A Village For Children

Built to a scale suited for children and designed to mimic the layout of their village, this kindergarten in beisha is a progressive model for rural education.

- Michele Koh Morollo

Funing County in China’s Jiangsu province sees a dearth of preschools, especially in its rural villages.

The local government therefore invited Beijing-headquartered Crossboundaries – an architectural firm that has much experience working with child psychologists to determine the best environments for preschools – to build kindergartens in two of the county’s villages.

One of these is in Beisha, a village with a population that consists primarily of the elderly and young children.

There is no primary industry in Funing County, so parents there have left their villages to work in the bigger cities.

The population in many Funing villages therefore consists mainly of elderly grandparents and great-grandparents and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The traditional farming work is carried out by the older generation with support from the children.

“There are many preschool-aged children in Funing who need to attend a kindergarten, so we built Jiangsu Beisha Kindergarten not just for the children living in Beisha village, but for more than 250 children from neighbouring Funing villages who also attend classes here,” says Crossboundaries co-founder, Binke Lenhardt.

Most of rural Jiangsu, including Beisha, consists of flat agricultural plains that are sporadically interrupted by linearly arranged trees and two or three-level houses with pitched roofs and brick facades.