One is mainly to educate the children of the family or clan. For example, the Volunteer School founded by Hu Ruqi, a Taihe person, is "the children of my family, the children of relatives, who are willing to learn but can't do it".
The other is mainly aimed at children in rural areas. For example, Qian Mengpu of Jiajing Xishan said, "If the villagers don't learn, they should set it as a voluntary school, cut their annual income and hire Confucianism, and gather the children of the villagers to teach them."
At that time, although the two forms of school-running purposes were different, they were not completely opposite, and some just schools combined these two purposes and functions.