Day: August 7, 2016

Release students from ‘cages’ to improve education, say Redefining Hong Kong panellists Instead of being spoon-fed or overfed, students should be free to explore different interests and possibilities, said all four speakers during South China Morning Post’s forum   The panel offer their views at the Redefining Hong Kong debate series at the JW Marriott Hotel in Admiralty. Photo: K. Y. Cheng   If schools are zoos, and students are animals confined in cages, when disasters strike, should zoo administrators move the cages elsewhere? Should they teach the animals how to protect themselves, or should they improve the zoo’s defensive system? “No, open all the cages!” was the answer from Professor Cheng Kai-ming, one of the speakers at a forum on education policy ­organised by the Post. Instead of being spoon-fed or overfed, students should be free to explore different interests and possibilities, agreed all the four speakers during the forum yesterday. They said the system under which everybody focused on passing exams, where there was only...

How China's cities bar the door to a better education for migrant students   China is increasingly a nation of university graduates, and that is no mean feat. The country admits more students to post-secondary schools than any other nation, meaning the average student's likelihood of achieving collegiate education is on the rise. Reforms since 2000 have increased collegiate admittance on a historic scale: The number of Chinese enrolled in university grew from 1 million in 1998 to 34 million in 2011, by one account, with that number expected to reach 35.5 million by 2020. Yet where other areas see China's positive developments magnified by its size, here the figures fail to capture the correspondingly huge gap between those who will benefit most from this growth and those who are likely be left behind—one that has seldom been wider or harder to bridge. "The market reforms in China have created a more stratified society in rural China," said Xie Ailei, a post-doctoral fellow at the...