Ideas to help reduce burden of too much student homework
Print Edition
Chinese students are known for their excellent mathematics performance, and also for their huge homework workload.
“The earliest birds waiting for the buses every day are not office workers, but middle school students. Even as a bystander, I feel they’re suffering too much,” said a bus driver in Lanzhou, capital of northwest China’s Gansu Province.
For decades, efforts have been made by authorities at various levels to cut the workload for adolescents, but their bags continue to swell and they sleep less and less.
A study by China Youth and Children Research Center showed in the decade from 2005 to 2015 that 60 percent of primary and middle school students slept less than nine hours a day, the minimal amount of sleep required according to the Ministry of Education.
Another report that was released by 21th Century Education Research Institute this month indicated that the time Chinese elementary and middle school students spent on homework every day was three times that of the global average over the past three years.
A major source of pressure comes from extra-curricular classes. As early as 2012, a Program for International Students Assessment test, an international survey aiming to evaluate education systems worldwide, found that Chinese students spent an average 13.8 hours on extra curricular study every week, the most worldwide. The trend has continued under China’s pressure-cooker schooling system and overbearing pressure from parents.
10pm watershed proposed
To free teenagers from endless homework, new policies on workload reduction are imminent. In February, the Ministry of Education jointly issued a notice with three other organs, vowing to rectify after school workload.
In the just concluded annual “two sessions” — China’s high-profile national political event — workload reduction was again a catchword as many called for reducing homework for young students.
Authorities in many regions have been pushing to turn the initiative into reality. A guideline published by the education department in east China’s Zhejiang Province required later school start times for students in different grades and in different seasons.
Junior high school principals in Hangzhou, Zhejiang’s capital city, suggested that students should not complete their homework if they cannot finish it by 10pm. “We advise the students not to continue working after 10pm. The parents can sign the paper and let the children hand it to the teacher,” they said.
Neighboring Jiangsu Province also specified school arrival times for students at different levels. Primary students should arrive no earlier than 8am, while students in junior and senior high schools should arrive after 7:40am and 7:20am, respectively. In many places, school start times for primary schools were previously as early as 7am.
“We should teach our educators to instruct in a scientific manner and get rid of monotonous, inefficient teaching methods. This is the only way to reduce workload,” said Zhou Hongyu, professor at the Central China Normal University.
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