In end April, I was in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a G-20 delegate together with the heads of well-known schools such as Marlborough and Wellington (UK), Kings and Geelong (Australia) and Appleby (Canada).

During our week-long visit to Beijing and Hangzhou, we interacted with numerous people guiding the phenomenal progress being made in K-12 education worldwide. The biggest takeaway from my China visit is the high quality of government schools and respect accorded to teachers by Chinese society.

Andrea Pasanetti, CEO of Teach for China, which started as a charity and is now a teacher training enterprise, outlined the enormity of the challenge confronting the PRC government. The school-going population of China is equal to the entire population of the USA. Despite this, the government has enacted legislation under which it is obliged to provide free and compulsory school education for nine years to 300 million children. Inevitably, this required a massive teacher training effort.

By 2016, the PRC government successfully trained millions of teachers with the result that single-teacher schools, still a feature of rural India, is a thing of the past.

According to Pasanetti, although 90 percent of PRC’s schools are government-owned, they are air-conditioned and equipped with labs, libraries and hostels. Each building is earthquake resistant and in remote villages, the school building is the largest community centre. The Chinese have also introduced technology on a massive scale in K-12 education and it’s compulsory for every school to have a broadband connection. China will soon inaugurate its first charter school and government school teachers are now better paid than ever before, with salaries ranging between Rs.50,000-1.5 lakh per month.

During my sojourn in the world’s most populous country whose GDP is five multiples of India’s, I also visited China’s biggest flagship primary-secondary government school — RDFZ in Beijing. With 6,000 students and 800 teachers on its muster rolls, apart from regular academic programmes it offers 200 optional ‘beyond’ programmes and 100 research areas. ‘Beyond’ signifies beyond the curriculum and is similar to the special interest clubs of Daly College. RDFZ also offers students a choice of 15 foreign languages.

Sited in the middle of an innovation hub comprising over 100 colleges, RDFZ is able to draw on them for specialist teachers for ‘beyond’ programmes. In RDFZ, we witnessed educational technology which would be the envy of any American university.

The laboratories are very busy and staffed with highly qualified and respected teachers with the more accomplished students designated as mentors to guide other students. However, students — and all young people — in China are still unfamiliar with English. Awareness that English is the universal language of business and diplomacy dawned very late in China and Indian industry and academia have an advantage before China closes the gap.

The advantage of a single-party political system became apparent when we were addressed for over an hour by Hao Ping, vice minister of education of PRC. In India, the compulsions of politics seldom allow the right person in the right job. This is certainly not the case with Minister Hao who is highly intelligent and well-educated. A history alumnus of the University of Hawaii with a Ph D from Peking University, Hao has held top positions in Chinese education including deputy director of student affairs, director of international programmes and assistant president of his alma mater.

China and India face similar education challenges. However ours is a more frightening predicament because we have the responsibility to develop the world’s youngest population over the next two decades. This can be a boon if our students transform into a workforce that increases the country’s productivity and wealth. It can become a curse if this population is left semi-educated and unemployable. And without a massive infusion of science and technology into Indian education, the majority of our children will be unfit for tomorrow’s jobs market.

The solution to this challenge is to encourage leaders of India’s education institutions to set ever higher standards. However, through regulation of tuition fees the Central and state governments are leveling down the quality of education provided by private schools, even while doing precious little to make government schools attractive, even to its own officials. On the other hand, not only are private schools encouraged in China, there are also over 2,000 partnership agreements between Chinese and higher education institutions overseas. Moreover, foreign private schools and universities are invited to establish campuses in PRC.

Nowhere in Beijing or Hangzhou did we see litter, garbage, graffiti or traffic jams. But it was obvious that what we G-20 school heads saw was pre-determined and carefully monitored. Speeches were printed in advance and delegates were never permitted to freely explore and visit institutions of their choice. This left us wondering whether what we saw was perhaps too good to be true. If true, China has made its second great leap forward.

(Sumer Singh is principal of Daly College, Indore)