“STUDENTS should be encouraged to treasure their time in school and concentrate on seeking knowledge in an undistracted manner,” said Xi Jinping, China’s leader, on September 10th. His speech, at an education conference in Beijing marking Teachers’ Day, coincided with the end of the long summer holiday and a return to school for a quarter of a billion young Chinese. Across China, cooling temperatures have been matched by the sight of yellow school buses and crowds of backpack-toting children adding extra noise and bustle to each day’s commuter rush. Alas, once they get to school, many of them face serious distractions.
One of the biggest of those distractions is overcrowded classrooms at government-run schools. Education officials define classes of “normal” size as those with up to 45 students. Classes with more than 55 pupils are considered “large” and those with more than 65 are “super-large”. But the average for junior-high schools exceeds 45 in 15 Chinese provinces, and is more than 55 in two. One district in Chongqing, a region in the south-west, reports an average size of nearly 73 students. A class size of 120 has been reported at a secondary school in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing.
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