Taming the tiger mothers

China sounds the alarm over its stressed-out schoolchildren

Pushy parents are making them miserable

LIN MING, a ten-year-old who has two years left at his primary school in Beijing, does not remember the last time he returned home before 6pm on a weekday during term. As soon as school is out, his mother, Yang Mei, shuttles him around the city, dropping him off at tutoring agencies where he studies advanced maths and English grammar. Ms Yang accepts that she is “maybe putting a bit too much stress” on her son. But she has no choice. “Around 90% of my son’s classmates attend after-school lessons. It’s a competition I can’t lose.” When the new academic year begins next month, Ms Yang estimates that she will spend 3,000 yuan ($435) a month on her son’s tutoring, about one-fifth of her household’s monthly income.

Many Chinese schoolchildren do well academically. In the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, held in 2015, Chinese 15-year-olds in some cities did better in science and maths than their counterparts in most members of the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. Yet Chinese officials worry that pupils’ achievements may exact too heavy a mental and physical price. In July the Ministry of Education released its first “comprehensive quality assessment” of the country’s primary- and junior-high school education. The unusually critical tone of the 26-page report has been causing a stir among China’s online commentators.

One concern the document raises is that pupils get too much homework. The ministry reckons that nearly one in ten pupils in the penultimate year of primary school spend more than two hours on Chinese-language homework alone, every school day. Even before the report was published, some education authorities had been trying to lighten workloads. In March, for example, primary-school pupils in the eastern city of Hangzhou were told by their teachers to stop doing homework at 9pm if they were unable to complete it by that time. Junior-high school pupils were given until 10pm.

Another, related, problem is that Chinese pupils are out of shape. Nearly a fifth of nine-year-old boys and 13-year-old girls are overweight or obese, says the report. That is partly because many schools, often under pressure from tiger parents, teach more sessions of core subjects like maths and Chinese than is required by the education ministry, bumping physical-education classes. From now on, however, schools will be evaluated not only on how well pupils do in academic tests but also on their athletic ability, based on their performance in challenges such as 50-metre sprints and standing long-jumps.

Yet the ministry’s harshest criticism is reserved for schools and tutoring agencies that overburden pupils by “teaching ahead”—imparting knowledge that is too advanced for a given age group. Zhang Ling, the head of Ben Jen kindergarten in Beijing, suspects that most nursery schools in the city use materials that are designed for the first or second years of primary school. That will no longer be allowed.

In July the ministry ordered kindergartens nationwide to focus on “fun and games” in the classroom. Fun inspectors will be dispatched later this year to enforce this. Ms Zhang, who says her kindergarten was already in compliance, welcomes the greater scrutiny. She says she can now wave an official document at parents who insist that their children be exposed to too-advanced academic fare.

To ensure that tutoring outfits do not offer “unsuitably” stretching courses, the government instructed them in February to provide education authorities with details of syllabuses and lists of their pupils along with which year they are in at which school. They must also agree to spot inspections. The ministry is cracking down on rogue pedagogues who refuse to teach academic material in school, and instead steamroller pupils into attending evening classes at tutoring centres where the teachers moonlight. This summer 31 teachers in the northeastern city of Harbin received unspecified punishment for doing that.

Ms Yang, the parent, says the new rules are well-intentioned, but may end up hurting middle-class folk like her. That is because those with deeper pockets can always hire home tutors, who are difficult for the government to monitor, to teach their little ones the advanced stuff. A customer service agent for Xue Er Si, a national tutoring chain, says the new restrictions mean that classroom-based tutors will have to be more cautious about what they teach. But she nonetheless reassures parents that the course content will still be harder than that found in school textbooks.

The clampdown on over-eager teachers and out-of-school instructors fails to tackle the root cause of pupils’ stress, notes Zeng Xiaodong of 21st Century Education Research Institute, a Beijing-based think-tank. As long as admission to senior-high schools is based on results from the gruelling zhongkao exam, parents are likely to exploit every loophole to give their children an edge. Typically only the top 60% of zhongkao-takers secure a spot at an academic school. The rest are shunted to vocational ones. A better way to reduce stress for young children, argues Ms Zeng, is to scrap entrance exams to senior-high schools. The education ministry has correctly identified a problem. It needs to study harder how to solve it.