Man with a mission: principal Sun Youxin. [Photo/tznews.cn]
Sticking to his original aspirations to teach youth is fundamentally important to Sun Youxin, principal of Jiangyan High School – located in the Jiangyan district of Taizhou city in East China's Jiangsu province.
They have given him a sense of purpose and professional drive that has served him well through the years.
"As a principal, I hope to guide the faculty and students to march towards our ideals together", said Sun, talking about his expectations prior to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
Sun is one of the delegates to the key Party congress from Jiangsu province and his focus was naturally on education, since he has been working in the field for 37 years.
After graduating from college, Sun began to offer ideological-political courses in the high school in 1985.
Contrary to some stereotypes, ideological-political courses taught by Sun were not boring at all. He developed a unique teaching style which enabled his students to actively participate in learning activities and helped cultivate their moral qualities.
Sun has deeply realized that schools should not only focus on academic performance, but also foster their virtues through education. He makes morality the top priority in education.
To this end, Sun proposed to establish a school moral governance mechanism and improve the moral guidance of teachers themselves, so they could pass down a positive influence to their students.
His hard work over the past 30 plus years has brought him many honorary titles, but his favorite is being known as the "all-weather principal". He earned the nickname for his dedication to all kinds of school affairs.
Sun gets up very early and is always the first to arrive at the campus and he works late at night. He usually checks all the classrooms before leaving.
He also attaches much importance to curriculum development and research projects. The school was recently named as an advanced collective in curriculum innovation in basic education and national civilized schools.
He said he expected the 20th CPC National Congress to usher in a new leap forwards in China's education and to consolidate the status of education.
"In particular, we hope that our country will strengthen its training of top-notch innovative talents and roll out more policies to support institutions of higher learning and basic education," he added.