Chengdu wants 'Olympic math' training abolished

By Qing Zhongwei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-07-08 15:13

Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province, is brewing harsh regulations to ban training for "Olympic math" -- known as Aoshu in Chinese -- Sichuan Online, a major local portal, reported today.

Officials from the municipal education administration are planning to introduce strict regulations to do away with the rigorous form of math education.

Authorities are considering a prohibition on teachers who work part-time to teach Aoshu, forbidding aoshu from being used in enrollment examinations for primary and secondary schools, and removing the heads of schools who give weight to Aoshu performances while enrolling students.

Olympic math education has become a common way to judge students' skills and logic with numbers across China. A lot of parents, especially in the cities, force their kids to take extra classes for Olympic math, considered a stepping stone to top schools.

"This form of math has already hampered students' growth. It overloads them with knowledge they can't hold," said an official.

The media once reported that a Olympic math question on a fifth grader's examination paper even stumped a college student who got a doctorate degree in mathematics, and took him half an hour to solve.