From Chinese Press

Classrooms are not for infants

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-06 08:02

Parents of a three-week-old baby made it attend a bilingual class in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, recently. This shows how irrational some parents in China have become. Chinese parents have to give their craze for children's pre-school education a serious rethink, says an article on www. cnhubei.com. Excerpts:

Children should be allowed to adjust to their surroundings, grow up in a healthy way and then made to go through the rigors of education. Before that, they should be protected against the vagaries of the world instead of being exposed to them. Children, unlike some wild animals' offspring, don't have the inborn instinct to survive in the harsh world.

As competition becomes increasingly fierce in modern society, parents' desperation to expose their children to knowledge and the outside world as soon as possible is understandable. But premature exposure could produce the opposite results.

Children should be cared for and allowed to enjoy their infancy and childhood, and not subjected to premature schooling.

(China Daily 08/06/2010 page9)