Yu Kuang elementary school is set in an idyllic hillside among the tea plantations of Pinglin Township, just 20km south of Taipei's urban jungle. The students, especially the boys, are noticeably stronger and leaner than their counterparts in Taipei. After school they head for the basketball court rather than a cram school. Tellingly, few wear glasses and most have dark tans, suggesting that they spend much more time outside than pasty-white city kids.
But all is not well at Yu Kuang. Like hundreds of other small elementary schools in remote rural areas, it has been downgraded to a branch of a larger school in Pinglin. If enrolments continue to fall, it may be closed altogether - despite an innovative principal who has tried to keep the school alive: he has pioneered a programme where guest students from urban areas visit the school for a few days.
Most primary schools in Taiwan are enormous education factories. Thousands of students cram themselves into classes of as many as 60, in Taipei's crowded suburbs. But tiny rural schools often have fewer than 100 students, and classes as small as 10 pupils. But they are expensive to run, and the Ministry of Education, in conjunction with local education authorities, has been closing them on a case-by-case basis.
Schools with enrolments of less than 50 are usually the first to go. Their students must be bussed to larger schools, often over dangerous mountain roads.
These closings have offended Taiwan's acute, but sentimental, sense of social justice. Many Taiwanese feel the state has an obligation to provide basic services such as electricity, telephone hook-ups and roads to every corner of Taiwan, no matter what the cost.
The sense of the state's obligation to provide health care and education to all has grown even stronger in recent years. That's because of the growing anxiety over an increasing gap between the haves and have-nots in what, just 20 years ago, was one of the world's most egalitarian societies.