How to integrate learning and practice?: Initial effect, some difficulties, and necessary future explorations

Wang Wenbin, who has been in school for half a year, has changed not only his behaviour but also his thought.

When a road was arranged to be built one year ago, there was not enough money. A meeting of the village representatives was called for discussion and the decision was made to ask all the villagers to put some money together to build the road. The road was completed last month but several households still hadn’t contributed money. In the past, Wang Wenbin would have gotten very angry. However, this time Wang Wenbin just said, “I will drop by their homes to talk to them. Even if they can only give part of the money that would be fine. If they truly couldn’t afford the money, then they could be dismissed of the responsibility.”

Xie Yunfei also felt the changes, “There were two villages with frequent conflicts in our township After the major cadres in the two villages had been studying for half a year at the RTVU, the villages have become ‘peaceful’ and everyone is getting on well.”

Chen Liang, head of Sunji Township, said, “After a semester of study, I have found that the village cadres are more capable of doing ideological work and that they have more ways to solve problems.”

In order to bring about such changes, both the RTVU and the county have continued to make innovations and undergone new challenges over the past half a year:

The county and the RTVU have discussed increasing the latest and the most needed content for rural collective ownership reform and collective economic development. However, it is difficult to strike a balance between curriculum system and the demand difference;

Face-to-face tutorials are more flexible and have more vivid teaching content. However, it is difficult to maintain a professional teaching level while also making teaching easy to accept;

The RTVU has created innovative assessment methods for these special students. However, it is difficult to keep standards serious and objective while simultaneously making innovations;

This is a good way for the county to strengthen student management but there is still a long way to go to cultivate a lifelong learning habit among rural cadres;

There is a high demand among the grassroots communities to “learn with problems, teach with cases, and work with methods” but further coordination is needed among the teachers, class hours, and so on;

One semester has already been completed. It is necessary to conduct higher, wider, and longer explorations into how to make the “foundation project” more stable and sustainable.

Reprinted from Shanxi Daily