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Back To School? Not For Half A Million Disabled Kids In China

Many migrant families live in the shadows of society.
Many migrant families live in the shadows of society.
Zhou Tian

BEIJING — While September is the moment for most children go back to school or start for the first time, more than 80% of the approximately 500,000 school-aged disabled children from China's migrant families have never been schooled.

Twenty Chinese organizations have just published a public letter calling on the Ministry of Education to change the country’s Education Bill of Individuals with Disabilities to enable children with disabilities from migrant families to enroll in the schools closest to their homes.

The letter also urged the authority to reduce the discretionary rights of schools and add provisions to penalize those that reject these children, while also providing targeted public aid to migrant parents with disabled children.

The letter notes some improvement in recent years for many of the millions of rural families that have moved into China's cities, including easier enrollment at their neighborhood schools. And yet these advances have not reached families with disabled children, who have even greater need for services.

Due to China's household registration system, migrant families aren't officially recognized as local residents and therefore aren't covered by the local authority's preferential policy. Whether it's for entry into special schools, special classes or regular classes, disabled children are almost always directly or indirectly refused.

The schools possess a disproportionate power of discretion, and migrant families with disabled children have no effective way to get help.

A broken system

According to data about the disabled population from China’s National Bureau of Statistics and the China Migrant Population Development Report 2013, it's estimated that about two million handicapped children between six and 14 years old were illiterate in 2006. That means this disadvantaged group's illiteracy rate is as high as 81.3%. And in 2012, there were still 410,000 school-aged children with disabilities from migrant families, out of the national total of half a million, who had never been schooled.

According to Deng Qinggao, a staff member at the Xiamen Promise Of Love Information Consulting Organization, an NGO, ordinary schools typically push all disabled children to enroll in special schools catering to children with intellectual disabilities. But these schools are not designed for children who have just physical disabilities. Worse still, even these special schools often refuse students under the pretext that these youngsters are "incapable of taking care of themselves."

Though there is no law supporting the rejection of disabled children, Chinese schools set their own criteria for acceptance, which vary greatly from one to the next.

Meanwhile, parents lack legal support to defend their offspring's right simply because there is no relevant law to punish schools that refuse to take in these children, and China's 1994 Education Bill of Individuals with Disabilities is sorely out-of-date.

Yet again, the source of this particular problem is in the constraints of the household registration system, and the school registration that comes with it. Even public school enrollment of non-disabled migrant children is much lower than enrollment for local children. Often, as they get older, students are forced to return to the rural areas where their family's household is registered. Otherwise, in a majority of cities, they won't be allowed to sit for the college entrance exam later.

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food / travel

When Racism Poisons Italy's Culinary Scene

This is the case of chef Mareme Cisse, a black woman, who was called a slur after a couple found out that she was the one who would be preparing their meal.

Photo of Mareme Cisse cooking

Mareme Cisse in the kitchen of Ginger People&Food

Caterina Suffici

-Essay-

TURIN — Guess who's not coming to dinner. It seems like a scene from the American Deep South during the decades of segregation. But this happened in Italy, in this summer of 2023.

Two Italians, in their sixties, got up from the restaurant table and left (without saying goodbye, as the owner points out), when they declared that they didn't want to eat in a restaurant where the chef was what they called: an 'n-word.'

Racists, poor things. And ignorant, in the sense of not knowing basic facts. They don't realize that we are all made of mixtures, come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. And that food, of course, are blends of different ingredients and recipes.

The restaurant is called Ginger People&Food, and these visitors from out of town probably didn't understand that either.

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