Puppy love prohibition displays arbitrary nature of local school rules

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Puppy love prohibition displays arbitrary nature of local school rules

By Liu Zhun (Global Times) 08:14, September 26, 2013

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Students at Chunhui Senior High School in Wenzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province now have to think twice before they frolic with their classmates and friends as usual on the campus. The school authorities demanded every student to sign an agreement of "moral education," listing 22 "extremely serious disciplinary violations," which prohibits students from having "too close relations" with their fellows, including their "same-sex friends."

This code of conduct has raised eyebrows among netizens, who criticized the rules as weird, prurient, and a one-size-fits-all approach.

Su Lianfu, headteacher of the school, according to the report by Wenzhou Metropolis Daily, responded to these attentions by saying "the rule is set to prevent the students from puppy love … Although the wording of the rule is a bit improper, the intentions are good."

Puppy love is regarded as one of the most unacceptable no-nos on Chinese campuses, but the taboo is often broken by some young Adams and Eves. Although no detailed or scientific data can prove the point, puppy love is still believed to have an absolutely negative impact over the adolescents' academic learning, degrading the ethos of the school.

Of course, individual schools set their own personal rules. Take Houghton Academy in the US, where international students must speak English, and any usage of their native languages on the campus is a disciplinary offense. This might seem ethnocentric, but the school insists on the regulation on the grounds that it will help those students who are non-native speakers have a quicker and better command of English.

The problem is that local schools in China rarely define the rules clearly. For example, Chinese students are usually forbidden from wearing "strange clothes," but the criteria for "strange" are usually left out.

On the contrary, some US schools have much more clearly stipulated dress code such as forbidding students to wear clothes with slogans about sex, violence, and racial discrimination.

Puppy love is also not encouraged in Western schools, but the authorities usually try to elaborate the extent of association between boys and girls. According to a report by The New York Times, Deerfield Academy, another well-known private school in the US, only allows students to visit the dorm of the opposite sex for 15 minutes every Friday and Saturday before lights out at 8 pm, and they have to leave the door ajar, lights on.

Let's go back to the recent puppy love prohibition in China. Not only are the "too close relations" hard to be defined, but the additional clause to extend the range of application to "same-sex friends" makes it more confusing and even suggests homophobia.

Good intentions are no excuse. And can we even call them good?

China's public education system is still trapped within the ideology that "scores come first." The success of a school only relies on how many students can pass the national college entrance examinations.

Academic knowledge is still the only thing that matters. Other programs to help cultivate students, especially psychological education, are usually ignored or even completely cancelled.

Given the high competitiveness and the temporary irreplaceability of the current educational mechanism, it's hard to shift this situation overnight. But it is not impossible for the school authorities to be more farsighted and shift more concentration to the long-term development of their students.

This is not an additional requirement for educators, but part of their job. Setting out clear rules and regulations, rather than relying on the arbitrary exercise of authority, is part of that.