Li Hao
China has achieved industrialization and urbanization within only 30 years, which other countries spent nearly a century. Contrasted with the rapid economic development, the plight of children education in small mountain villages became more obvious. The scarce arable land and fewer employment opportunities in local forced the people to leave and travel far to work to support their families. It led a large number of children to be left at home and became "left-behind children".
By the end of August 2018, there were 6.97 million rural left-behind children nationwide, and 96% of them were taken care of by their grandparents or grandparents across generations.
The long-term separation from parents and the lack of family education caused a lot of complex problems in the left-behind children education, such as physical and mental health and behavioral norms; they generally assume that when growing up, they can only end up going to the factory assembly line to continue working just like their parents: the lack of imagination and expectation of future career and life has led to a continuous decrease in their enthusiasm for both learning and life.
Program SPARK is a non-profit project initiated by One Take Architects. Taking the construction of space installations as the starting point, and aiming at the education status of leftbehind children in rural areas, a series of new summer camp art education systems have been developed. The courses including a number of art and craft enlightenment education courses suitable for children between 8 to 14 years old: in the courses, "building" is used as a medium of the world recognizing to help kids understand and develop their self-potential.
This process leads kids to return to the real world through real physical participation, to bring children's interest back to the real world. At the same time, they could get familiar with the work of builders and creators, so as to have a more vivid and rich career dream.
