China’s children too busy for playtime – Gillard announces Australia is next

At the age of 12, Zhuzhu seems to have everything a child could dream for — plenty of toys, beautiful clothes and even a piano.

Zhuzhu however, has little time to play, with a large stack of homework to do.

Like most other Chinese children her age, Zhuzhu has to go to school from Monday to Friday, nine hours a day — an hour more than her parents spend at work. Come the weekend, her mum and dad indulge themselves in a lengthy lie-in — Zhuzhu however, isn’t so lucky.

Unlike her parents, she has to get up early for piano lessons on Saturday and Sunday morning, followed by private extracurricular Maths and English classes the afternoon. As a reward for her hard work, Zhuzhu’s parents let her play with her toys for one hour on Saturday and Sunday evening.

“She will have plenty of time to play after she enters university,” said Zhuzhu’s 42 year-old mum An Hui, a department manager of a PR company in Beijing.

Zhuzhu is not alone. According to a new survey conducted by the Chinese Youth and Children Research Center (CYCRC), increasing numbers of children in large cities across the country are experiencing joyless childhoods.

The CYCRC surveyed 2,500 primary and secondary school pupils across the country in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Changchun, Chengdu and Lanzhou. The results of the survey reveal how, due to long school hours and growing pressure from parents to study hard, children are feeling unhappy about a lack of playtime.

On average, China’s children spend 8.6 hours a day at school, with some spending 12 hours a day in the classroom. The survey also claimed that the majority of children spend longer hours at school than their parents spend at work.

Almost all of the students involved in the survey said they had to do homework, revise and prepare for classes after school. Around half of the students’ parents testified that they often don’t allow them to play outside as it means less study time.

The CYCRC survey also reveals that when they do have spare time for play, many children are either too tired to play or have nobody to play with — only 4 in 10 of the survey’s participants claim they had friends to play with.

Indeed, Sun Yunxiao, director of the CYCRC noted that heavy study loads have exhausted children, more than half of the survey’s participants said that what they want most is, “A good night’s sleep.”

Chinese students are put under ever-increasing pressure by their parents to study hard due to the country’s highly competitive market for university places and jobs. Study pressure has led to an increase in stress, psychological problems and even tragedy.

Last June, a 16 year-old girl from Chengdu, Sichuan Province, committed suicide after failing to pass the entrance exam for a respected senior high school.

In spite of persistent requests from the Ministry of Education asking parents to stop enrolling their children in extracurricular courses and requesting schools to limit homework time to one hour a night, primary and secondary schools have continued to offer after school Maths and English classes, with the sole aim of sending more students to good universities.

“Too many students are striving for the limited places in higher education resources may be a reason for schools’ flout to the circulars,” said Sun Yunxiao.

As for Zhuzhu, her mother, An Hui, knows full well that her daughter doesn’t get enough sleep or playtime, “We have no other choice,” she said, “if she gives up now and doesn’t study hard, she will regret it as her future will be lost. She will complain to us more then.”

“This is the reality of China,” An sighed.

And this is the reality this Gillard regime is trying to force onto us, already there is a mountain of homework for MY daughter who happens to be 12yo also.  Because she plays competitive basketball  on Thursday and Saturday, it has meant she was forced to spend half of Saturday and most of Sunday doing homework.  This is NOT the life I want for my child and certainly not the life I will allow this Gillard regime to foist on me or my daughter.

I believe we trade more than enough with Asia already and do not need to increase our reliance on them. I find it fascinating that while this Destroyer of Aussie spirit and culture has been in power we have made payments to all these Asian countries for reasons only known by a few in Cabinet and yet you are releasing a blueprint aimed at forcing greater interaction of our region.

Gillard has also claimed “Asia will be home to most of the world’s middle class by as early as 2025″
. http://www.news.com.au/national/pm-launches-asia-policy-blueprint/story-fndo4eg9-1226504762323

This Asian Blueprint has shown the dangerous thinking of this regime where she is wanting to destroy the middle class in Australia and force our children to have an hour on a Saturday and Sunday when they can unwind from their schooling.

We cannot allow this to occur, it is the worst of all scenarios as it is effectively changing the future of our nation today  by wrecking the childhood of our kids and turning them into autonomous workers for her corporation.