SUA Cohort Highlight | The Real "Dead Poet Society"​-- Left-Behind Children and Poetry Education

Author: Zhiqing Chen, International Affairs Officer, China Alliance of Social Value Investment

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion."

--John Keating Dead Poet Society

Do you remember your first poem? Do you have a moment of relief when you express moods through words?

Literalism escapes from a didactic form, secretly hiding in our daily lives. When our emotions are pounding, we all have inner voices. These voices have no shape and are flowing as a lyric, a rhyme, an ocean wave with a blend of wisdom, emotions, and humanity.

Stars glitter at the black velvet night

With my wanders nearby the creek

When I glance at the tranquil flows

I saw them jumping and chasing each other

- - A poem from a left-behind child

“Before the age of five, my impressions about my parents only linger in the vague voice from phone calls.”

Who Are Left-Behind Children?

Deprived of the warmth of parents, left-behind children is a severe social issue in China. When migrant workers moved from rural to metropolitan areas to search for jobs, young parents would leave their children for years. Only a few times a year can they revisit their children.

According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, there were about seven million left-behind children in rural regions in 2018. Their grandparents raised 96% of these children.

For most people, these statistics are pale and senseless. But for left-behind children, these numbers symbolize their nostalgia, anxiety, and hope waiting for their parents’ visit.

Left-behind children are a complicated population. They bear financial pressure at a very young age and embody the natural desire to reunite with their parents. For this population, their struggles reflect in the deprivation of family companionship.

Children Who Write Poetry Don't Break Glass

From the age of 8 to 14, when other children reach puberty, they experience teenage rebellion in adolescence. But for left-behind children, an argument with parents, or even a normal conversation, seem like a precious and rare opportunity. When their parents visit again, these children might only remember the blurry contours of their parents’ figures.

Frustration and self-doubts often plague this population; even materialistic gifts or financial support could not erase their scars of loneliness.

In this case, poetry is magic. It allows people to open their hearts and scribe words randomly. Sometimes it doesn’t have any meaning. Sometimes it is an outlet, enabling us to awaken our most profound feeling and release what we were afraid of telling in the outside world.

The same things happen to left-behind children. They were told at a young age that they should be strong and independent even without their parents. A cage of self-oppression invisibly shadowed their lives.

“My parents don’t care about me because I don’t even remember when it is the last time we met.”

To help these left-behind children with broken hearts, Enlighten Our Future (是光) is a non-profit poetry education organization providing a systematic poetry curriculum for children from grades 3 to 8. This organization creates a project called “Poetry for All Seasons” to help left-behind children express their emotions through poetry. Over 502 primary and secondary schools in rural regions, such as Yunnan, Shandong, and Henan, have adopted the poetry education and served more than 42,600 children.

The poetry program is designed based on children's psychology and the modern poetry system. With the concept of poetry therapy, this program helps children who are introverted and fear interpersonal communication to express their emotions by reciting poetry. The mundane village life also elaborately created poetry concerts, discussion sessions, and other creative forms to bring a touch of comfort to the left-behind children.

Delicate poetry warmly embraces children at sensitive ages. Children with puberty no longer use violence or extreme actions to release their anxiety but quietly reconcile with the world swimming in the ocean of poetry.

In the poetry curriculum system, it also contains a professional teaching team. Providing curriculum development from upstream to downstream sectors has successfully covered all aspects of poetry education. This includes:

• Upstream Development: The national editorial committee is established with over 19 professional poets. It strives to develop the poetry curriculum system by combining children's psychology, the modern poetry system, and the nine-year compulsory education in China.

• Midstream Training: This program facilitates rural teachers to quickly grasp the course essence and teaching tolls through a standardized curriculum package. Simultaneously, by collaborating with local cultural federations and education bureaus, this program is online-based, reducing marginal costs and improving training efficiency.

Photo: Poems on display in various Starbucks across China. Viewers can write their comments and inspirations on the yellow post-its. Source: Enlighten Our Future

• Downstream Platforms: This project tracks both long- and short-term impacts and publishes children’s poems in a journey called “Little Poets in the Mountain."It also has partnerships with

Starbucks and Tea Face to widely distribute sustainable operations.So far,Enlighten Our Future elaborates with Starbucks to promote poetry education in more than 1500 local stores and 23 flagship shops.

This organization has more than 1900 volunteers and applies poetry education in 24 rural regions in Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Henan, and other provinces. This project expanded to over 1000 schools and brought the light of poetry into children’s hearts.

Top left: Poem by Liyun Fan, a child in the Enlighten Our Future program. Bottom left: Artwork by Italian designer Barbara Vaccaro, inspired by Liyun's poem. Source: Enlighten Our Future

This organization has been widely recognized and awarded the national championship for the 2019 Star of Social Innovation through its dedication. In the future, this team hopes that this project will reach out to more left-behind children and teach them to appreciate the charm of poetry.

Along with a strategy, the so-called “encircling the countryside,” this project will excel in online education to stimulate children’s intrinsic motivation and passion by composing poetry. Overall, this project amplifies the humanistic care and aesthetic literacy by engaging them in a different spiritual awakening level.

Social Value:

Over 94% of teachers said that this project had improved children’s self-confidence and adolescent behaviors through poetry education.

Business Value:

This project cooperates with public welfare foundations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) enterprises to expand its influence. Also, consumers' poetry education has been generally promoted spontaneously through social media platforms, such as Weibo.