A recent notice issued by the Ministry of Education on compulsory enrollment has caused parents and the public at large to focus on the issue of school age once again, in particular introducing the practice of holding kids back a year if they're not ready to move on to the next grade.
Commentator Huang Qichao, writing on Hubei-based news site
www.cnhubei.com, said such a system would better meet the needs of individual development, and that the current age-based system could cause students who weren't yet ready for the new grade to lose interest and motivation. Huang argued that although there's been concerns about cost, a carefully managed system wouldn't disrupt the educational order.
But another writer, Ran Yu, argued that although the system might be good for children's growth, it could cause feelings of unfairness because it meant some students would eat up more of China's scarce educational resources. And since parents and students would regard being held back as shameful, they might reject staying down a year.
Holding back kids isn't a bad thing, wrote Yang Peng, a reporter from Shanxi Province’s news site www.hsw.cn, but it will be hard for the public to accept. Yang stressed that there's plenty of educational problems that need to be settled, and that for most people, the priority is providing balanced resources.
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