From Chinese Press

Promoting balanced education

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-02 07:43

To promote balanced development of compulsory education, the Ministry of Education has banned schools from charging "selection" fees. Since entrance exam for junior middle schools is a controversial issue in big cities, the problem of "selection" fees can be solved by eliminating premature competitions in education, says an article in Modern Express. Excerpts:

The real purpose of education is more than acquiring knowledge; it is to build people with healthy, all-round development.

But unfortunately balanced development has given way to exam-oriented education. As a result, many parents would do anything to improve the academic performance of their children.

Millions of parents are obsessed with the misconception that a child should not fall behind at the starting line. It reflects the imbalance in educational resources, the reason why the ministry is trying to promote balanced development of compulsory education.

We hope the ministry would also make efforts to evaluate the resources' distribution mechanism to help parents and students not to pay too much attention to scores and grades in exams.

The practice of teacher rotation and eliminating ranks introduced in some cities is a move in the right direction.

But education departments should also issue more favorable policies for disadvantaged schools when allocating educational resources.

(China Daily 03/02/2011 page9)