Underachiever Discrimination

Teachers of Dongguan Huizu primary school in Henan Province, China, asked the underachievers to pretend to be ill in order to “escape” from District uniform examination assessment.

Li crying for the whole day, made his mother Ms. Li quite worried. “I tried to ask him, and he told me that because he didn’t do well in past exams, his teacher asked him to pretend to be ill. It’s ridiculous!” The mother of the 11-year-old boy still couldn’t help being angry.

As Ms. Li said, it’s not the first time that her son’s teacher asked him to cheat, and other students who didn’t have good marks in exams were required to do the same thing. “It’s the District uniform exam. If pupils don’t do well, it will bring bad effect to the teachers’ reputation.” said Ms. Li, with extreme furious, “I think my son has the right to take the exam, no matter how he does it.”

Well, it sounds to be quite absurd, but still ordinary in China, where exam-oriented education system takes the leading position, although government always emphasizes the importance of education for all-round development. I think it’s a meaty theme for study and debate.

To be honest, when I was a pupil, I didn’t need to take any exams since I did well enough in during-semester tests. (That’s our school’s encouraging policy for hard-working students.) I used to wish if I could escape from all the exams, it would really be the most fantastic thing in the world. But oddly disappointed feeling came up when I saw others taking exams, because I think, I lost the chance of taking exams.

Now just come back to the issue. First of all, taking examination is students’ right, obviously. Depriving of it, I mean in such a situation, it will be kind of esteem detriment. It doubtlessly must make Li feel seriously frustrated and heart-losing. You know it’s always not very easy for children to rebuild self-confidence. Here is a picture showing that a boy wanted to jump from the building to commit suicide because the teacher’s words hurt him(from Information Ontimes in China).

Secondly and importantly, it’s cheating. In order to deal with the assessment of education, teachers made a choice of telling lies, which surely set a bad example to children. The reputation of themselves, and the prestige of school, both will be elegant reasons. But, if teachers were cheaters, what would the children think?

Then a problem has arisen. Why are the teachers so anxious about the marks of students? The answer is that education evaluation department assesses teachers work by their students’ mark of exams. Using this ruler, can the result of assessment come up to the education evaluation department’s expectation? I believe not.

Blaming on teachers too much makes no sense, I think, because both students and teachers are the “victims” of exam-oriented education system. It’s necessary for teachers to treat every student on an equal footing, and more pressing issue must be adjusting the education evaluation criteria practically. A relaxed education environment surely makes students more comfortable.

Don’t worry if you are not a top student in class, Bill Gates either.