Ripping farewells to school life have now had their day

A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT from Nanchong, Southwest China's Sichuan province, wrote a letter to the cleaners at her school, seeking their pardon and understanding for her classmates' ripping up their schoolbooks as a way of releasing their growing exam pressure. Yanzhao Metropolis Daily comments:

Tearing up schoolbooks has become a common form of catharsis for students about to sit the national college entrance exams, which increases the workload of school cleaners. The student writing the letter sincerely apologized to the cleaners at her school on behalf of all the students that chose to vent their feelings in this way, and implored the cleaners at her school to forgive her classmates for causing them extra work.

Those about to sit the national college entrance exams often live in a state of high anxiety and repression, because the exams remain quite competitive, even though China has markedly expanded college enrollments since the late 1990s.