China’s Schools Test Students’ Stamina

Concerned that excessive pressure on students is harming the image of China’s government and education system, officials here announced new rules this month to address some worrying trends: first-graders cramming for midterm and final exams; middle school students still doing homework long after their parents have dozed off; growing young bodies burdened with 20-pound book bags.

In recent years, Chinese officials and parents have expressed hopes that the nation’s schools can train more creative thinkers and ethical citizens, not number-crunching, test-taking drones.

Yet many Chinese fear that the new rules may hinder their children’s advancement.

“Any school you apply to now requires high scores. If we don’t push our kids, how are they going to succeed?” one parent complained to the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper. “If the school assigns too little homework, we’ll have to assign some more.”

The Education Ministry’s new rules suggest how heavy the burden on students has become. They call for:

* No mandatory classes during evenings, weekends or vacations.

* No written homework for first- and second-graders. For other primary school students, no more than one hour of homework a day.

* No assigning extra homework as a form of punishment.

* No tests for primary school students other than in Chinese and math classes, and no entrance exams for middle school.

* No percentile grades for primary school students. Instead they will receive broad assessments: excellent, good, pass or fail.

Critics point to a slew of surveys and statistics that indicate the education system is grinding Chinese kids down, not building them up. One-third of Beijing high school students polled by the Chinese Academy of Sciences suffer from school-related psychological stress or depression.

A poll of urban youths by the China Youth and Children’s Research Center found that 82% of respondents ages 10 through 15 said they had “no ambition to achieve personal success.” The survey attributed the lack of motivation to excessive pressure for good grades.

“I think this way of educating people is wrong,” said Li Min, a high school freshman in suburban Beijing. “We have to go to school for 14 hours a day. Do we really have that much energy?” Min gets up before 6 a.m. each weekday and starts the first of his nine classes at 7:40 a.m. After his evening meal at school, he has three periods of self-study. He leaves school at 9:20 p.m., finishes his homework by 11 and goes to bed at 11:30.

Exhausted, he often blanks out in history class: “The period ends, and I don’t remember a word they said. But I have no choice.”

When asked what his father thinks of his grueling routine, Min replied: “He’s not satisfied. Other kids sleep even less than me but still get better grades.”

Experts contend that the pressures on students are symptomatic of another problem: the severe shortage of higher education opportunities for a country of 1.3 billion people.

“Higher education in China is still a scarce resource,” explained Chinese Academy of Social Sciences historian Lei Yi. “Whether people are willing to accept it or not, unless this situation changes, excessive pressure will naturally continue to filter down to middle and primary school students.”

Lei pointed out that 20% of Chinese attend high school and that only 3% make it into college. The government claims that those figures are respectively 50% and 9%, but they include technical and vocational schools. In 1998, China had 1,022 colleges and universities, but only 72 were not professional or technical institutions.

Experts say that, despite official claims to have opened the way for private education, the Communist Party still sees schooling as an “ideological front” that it must monopolize. And only government-run schools can provide the access to urban residence permits and government jobs that offer rural students a chance to move up in society.

The importance of testing has long been ingrained in Chinese education and culture. For more than 1,300 years, until 1905, one of the main avenues of social mobility for Chinese was learning the Confucian classics and passing national examinations to enter officialdom.

When testing was temporarily curtailed during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, the main result was that only the children of those with political power got into good schools.