By Li Hong, People's Daily Online

Unlike reform in manufacturing and service industries that mostly revolve around privatization, reshaping China's current education sector will prove to be a more tricky and challenging job. It is heartening to see the State Council, headed by Premier Wen Jiabao, has conducted five rounds of opinion-soliciting procedures to draw a reform road map that aims to sharpen competitiveness of Chinese education apparatus and churn out more top-caliber talents.

The restructuring of the education industry is strategic, correlating to this country's further ascendancy onto the world stage. It will also have repercussions on the future well-being of Chinese families and individuals. Apart from building the world's most advanced ports, railways and expressways, the country needs to institute the world's most efficient educational system if it does not want to "play for the second place" in this century and next.

It is nice for Beijing to forgo complacence after Mr. Deng Xiaoping re-launched the college entrance examination system in 1977 that has generated tens of millions of educated people for the modernization drive. Though some Western scholars have lavishly praised China's education system for producing huge squads of fairly learned and disciplined talents, it rarely has given birth to the world's pearl-of-the-crown talents.
Now, Chinese students and parents alike are debating a wide range of critical issues: overhauling the college entrance exam from simply emphasizing students' scores to picking up the merits, too; more free-wheeling tutoring trials to inspire pupils' enterprise and capability; less homework to relieve students from piles of assigned jobs, and, more government financial backing to children from poverty-ridden rural families.

The consensus is moving away from the hoopla surrounding drumbeats of reforms in the past years that have centered on treating education as a business. Many cash cow colleges have emerged in the cities that charge exorbitantly high tuition fees, effectively shutting their doors to prospecting but poor students. With employment prospects dimmer following a global Great Recession, a growing number of rural students have chosen not to apply for student loans, which they fear could never pay back after graduation, and opted to find a bread-earning manure job in stead.

It is the responsibility of the government, the Ministry of Education, especially, to prevent Chinese institutions of higher learning from becoming entities that doggedly seek fat profits for faculties. Arbitrary charges in schools and colleges have been rising and some experts have estimated that from 1999 to 2008, arbitrary education charges amounted to more than 200 billion yuan (US$30 billion). It will be a heinous crime if the education authorities refuse to admit the problem and outlaw the corrupt charges on students, now.

Chinese colleges should not end up in private hands. The central government ought to earmark more resources, in keeping pace with the country's GDP growth, to invest on public education. And, teachers' compensations could be proportionately increased, the same as the public servants and hospital workers.

The entire national education system, from primary and secondary schools to colleges, deserves a reshuffle to keep with the times. We have seen lots of colleges merged and enlarged in the recent past, but except for the new names of the schools, little have changed. Old shackles of thinking still depress creative ideas. From preschool pupils to graduates, students have to wage an unrelenting battle against towering homework assigned by their tutors.

Although China's gross enrollment rate of primary school-age and middle school-age children had reached 99.2 and 94.8 percent respectively, and each year up to 6 million graduates walk out of college campus, students' potential is not fully tapped. So, it is prerequisite for the education authorities to rewrite the curriculum, and phase in tutoring moulds modeling some Western school teaching.

All in all, a flourishing country needs contagion of tradition-breaking and epoch-making minds to fire up. China's present education system, heeding children's exam scores and favoring urban well-off families, must face the ax.