From Cover, issue no. 339, October 29th 2007
Translated by Michael Martin
Original article: [Chinese]
Though the early morning fog of this typical October morning has yet to lift, people are already leaving their homes. Wearing her red and white uniform, Xiao Chen walks to school on South Zhongguancun Boulevard. Inside Chen's schoolbag she's packed her science textbook, several notebooks, test preparation material, and a thermos. She walks briskly, her head and shoulders pressing forward. This posture helps her cope with the heavy load on her back.
Xiao Chen is a typical 3rd-year math student at Beijing Rendafu No. 3 Middle School.
After school, Xiao Chen waits for her father at the local McDonald's. After walking back with him, she returns to her desk, which is littered with science exams and composition drafts, leaving her just enough room for her French fries. The mid-term examination scores have just come out, and Xiao Chen did not score within the top 10, leaving her crestfallen. "I'm looking at what I did wrong," she says, "why I didn't get certain points."
Xiao Chen's mid-terms are monthly, but not scheduled at fixed times. Her October exam came after her 10-day National Holiday vacation, forcing her to spend her entire break studying. These monthly mid-terms are the official examinations taken by all students in Haidian District. After grades are released, her placement will be posted for her entire class, grade, and neighborhood to see.
"I really want to study, but I feel very constrained. The tests are very stressful, but nothing can be done about it." Tests are scheduled nearly every day. Rendafu Middle School tests third year students in literature on Mondays, physical education on Tuesdays, math on Wednesdays, science and athletic training on Thursdays, and English on Fridays.
Daily test-taking has become the norm. While scores are not published for the district, they are sometimes posted at school and used to determine one's status on the class roster.
During the final phase of mid-term examinations, the school also administers a few practice tests. Test preparation materials occupy only a small portion of the heavy load that Xiao Chen bears to school in her backpack each day.
Xiao Chen's father, often unable to pick his daughter up from school, says, "My main concern is that I wish I could help her carry her backpack home." Watching Xiao Chen reviewing her science tests at McDonald's reminds him of himself during his youth, though in an entirely different academic environment. After class, he would leave his backpack behind on a field of grass and play games with friends, catch cicadas and butterflies, gather strawberries, picking weeds, and reading picture-books. He sighs at the thought that his daughter will never experience the light-hearted childhood that she is entitled to.
In his generation, some students carried homemade cotton backpacks and others used military satchels as book-bags. "Those book-bags were small, and they were divided into two compartments, one for books and one for pens. The bag carried only five or six textbooks, and textbooks were all much thinner then than they are now. If you put Xiao Chen's textbooks in one of those bags, the straps would have snapped."
Former teacher Miss Xie, remembering her class agenda in the 1970s, said: "At that time, we lectured for the first half of class and used the second half for practice. Problems were solved in class, not at home."
However, after 1980, everything changed. Xiao Chen's father, who graduated from middle school in 1982, wrote a government service report about reducing the middle school student's workload. In 1987, the CCP addressed similar issues in thirteen major reports. From 1983 to 1994, the Bureau of Education issued six reports promoting a lightened workload for students.
More and more reports were issued, but the backpacks never got lighter. On one level, the increasing weight of backpacks reflects the mounting importance that students and teachers must place on college entrance examinations.
1995 is thought of as a watershed year for the education system. Wang Baigen, a middle school principle, clearly remembers that in 1992 and 1993, his son's coursework was relaxed, and class ended at 3:30pm. "But after 1995, things worsened, and despite policy to reduce such burdens, the situation became more serious," Wang said. Miss Xie, a former teacher with more than 40 years experience in the field agrees. Still working in 1995, she said, "From that time until my retirement, the lectures and after school courses were incessant."
In 2000, the Ministry of Education issued a report entitled, "On reducing students' overwhelming workload," the 49th report of its kind issued by the National Education Administration Bureau.
Up to summer of 2005, The Beijing Municipal Education Bureau has enforced an "Anti-Extracurricular Tutorials Order," strictly prohibiting supplementary courses in elementary and middle schools and society at large from beginning new courses. They also prohibited elementary and middle school students from matriculating to the next level of supplementary studies. That same year, Beijing, Guangdong, Hebei, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu were only a few of the provinces that issued measures against "secret math classes" and stopped secret academic competitions.
In October 2007, if you visited Beijing's Rendafu Middle School, you probably would have noticed a few tutorial course advertisers at the school gates. One boasts aloud, "Using an all-new home-schooling method, we promise you an A+… The home-school is based just north of Beijing. It was established 11 years ago, and is now comprised of four major bases, 18 study headquarters, over 50 study centers, and over 800 professional teachers. We are also considering setting up an athletic training center."
Ironically, these past 11 years, public opinion has simultaneously called for a reduction In workload.
These extracurricular schools have published their own science textbooks to further weigh down children's backpacks.
Children can't cope with the added workload. Xiao Chen says, "We juniors are finding a lot of white hairs, and seniors have even more. Half of one senior's head is white. We are all coping with nearsightedness."
In an article in the national "85" focal points of scientific research, the specialists of the Middle and Elementary School Student Psychological Health Investigative Team studied more than 10,000 students in all 76 schools of the Dongbei education system. Thirty-five percent of middle school students displayed psychological problems and approximately 30% of elementary school students did not pass a mental health examination. Only 8.2% of the study's subjects successfully passed the examination. These results are attributed to the enormous pressure "at work on their overloaded mentalities" and the "long-term anxiety accumulating in their minds."
Looking back at her 40 plus years in teaching, Miss Xie still believes that her first class was relaxed and happy. In the 60s, when Miss Xie was in her 20s, she and her students would often pick weeds, harvest rice, climb trees and bamboo poles, and make clay dolls. Xie said, "In those days, kids almost didn't even need book-bags."
"Climbing trees and bamboo poles, I often told the children to put a little friction into each step as they climbed," Xie remembered, "Watching two ships rowing toward their destination familiarized them with hydromechanics- their was a perfect integration [of academic and real life]."
When Miss Xie retired, she was upset to find that the principle halted the student's summertime social activities and that "all the students had to attend tutorial sessions." She regretted that there was no practical way of testifying to the old-fashioned method's advantages. "But I still firmly believe that's the happiest way to teach students. Teachers are also happy, because they don't have to sternly discipline their pupils."
Wang Baigen explained: "Now there's a lot of pressure on teachers, and there's even more on schools and principles. Student's are graded harder on tests and tests are becoming more important. We don't have the authority to stop that. We must meet the demands of the college entrance exams."
When the college entrance examinations began again in 1977, Wang Baigen tested into Hangzhou University (now Zhejiang University). In 2004, his son tested into the Department of Finance at Jilin University. "That year, our whole family felt liberated, we could finally put all his teaching materials, reference texts, review questions away on the shelf."
Before schoolchildren play ball-games at recess, they know that they are in elementary school to prepare for middle school; they will go to middle school to get into a good high school; they will go to a good high school to prepare for college; and they will go to a good college to find a good job.
As for Xiao Chen, the pressure of examinations affects her extracurricular activity. Many times, her backpack is loaded with paintbrushes, a paint palette, and a recorder. Adults have turned children's fun pastimes into fodder for aptitude tests. Ensuring their children's future careers, they have taken all the fun out of their favorite activities.
Even the backpack factories understand that children cannot cope with the weight on their shoulders. They now produce specialty backpacks with buckling belts and wheeled carting features, popular sellers. Sales promoters at Xidan Shangchang Bazaar advertise the new bags: "Go ahead and add more weight on, there's no way the straps on this backpack will snap."
Indeed, the army satchel book-bags of old, with five-point stars and Chairman Mao faces printed on the front, have become antiques now sold to tourists as souvenirs. Xiao Chen's father is often bewildered when he sees these articles commonly sold in Beijing on Yindaixie Street and South Luogu Alley. He doesn't understand where today's students, carrying various subjects, foreign languages, dictionaries, and writing utensils in their backpacks, are going.
