Chinese school removes chairs so pupils don’t linger over lunch

To maximise lesson time, a Chinese secondary school has removed all the seating from its dining hall to make sure that pupils take no more than ten minutes to eat their meals.

The 6,000 students at Suixian High School now stand up at metal tables while eating in an innovation that the school claims has halved average mealtimes.

Teachers said the initiative has freed up more time to memorise English grammar or maths formulae. They intend to speed up the process further by giving each pupil a pre-ordained spot at which to eat their meals, thus reducing the time expended finding somewhere to stand.

“It’s a best practice we’ve learnt from other schools to improve the mealtime efficiency so our students would have more time to study,” an official in the central province of Henan told local media.

The goal, the official said, is to limit mealtimes to a maximum of ten minutes. The reduction in eating times and the aim to maximise study, reflects the highly competitive and often career-defining nature of China’s national college entrance exams.

Chinese high school students typically cram intensively for the exams, with extra lessons, quizzes and mock tests, and some establishments have gone to other extreme measures to free up study time.

Hengshui High School in the northern province of Hebei limits toilet breaks, giving pupils between one and three minutes depending in the nature of their requirements. All students on their morning run must carry a text so they can learn at least one more English word during their exercise.

Mobile phones are strictly prohibited on campus, and the school unplugs landlines in its dormitories in the final weeks before the national exams to ensure zero distractions. Despite such restrictions places at the school are highly sought after because it sends a high percentage of its students to some of China’s best universities, and the Hengshui model is being copied elsewhere.

But even Hengshui High has not taken seating away from its refectory, and reaction to the new of the standing only dining hall has been mixed. “It’s a terrible idea to make students eat while standing,” the state-run Chongqing Morning Post said in an editorial. “It sacrifices the student’s health for academic scores. It’s unacceptable, and it should not be emulated.”

It quoted Gao Shan, a gastroenterologist, who suggested that rushed eating over a long period of time could lead to chronic digestive problems. The paper questioned whether the few minutes shaved off a proper meal could improve academic performance, when a meal consumed while standing is more likely to hurt one’s health, the newspaper added.

At Suixian High, some students said they understood the school’s intent was ultimately designed for their benefit.

“The school has done it for the good of us, so we don’t spend too much time on eating but more time on studying,” one student said but acknowledged that there were some teething problems. “It’ll be better if the dining table is higher,” he said.

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Public Grows Disenchanted with the Ivory Tower

Is the American public losing faith in public higher education? A recent survey from the Pew Research Center suggests that broad swaths of people are indeed peeved by state-funded universities and colleges. As Independent Institute Senior Fellow Richard K. Vedder explains at Forbes, 61 percent of the survey respondents indicated they thought schools were “going in the wrong direction,” including 73 percent of Republicans (or GOP leaning) and 52 percent of Democrats (or Democratic leaning).

Some concerns involved rising tuition fees (a worry shared by almost all Democrats and most Republicans) and free speech restrictions (shared by many Republicans and some Democrats). One apparent by-product of the bipartisan upset: reduced state funding for certain institutions, including a few schools troubled by well-publicized student demonstrations, such as the University of Missouri and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Public education has a major PR problem that it can’t afford to ignore.

One step toward fixing the problem—at least on the academic-freedom front—is to ditch certain Obama-era guidelines, according to Independent Institute Research Fellow William J. Watkins Jr. “Under the Obama administration, Title IX [of the Education Amendments of 1972] became a tool not to achieve [gender] participation-parity [in school sports], but to sanction kangaroo courts and silence certain viewpoints,” Watkins writes in an op-ed for the Sacramento Bee. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has already cast aside some of the guidelines, but more needs to be done, Watkins argues. “Undoubtedly, Title IX-inspired speech codes and inquisitions stifle student speech and undermine the first principles of a free society.”

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Australian student writing standards plummet to a new low: One in three Year 7 students are still learning to read and almost half of 15-year-olds need help to construct a sentence

Students have recorded the lowest ever scores since NAPLAN testing began - and the alarming slide has experts calling for urgent classroom reforms. 

The National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) are a series of basic skills tests given each year to Australian children.

A third of Year Seven students are still learning to read and almost half of 15-year-olds need help constructing sentences, according to this year's test scores.

A staggering 20 per cent of Year Nine students in New South Wales failed the writing test, the Daily Telegraph reported.

About 40 per cent of Year Nine students across the state need help from a teacher in putting a sentence together as they only just met the minimum standards for writing.

The performance of NSW students has been getting worse since 2011.

Writing results in Year Five and Year Seven were also below those when testing began.

Students who are unable to reach minimum standards - 22 per cent in NSW - may require 'additional assistance' from teachers, according to the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority.

Pete Goss of the think tank Grattan Institute said the results were disappointing, and added schools should be focusing strongly on teaching students how to write well.

'National benchmarks are not set very high and that's just not good enough,' he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

'In a typical to slightly disadvantaged secondary school, one-third of Year Seven students are still learning to read, they're reading at a Year Three or Four level,' he said.

University of Technology Sydney education professor Rosemary Johnston said the poor results were due to a lack of practice.

'I don’t think it matters if it is handwriting or written on a computer, we need children to read more and to write more, otherwise it is a skill that is going to be lost,' she told the Daily Telegraph.

Students are given a picture or phrase in NAPLAN tests and are asked to write a 'persuasive or narrative' text in 40 minutes, which is then marked against ten criteria including vocabulary, spelling and sentence structure.

NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes defended the state's results, saying it performed above the national average when numeracy and reading were included.

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