began teaching his students Mandarin, starting with pinyin. Because of power outages, they lit diesel lamps every night. After mastering some of the basics of pinyin, he had each student tell his or her own story, which was translated into Mandarin and then written down in pinyin by Lu Anke. In this way, each student had a pinyin text that was different from the others, familiar because it was their own story, and when they practiced reading it, they didn't have to say what the text meant; they already knew it.

One student said, "I went to Po La to get rice (return grain after returning farmland to forest), and I was supposed to get 300 pounds of rice, but when I came back and got someone to weigh it again, it turned out to be only 150 pounds."

"I was so sad, I thought where can I go to read a little? When I was young I asked my father for money to go to school, but my family had no money. Seeing other people study, their hearts are very sad. At the age of six or seven, I labored to herd cattle. I wanted to study very much, but I had no chance and no money, which made me unable to eat. I am very excited to meet a good person like you, who comes to teach for free. Lastly, I hope you teach me fluent Mandarin and become a polite and sensible person."

Other students said how they went out to run errands and couldn't find a ride home because they didn't know Mandarin, or how they went into town to sell fruit and were cheated because they hadn't learned arithmetic.

"The essays my students produced in this way were not as good as those written by regular elementary school students, though they expressed more of what was truly theirs than they could. After a while, students come together to write and practice reading essays such as 'The Drunk,' 'The Smoker,' 'The Gambler,' and 'The Computer Player.'"

Loanke added that what city kids lack is hands-on work, but what rural students lack is the planning work to think independently.

"So when the students tell me they are learning Mandarin to go to work, I let them plan the whole factory of their dreams in a narrative."

The first day was titled: "Workers' Hopes and Bosses' Hopes". The following days also included, "What Products to Make and What Sells," "What Working Conditions Need to Be Provided to Allow Workers to Utilize Their Strengths," "Different Tasks in the Production Process and Using the Talents of Workers," and "Ways to Work Together in a Factory Department. The hardest thing is to make the students realize their own specialties.

"I wanted the students to discover the tasks in our class, then invent them, and only at the end let them get in touch with the results they made. I think that from adolescence onwards, tasks are something that each person only discovers for themselves and can no longer be organized by others. What is their path and their task, I cannot possibly know."

"If all I give my students are results, they'll never find something new that no one else has found yet."

I asked Luannke with amusement, "The Tunisians think you're a 'good thing' Huh?" "There are those who think I'm a thing to be used." He smiled back.

"Use you for what?" "Looking for money." Luank said cheerfully.

"They often ask me to go to the leaders of the county and convince them to give them money, and say that if I go and say so, I'm sure they'll give it, but there's no way I'm going to ask for it."

Building a bridge

One day, people in Tunli again asked Lu Anke to help them find county leaders and ask the county to build a second bridge for Tunli. The village had just finished building the first bridge according to the government department's design. "However, I felt very 'thirsty' while crossing this bridge. Before, there was a special, very cool feeling when crossing the river here, and I feel that there is less of a feeling with this bridge." Luannke said.

Can you design a bridge that retains the cool feeling when you walk across it? Could students design a second bridge from the feeling of the river? "That's why I told the Tunisians that I wanted to design the bridge with the students themselves first."

Every morning, when the students were not busy with farm work, Luank first let the students play with their imagination regardless of whether it was realistic or not, and then let them go to draw, model and experiment with his help.

But the students feel they are just playing, and that their ideas and designs won't work. They said, "We want to be organized by someone from above and let us do it." Luank asked, "Is your life, your own, or someone else's?"

"I don't understand why my students, want me to just make them do homework problems that hundreds of millions of people have already found the answers to? Instead of designing the bridge they really need? If all I give my students are results, they will never find something new, something no one else has found yet. My students, their lives can only change if they find their own, new ways of thinking."

Loanke changed his lesson plan, and in his evening Mandarin class, instead of having his students talk about what they've experienced, he no longer lets them talk about what they plan to do in the future. Then together, they slowly analyze and discuss how to make it happen.

"In this way, the Mandarin class also supports the idea of creating a plan."

For the bridge design, to understand the mechanics needed to build the bridge, they used paper, clay, iron, and other materials to make a variety of models, to experiment and draw a standardized, scaled diagram, and then make a very fine, better model of the bridge based on the diagram. After many times to the actual three-dimensional model of the structure to the abstract plan of the design, and then the abstract design to the actual three-dimensional model made, so that the students more and more concrete control of their imagination.

Building roads

One day, as they practiced modeling houses, Luenke asked, "This is our house, so where should we put the neighbor's house?" He had the students take the houses of the entire village, put them in their respective places, and draw the paths on how to get to each house, which became the first map the students ever saw. The next day, he led the students up the mountain again, revising the map based on what they saw.

After a while, Luenke asked the students: How can I get on the map and plan to transform the team's environment? The students said the hardest part was the roads. There are practically no roads in the team, people are walking in the drainage ditches, sunny and hot when there is sun, and can not walk in the rain. Luenke and the students a****ed to design three paths: one that people could walk on in the rain, one that was tailored to the different needs of the people and the buffalo, and one that needed trees planted on the sides.

"My brother was touched to know the students' plan, and he immediately encouraged me with 2,800 yuan to realize the students' plan. I think it would have been difficult to have a design like ours come out if there had been money first. Things are often ideas first, then solutions. "

Then, they posted a report:1, Mr. Lu's students made a design to remodel the Guangla team. According to this design the main 3 roads in the team have to be fixed and some trees have to be planted in the team; 2, Mr. Lu's brother offered 410 euros to our team in order to encourage us to realize the students' design. If it is not finished by November 2002, this money has to be refunded so that he can finance projects elsewhere; 3. Now we ask our comrades in the Kwangla team to come up with a plan for realizing the student's design, i.e. how to manage and spend the 410 euros (materials/wages), how to arrange the labor force, etc.; 4. If anyone uses Mr. Loo's brother's money for something other than the project (e.g. lending it to someone else, inviting someone to a party, etc.), Mr. Loo will have to stop working in the team. Teacher will have to stop his educational work in the Guangla team.

The matter immediately went viral in the village, and when the team saw the report, they immediately met and then acted to repair their own trails. Luanke's students were the designers of the trails and felt honored in the village. For the first time, they were nervous for the design class and were busy attending what they originally said was useless study.

That's when Luenke taught math, and the students took to it exceptionally quickly, quickly calculating how many bags of cement, how much sand and how much each person would have to carry, etc., to build the trail.

"When we went to the river to ask for sand, the students asked: aren't we going to have class in the afternoon? They don't understand yet that our design projects become real, that our thinking has shifted to the hands-on phase, that these are our lessons."

The path, which is just 0.6 meters wide and less than 300 meters long, was completed on schedule, with people from every household on the Kwangla team involved in building it.

Luanke said, "Once upon a time they thought: people who grew up in this place where others look down on them don't have much of a chance in society anyway, and life is unlikely to change, so they don't pursue anything anymore. For someone who is hopeless and has given up, all the pressures don't work; the only thing that works is the opposite, the pull."

I summed it up for him again, "In education, you're mostly raising kids to discover their own talents, to have dreams of changing their lives?"

"And to discover the needs of the environment. It's twofold: the needs of the environment, and what you can do for yourself based on the needs of the environment." Luenke added.

"Doing what others can't or won't do makes me valuable."

The value of living

During the interview, a constant stream of doctors and nurses came into the room to deliver medicine and ask questions. The doctor asked him if he had ever had an operation or blood transfusion before. He said no. "Is there anyone in your family or around you who has hepatitis? Do you have many people with hepatitis in the rural areas over in Guangxi?" Lu Anke said his family didn't, and as for the people in his village, he said, "It's impossible to know because they don't have the money to go to the hospital for checkups. "Usually, Luanke eats at his students' homes on a rotating basis.

Luanke's expenses are now given by his parents, 4,800 yuan a year, of which 22 percent goes to photocopying materials to send to others, 40 percent to donations, and 38 percent to the students and him for personal use.

"Primary school teachers in other villages think I'm very strange, and when they saw me once, they wrote on the ground: no alcohol, no cigarettes, no meat, no gambling, no love. Then looked at these words and asked me: what else do you live for? I said: If others don't do anything, I will do something. They added: Without these five enjoyments, all my purpose in life would be gone. I said: If I didn't have more interesting pursuits than these 5 enjoyments, I would have lost interest in living. They asked again: Would you sign your life away from these? I said: no, because I'm not setting myself up to not want these, I'm just not interested in them right now."

I asked Luannke: "What kind of life do you think is worth living?"

"Doing what others can't or won't do makes me valuable." He replied.

"Have you gained anything for yourself by doing those things?"

"Quite a lot of gains. Identified a lot of problems and was able to find solutions to them."

"And what happens with the results?" I asked next.

"I'll write it in a book and publish it on my web page so that others know about it and others can take advantage of it." Every 10 days, Luank leaves Tunis for two days to go to an Internet cafe in the county, where he has his own Web page and e-mail address.

He says he has his own book, which he mainly wants teachers to read. "The comprehensive practice class, which has a good name, but the teachers don't know what to do with it, and I want to help China develop education." Luank also said that every six months he sends his research results to the relevant education department, but no one pays attention to him.

"No government officials or experts came to me, and those who did, were interested in me personally."

Media outlets such as CCTV had reported on Luank, so there were quite a few journalists looking for him. When he was teaching junior high school in Donglan County, the principal would happily call Lu Anke out of his classroom to answer the phone when he heard it was a reporter. A reporter asked him to come to Shenzhen for an interview, and the whole thing was free of charge. "But I said, how can I skip class? A teacher who skips class just because he has a chance to be on TV doesn't love his students enough."

He was unhappy with much of the coverage. "All they're interested in is foreigners living in the countryside, so what's the point? No media ever wanted to report on my educational research."

Luanke has traveled by train on hard seats every time he's been to Beijing, and the last time he stood all the way from Guangxi to Beijing. In Beijing, he eats street-box lunches with migrant workers and rents the cheapest peasant houses to live in. Two weeks ago, he felt particularly fatigued and uncomfortable, and did not like to eat, before he went to the hospital for a checkup, and the doctor told him to be hospitalized immediately.

I asked Lu Anke: Why don't you cooperate with some international organizations or government departments so that you can solve your economic problems?

"I don't need a lot of money, I study that thing, money is useless. It can also be said that it is a spiritual research that can't be helped with material things."

He added: "If I had money, or if I had the right to arrange for it, more and more people would come to me and I would not be able to do my research quietly; and when they come in contact with me, they may become dishonest in order to get favors, and I would not be able to study what they need for their education."

At one point, Luanke was offered a job as a "youth volunteer," hoping he would be the first foreign volunteer in Guangxi, and was also intended to be involved in a number of public campaigns.

"I was asked to participate in all sorts of attractive, attention-grabbing activities, and when I heard that, I felt uncomfortable. I want to do real work and need quiet. I'd prefer not to participate in activities that look good and don't help much, and talk about frequenting activity centers in big hotels, where I'd be doing nothing but wasting the state's money. I've also heard that many schools can't afford to pay for insurance for volunteers, and I've also heard that the **** Youth League pays me a salary. How can I be such a volunteer?"

By now, the people of Lin Guang Tun are used to having Luanq.

"The people who often interfered with my classes in the beginning now come every day to care whether the students have classes or not, because they feel as if something is missing in the village without our activities. Children do not want to talk to their parents, love to talk to me. This time when I came to Beijing, the old man who said it was useless for me to teach like this, also cried." The students cry every time they leave Tunli, thinking that, when Lu Anke goes out into the world, he will never return to their poor place.

I asked Luank what he planned to do. He said that for now he could only stay in the hospital for treatment, and then go back to Lin Guang Tun.

"I want to not teach Mandarin or anything outside the program from now on, but do all the projects and teach them during the activities. The programs are based on the talents of the students, based on the needs of the environment, and I would like to do it in Po La Township, a few more villages."

Luanke also told me that once he and his students find a project to do, his twin brother, Luanth, will also come.

"He's in Greenpeace and is in charge of climbing and filming, and he has to climb buildings, nuclear power plants, and US warships to get them, and the filming is live, and he often gets caught by people."

I asked him what your brother could do when he came. "He can do everything except he can't speak Chinese, and he'll stay for six months."

On March 4, Lu Anke told me: the book manuscript had been corrected, his body had fully recovered, and he was leaving immediately to return to Lin Guang Tun.

Summary

Loanke, a German, is doing what China's education needs most, but no one else is doing!

He has been teaching in China for ten years and was a candidate for Moving China 2006. At the time, he said, "I was afraid to move people. I was recommended to participate in the selection of people who moved China, I was so scared that I hurriedly wrote a letter to the selection committee and asked them not to choose me. I don't want to move China, only China can move me."