Editor's note: Wang Yan is a senior specialist at the National Institute of Education Sciences. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

September 10 marks the 34th Teachers' Day in China, when people across the country, inside and outside of the education institutions, celebrate the day and honor the teachers in various ways.

Respecting teachers and valuing education has been a fundamental social norm in China. Teaching is regarded as a noble profession as two old sayings go, "A teacher is supposed to impart knowledge, lead career development and resolve confusions and questions for students" and "A teacher for a day, a mentor for life."

For several years, President Xi Jinping has visited schools and universities on Teachers' Day, to extend his appreciation to the country's educators for their diligence and commitment, and highlight the important role of teachers in education and that of education in social and economic development.

In his speech at the National Education Conference on Teachers' Day this year, he noted that the teacher serves as the engineer of the human soul, who carries forward human civilization by disseminating knowledge and truth, shaping lives and fostering new generations. 

There are more than 16 million full-time teachers in China that support the largest education system in the world, including 2.4 million for pre-primary education, 5.9 million for primary schools, 3.5 million for lower secondary schools, 1.8 million for upper secondary education, and 1.6 million for academic universities and colleges. The figure has been increasing on an annual basis.

Compared with many countries, China has a fairly good gender parity for teachers. In primary education, the share of female teachers averages 63 percent, in lower and upper secondary education, female teachers account for 53 percent and 51 percent respectively of the total number of instructors.

The quality of the teaching force also matters. It is said the quality of the education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers. The caliber of teachers is largely the most significant in-school determinant of student achievement.

Such a caliber is not only a matter of talent but also relates to teachers' morality and dedication. Apart from their core tasks of teaching, being a teacher also involves planning or preparing lessons, marking students' work, general administrative work, communicating with parents, and supervising students.

To perform these tasks well, teachers in China, like those in many other countries, work more hours than required by schools or by law. They devote themselves to the teaching career and are role models for students in many ways.

In the process of rapid social and economic development, a rural-urban gap of teaching resources has emerged, as part of the rural-urban gap in education resources. How has this challenge been addressed?

There are approximately three million teachers in rural kindergartens, primary and secondary schools who have relatively lower qualifications, and work with less adequate infrastructure and facilities and a more demanding job for students with relatively lower performance levels on average.

The government has taken several steps to attract, develop and retain proficient teachers in rural areas. It started with a special post scheme that recruited university graduates to work in rural schools in most provinces and autonomous regions, approximately 100 students for each county and three to five such teachers for one school. A total of 170,000 university graduates are selected to work in rural schools from 2017 to 2018 according to official data.

It was followed by a "national professional development program" initiated in 2010 that trained teachers from rural areas through partnerships with selected education institutions including top-performing universities, aiming at 360 learning hours of training for each rural teacher and principal by 2020.

Moreover, the "Rural Teacher Support Initiative 2015-2020" was rolled out by the central government in 2015 to attract talented people to work as rural teachers, incentivize university graduates to join the rural teaching force, improve fringe benefits of rural teachers, encourage mobility of teachers from urban to rural schools, and improve the overall quality of rural teachers.

It also honors those teachers who have worked in remote rural areas for a long time.

Typically, teachers who have worked in rural areas for 10, 20 and 30 years are also given certificates or other incentives to honor their dedication to rural education.

These include measures taken by local governments, such as free physical examinations annually, subsidized tuition fees for students who choose to work as teachers in rural areas, or special allowances (on a monthly basis) for teachers out of the fiscal budget.

This plan was upgraded to the recently-issued "Teacher Education Invigoration Action Plan 2018-2022."

Building on previous experiences and lessons, the action plan incorporated ten new strategies to improve the quality of teachers such as professional development focusing on morals and ethics, training more prospective teachers with higher qualifications, reinforcing the teaching force in poverty-stricken areas, application of information technology including MOOCs, trying out new alternatives through teacher reform experimentation zones and the creation of quality insurance mechanism, among others.

As President Xi stressed in his speech, with all these endeavors, China will carry on the culture of valuing education and respecting teachers and education professionals, and further improve their social and professional status so they could contribute more to the national development and social well-being.

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