As a minister of education, his greatest political achievement naturally comes from the cause of education, these two years has been committed to the development of the education model of the combination of new disciplines and traditional scriptures, but in the past two years, the Chinese army has continued to fight foreign wars, which has seriously squeezed the funds of the Ministry of Education, resulting in his skillful wife making it difficult to cook without rice.

It's not good to run a school without money, especially when you're still preparing to run a comprehensive university!

Referring to Imperial University, its annual funding needs to be as much as hundreds of thousands, of which although there is a certain amount of tuition income, it is still far from enough to spend, and it needs to be subsidized by the Ministry of Education.

Students have to pay a certain tuition fee to enter the empire, and the tuition fee for students a year is about 90 yuan, which is not high if it is placed in the world, and it is only more than 20 pounds when converted into pounds, which is about two months' salary for British skilled workers, while the tuition fees of private universities abroad are generally more than 100 pounds or even hundreds of pounds.

For example, the international students sent to the UK from China are basically more than 100 or even 200 or even 200 or 300 pounds depending on the school.

However, the tuition fee of the Imperial University is still very high for the income of the contemporary Chinese people, basically only the middle class and above, that is, officials, merchants, and local gentry have this condition to support the tuition fees of their children, while the ordinary peasants and burghers are difficult to support, and often need to borrow money to study.

But although the tuition fee is not cheap, in fact, the school's expenses are even greater, and 70% of the teachers in this school are foreigners, and foreigners come to China to become teachers, and people are running for money, and the monthly salary is calculated according to pounds. The lecturer of professional courses basically goes up to ten pounds a week, and the annual salary is generally more than five hundred pounds. If you are a talented person, your weekly salary will basically be higher. For example, a university physics professor specially hired from the United States earns as much as 20 pounds a week, and the annual salary reaches more than 1,000 pounds.

This income standard is actually very high in terms of the income level in contemporary China, but there is no way, people come all the way to China, and the comparison is not the salary level of your China, but the income level of London and New York. If you are an ordinary lecturer, the annual salary of between £500 and £1,000 is actually the income level of the middle class in London. It's not much of a rich income.

And in recent years, whether it is domestic or foreign, the salaries of university professors are generally high, and the salaries of people in China are so high, if you want to invite people to travel thousands of miles to China to teach, how can people come if they don't give high salaries.

The salaries of foreign teachers are high, and the salaries of domestic teachers are also quite a lot, and this annual personnel expenditure has to account for about 40% of the expenditure.

Then, running a school is not only about asking for people, but also about purchasing some teaching tools such as instruments and books, and just to buy all kinds of scientific and technological books from abroad for the library. That's a lot of overhead.

All of them add up, resulting in half a university this year, and it is also comprehensive, especially a university that is biased towards science. The cost is considerable.

It is precisely because of the high cost of running schools, especially higher education, that the Ministry of Education has only one imperial university in the past three years. There is no capacity to open another university.

With such a shortage of funds, the Ministry of Education has also focused its attention in other directions. For example, to set up a normal school with less cost, or to directly raise donations from the society. Another example is to encourage wealthy businessmen and gentry to run their own private schools.

Beginning in 1856, the Ministry of Education in order to solve the problem of shortage of teachers in county primary schools and middle schools, specially founded a number of normal schools, the first was Jiangning Normal School, then Suzhou Normal School, Shanghai Normal School, then Ningbo Normal School, Hangzhou Normal School, and this year it was founded Fuzhou Normal School, Taiping Normal School, Yangzhou Normal School.

At present, there are a total of eight normal schools in the empire, but although the number is not small, but the scale is large and small, such as the earliest establishment, but also the most successful is the Jiangning Normal School, opened for more than two years, has enrolled two classes of students, has trained and graduated more than 500 students, this year's autumn enrollment plans to expand the scale, is expected to enroll 400 people.

For example, Fuzhou Normal School has just started recruiting students this spring, and the enrollment is only more than 50 people.

Therefore, the scale is large and small, and cannot be uniformly discussed, but one thing is the same, that is, the funds of these normal schools mainly come from local finance, such as the support of provincial finance, the financial support of the prefecture and county where the schools are located, and the funds directly spent by the central government are relatively small.

At the same time, the duration of study is only a short year!

Because the purpose of these normal schools is very clear, that is, to train 'basically qualified' grassroots teachers in the shortest possible time, and normal students often only learn one subject, for example, normal students who want mathematics in the future will specialize in mathematics during their studies, of course, if students are smart enough, and then complete the learning tasks of this subject, they can also have time and energy to learn other subjects, the school will naturally not be limited, and students can choose courses according to their preferences at will.

After a year of systematic study, some of these normal students will stay in school to teach, and most of them will be transferred back to the prefecture middle school or county primary school to serve as teachers.

Because the current normal schools are all government-run schools, and the students in them are basically special students, which means that you have to become a teacher in the future before people let you go to school.

These students have already signed a work contract with the Ministry of Education before they enter the school, and after graduation, they need to work for the Ministry of Education for at least three years before they can freely choose their careers, whether they stay in the school to teach or go to other government-run schools.

During the three-year work period, if you are admitted to a higher school or take the provincial examination to successfully take up a public office, or simply find a job in a large commercial bank or simply start your own business, they will not force you to stay, but you have to pay the Ministry of Education liquidated damages to terminate the work contract.

In the words of later generations, this is basically the category of commission trainees.

The normal schools that are now being promoted on a large scale in the Chinese Empire are not strictly speaking, but are more like night schools or technical schools in later generations. As a result, students can only be good at one of them, and they are seriously biased. And it can't be like the students who come out of traditional colleges and universities, and all the content of new subjects is covered. There is a big gap in overall quality.

After all, people only graduated after six or seven years of systematic education in higher schools and universities, and your normal students are only one year, so the two are naturally incomparable.

However, regardless of whether the system of normal schools is good or bad, one thing cannot be denied, that is, on the premise that the central government does not need to pay a lot of education funds, the local provinces will solve most of the school running expenses on their own, and then provide a large number of qualified teachers to local government and county schools.

In addition to establishing a normal school, Jiang Daoquan's work in the past two years has also encouraged private schools on a large scale.

The tradition of private schools in China is very strong, and there are countless private schools and academies from ancient times to the present. Often, in places with a strong focus on literature, even in a small village, there will be private schools funded by clans.

It can be said that for thousands of years, China's traditional education has basically been built on private schools, as for government schools, although there are county schools, government schools and Guozijian, but to be honest, these effects are not great, because you have to take the exam to be a talent to enter the county school, and before you can take the exam, you have to go to various private schools to study. After studying hard for more than ten years, you can only enter the county school after passing the Xiucai examination, and entering the county school is not to go to class every day, most of the county schools are just a nominal institution, and the biggest role is to issue subsidies to students with excellent grades. As for education, the role is very limited.

In other words, the official educational institutions of the Ming and Qing dynasties were mainly 'taking scholars', rather than 'cultivating talents'.

It can be seen from this. China has a tradition of establishing private schools and the soil!

In the current Chinese Empire, many county primary schools and prefectural middle schools have been established. And educate students in these schools, but even in the lowest county elementary schools. They also don't care about the students' enlightenment, and they don't refuse to come, first of all, you have to be admitted to the school.

To get in, you not only need to be as literate and write good articles as in the old days, but you also have to know some basic content of the new subject.

And these enlightenment education people don't care about the county primary school, you either study at home by yourself, or go to various private schools.

Therefore, in the past few years, the official education system has not replaced the various private schools and seowon in the past, but on the contrary, it has promoted the establishment of various private schools to a certain extent.

The atmosphere of private schools is so strong, and the Ministry of Education naturally wants to use the power of the private sector to establish a high-cost higher education school.

One of the more successful is the 'Shanghai Industrial and Commercial Joint School', which was jointly founded by Linde Machinery Factory and several other enterprises, but this school is not strictly speaking a school in the traditional sense, because this school is the exclusive school of the above-mentioned enterprises, and its students are not openly recruited by the society, but employees of these enterprises.

The classes are not specialized teachers, but engineers and even executive executives of these companies, mainly teaching various subjects such as "finance" and "machinery", and the purpose is to systematically and quickly train specialized technical personnel for their own enterprises.

This joint school is more like an in-house training course for these companies, but on a larger scale!

Private institutions of higher learning in the real sense, or more formal high schools or even universities, not to mention universities, in these years, the huge Chinese Empire can only build one imperial university, and if the private sector does it, it is too difficult, and it is not so easy to solve the problem of hundreds of thousands or even millions of yuan a year in running schools.

Therefore, private higher secondary schools are still limited to higher secondary schools at present.

For example, in 1857, due to the fact that there was no high school in Fujian Province, students from middle schools in various provinces in the province had to travel thousands of miles to Hangzhou, Shanghai or Nanjing to apply for higher secondary schools if they wanted to continue their studies.

In order to solve the problem of schooling for students in this province, the Department of Education under the Yamen of Fujian Governor took the lead, and then pulled many gentry and wealthy businessmen in Fujian Province to set up a 'Fuzhou Higher High School' on a trial basis, imitating the academic system of Hangzhou, Shanghai and Nanjing, and striving to build the fourth higher middle school in China. (To be continued......)