China Focus: China works to create well-rounded college students

The coming two days are crucial to high school graduates in China, as they began attending the nationwide university entrance examination on Tuesday. For them, a university education means a better job, handsome earnings and a higher social status, rather than an opportunity to learn and develop abilities.

Chinese college students have been widely criticized for mechanical memorization, lack of independent thought and inability to solve practical problems. Worse, some students spend extravagantly, lack humanitarian concerns and remain apathetic to social happenings.

Chinese educators attributed all these to the emergence of multiple values in the course of social transformation and neglect of moral education.

To this end, universities, prestigious ones in particular, are now working to cultivate the integrated quality of college students.

Shanghai-based Fudan University, plans to divide this autumn's freshmen class into two groups -- one in the science and engineering school and the other in liberal arts school. In the first year of college, the students will learn general knowledge in the two major areas and will specialize from their second academic year.

"The practice will be conducive to whetting students' interest for learning and inspiring their creativity. It will also help broaden their scope of knowledge," said Wang Shenghong, president of the Fudan University.

In addition, the new arrangement will help students take a year to think over in which disciplines they are really interested. Traditionally, Chinese students were required to choose their majors before they enter colleges.

Ge Xiaoyin from the prestigious Beijing University, or Beida, said equal importance should be attached to moral education and psychological guidance.

Early last year, a serial murder on campus of Yunnan University, aroused nationwide concern about psychological pressure on college students.

The murderer, Ma Jiajue, a former life science major at Yunnan University in Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province, was described by some of his schoolmates as a hardworking, poor student with fragile self-esteem and warped mentality, which were subtly implied by the media as main factors behind his crime.

Some analysts see the young generation as a whole is vulnerable to a frequent moody pendulum and "has gotten lost in a boldly blazoned lust for material and physical pleasure."

Sociologists said the pressures of students came mainly from job hunting, acute competition for post-graduate education, love affairs and lack of school assistance in shaping a healthy personality.

Last summer, approximately 2.8 million college graduates joined the fierce competition in China's labor market, as against 2.1 million in the previous year. Only 70 percent of them found jobs, according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

To help students cultivate a healthy mentality and integrated personality despite increasingly great social pressure, some universities, including Fudan and Beida, have added at the beginning of this year traditional moral curriculum to some new courses. These classes include contemporary world economy and politics and current situation and related polices.

San Yucheng, a professor in Fudan's social sciences department, said that China has changed previous practice of separating moral education from academic education to encourage college students to have a sense of mission and responsibility to the nation and society.

Efforts to enhance moral education are highlighted by the recent publicity of the two trend-setting college students.

Xu Benyu, a post-graduate student at the Huazhong University of Agriculture in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, has quitted his post-graduate courses and gone to teach children at poor villages in western part of the country.

Li Qiang, an undergraduate with the news and communications department of the Qinghua University in Beijing, made an independent social survey at rural areas in north China's Shanxi Province during his winter vacation and wrote a report on universal rural problems in northern China. The report ignited wide concern among students and scholars across the nation.

Following their examples, more than 1,355 volunteers from 66 Chinese universities and colleges have taken part in a one-year teaching program at economically underdeveloped areas in western China.

Source: Xinhua