State Plans to Ease up on School Texts, TestsThe Ministry of Education will streamline textbooks and simplify exams to reduce the homework of senior middle school students while focusing the quality of education on how children can apply knowledge.To update senior middle school curricula and make students more well rounded, 10 provinces and municipalities will try new teaching approaches this fall term, the ministry announced at a press conference yesterday in Beijing. Also, textbooks and teaching methods will be changed to cater to a reform of college entrance examinations, a ministry official said. Many schools have long practiced exam-oriented teaching methods and piled on homework because higher exam grades confer honors and promotions on teachers. Li Lianning, director of the ministry's Department for Basic Education, said the new teaching plans will help improve instruction in the 12 compulsory subjects: politics, the Chinese language, foreign languages, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography, information technology, sports and the arts. The plans would phase out the use of rote textbook-based memorization and combine it with practical skills such as community service and academic experiments. Outdated and overly complicated contents in the 12 subjects will be removed from the curriculum to help reduce homework, said Li. Today some schools grade students according to their exam marks, and statistics indicate that about 70 per cent of middle school students are anxious about being graded after exams. The ministry has called on senior middle schools, which used to give many preparatory tests for college entrance examinations, to reduce these tests to ease students' mental stress, Li said. The annual entrance examinations once focused on testing students on their memorization of texts. College entrance examinations will be gradually rewritten to emphasize comprehensive skills, such as flexibly using classroom knowledge to solve social and daily life problems, said Zheng Zengyi, an official with the ministry's Department for Senior Middle School Affairs. To help low-income children afford education, the ministry and the State Press and Publication Administration have decided to provide cheaper black and white textbooks for primary and middle school students in poor areas, said Li. China introduced color textbooks to primary and middle schools in the 1980s. |
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