Break Time Banned in Chinese Schools. What Now?

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I started this post with anger. If school is a place that only outlines what we CAN do, then what are the differences between schools and prisons?

The shocking news

My nephew Jimmy just enrolled in primary school on September 1, 2023, in a suburban district of Tianjin, China. He isn’t a very extrinsic kid. He would even be too shy to talk with me after being separated for a couple of months, even if we had just talked happily on the phone days ago. “It’s natural for an intrinsic kid to be afraid of school.” I comforted myself, “He’ll get through it soon.”

Several days after the new semester, I happened to have an opportunity to visit him. However, when I saw how resistant he was to school, I realized it was more than his young age or intrinsic characteristics. He had been crying every time he set for school, repeating things like “it’s too boring,” and “time goes too slow.” Yeah, I can relate to my old memory, Chinese schools weren’t necessarily interesting places. But the words “time goes too slow” rang my bell: he is just a 6-year-old, how would he have the feeling of time being too slow?? If he was enjoying, he should have felt time flies. I sensed something was wrong and decided to investigate.

I started by asking him why he didn’t like school while he had so much fun to enjoy, recalling the happy memory I had in primary school playing games between classes. It was the mid-1990s, in a very underdeveloped town in China. We didn’t have as many toys to kill time, so we made good use of our creativity: we played all kinds of interactive games, like hide-and-seek, police chasing suspects; we also made good use of materials we found nearby, flying paper planes, square-bashing competition (read on for explanation), stalk-pulling (see below). The list goes on and on. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed my primary school overall, but remembering those games, I still can’t resist putting on smiles. I asked my nephew weren’t these fun activities to do at school?

Note: The square-bashing game is a game with papers folded into squares. In the gameplay, players bash their squares in turn on the ground, nearby, or on their opponents’ squares. If the opponents’ squares flip, you win their squares. A good player is proud of piling up the squares he wins – triumphs to show others how powerful he is.

Note: The stalk-pulling game is played by pulling stalks (usually from fallen tree leaves) as illustrated above. The one whose stalk breaks loses the game. The fun is very similar to the big boys game, MMA – you keep winning or you’re done.

I was shocked to hear that they are not allowed to enjoy the break-time anymore. They must remain in the classroom unless they need to get water or use the toilet. Yes, you read it right. No chasing around in the corridor, not to mention in the schoolyard. Feeling too hard to comprehend, I asked him to wear his smartwatch to school, so that I could give him a video call during break-time and observe his environment by myself. Only to know that smartwatches were said to be banned on the first day of his admission. Trying to cheer him up, I suggested taking some toys so that he could at least have some fun. But sorry, toys are banned too, of course.

Still not giving up, I started asking around my friends and relatives, with the hope that Jimmy’s school was just a special case. Soon I got some responses. Some relatives said this to be very common, and even more serious in Beijing. Another friend, who is now a teacher in a primary school in my hometown, expressed that this is just like COVID-19 – a new norm. Now I need somebody to cheer me up.

PE classes

Beside the hopelessness, a very slight comfort is that Jimmy has a PE class 4 days a week. They also have group gymnastics every day during the long, 30-minute break in the morning. These are the only times when they are allowed in the schoolyard and the playground. My sister and I decided to do some investigation on the quality of such outdoor activities. We also optimistically thought that after the group gymnastics, the students might have the chance to play freely. Yet we were surprised again.

Below is a video I took after the gymnastics. Kids were taken back to the classroom in order. In another corner of the schoolyard, one teacher instructed her students: “Don’t talk while in the corridor. Quickly drink some water and use the toilet if needed. Don’t make me repeat!”

This second video witnessed the “very fierce” sport they did during the PE class. They walked for three whole rounds during the 40-minute class, which explains why they needed to have good rest when they weren’t walking. Oh right, they also spend quite some time in practicing lining up the troop. Another class nearby, 2nd grade or even higher (because they have uniforms already), also spent their whole class in practicing the lining.

The reason

You may tend to think this is a byproduct of the COVID-19 regulations, as I did in the beginning. The whole population was basically educated to do this during the miserable 3+ years, so it’s somewhat understandable that the schools are still in the shadow of scaring new breakouts, though not forgivable. But then my teacher-friend told me a true story in which a boy’s parents blamed the school for their son’s falling on the ground, resulting in a flea-sized crack on one of his teeth. The parents kept pressuring the school for months to find a satisfying solution for them, and they succeeded. “How could parents put so much pressure on the school?” you may wonder. Well, now with all kinds of social media, there are already countless stories in which parents “exposed” schools’ “negligence” by mentioning/reporting to newspapers or local Education Bureaus. You may argue, “The Education Bureaus can give justice to both parents and schools.” But the simplest solution is to just pass the pressure back to schools and let schools bother themselves with their own problems, and that is what usually what such cases end up with.

After thoughts and call for changes

Among the friends I enquired, there was another primary school teacher in Shenzhen who said their school still has normal break times, when kids can freely wander around. But I remembered another shocking story where a teacher from her school had to kneel down to get a student back to school. With a better understanding of the situation, now I feel a bit sorry for schools and teachers.

However, I don’t think schools are innocent. Quit the opposite, I think schools bear the most responsibility for the current situation, although I think the root causes are irrational parents, failing Education Bureaus, and the misuse of social media. Here is my justification. IMHO, although the education system comprises families, schools, and society, schools are the lead among these three parties. They are the place where students spend most of their study time, and they are the place where most trends, good or bad, start. In the case of bad trends, schools should take the responsibility of correcting them so that things won’t deteriorate. Schools and teachers can’t just sit back and watch the education system being doomed, can they?

Parents, and citizens who still have faith in this society, shouldn’t just sleep on these negative trends. We should keep fighting even though we won’t change the situation in the near future. Media, especially traditional newspapers, you’re the ears, eyes, and mouths of this society, please don’t pretend that nothing is wrong, let alone act as the gun of ugliness.

Education Bureaus, you’re the brain of the education system. You’re the most powerful, but remember, with power comes responsibility. If you’re asleep, please wake up. If you’re drunk, please keep sober at work time. Or if you’re burning out, reconsider whether you’re taking too much unnecessary responsibility. Don’t forget that in the human body, the brain is not the whole nervous system, though it is the core of it. The art is to distribute responsibility with rights altogether.

Remarks

In the middle school section of the same school, which is by the side of Jimmy’s, the same phenomenon was observed. If this phenomenon continues or even widens, I can imagine universities in several years will adopt the same regulation. There is no reason why they won’t: schools, colleges, and universities will have much fewer troubles to deal with; students are so calmly obedient. When they start their careers, their employers will be happy too about their do-as-said part. Soon enough, in a future virus outbreak, people will be locked down so comfortably, feeling hundreds of thousands of times more relaxed than their parents did.