A new policy aiming to reducing student stress from school was implemented recently in northwest China's Shaanxi Province.
   
The new policy said primary schools in the province should not give homework to students in grades one or two, and that students in other grades should spend no more than one hour on home assignment.
  
The policy also says students in grades one and two of junior high school should only spend at most one hour and a half doing homework everyday.
   
The same policies can also be seen in east China's industrial and business center Shanghai and the province of Zhejiang.
  
Many experts considered those polices as successful practices to comply with international conventions. For in some region of European countries, legislation banned homework for students underage 12.
   
Principal of Australian Melbourne school, Gordon Donaldson, who attended the First-Ever International Schools Forum here just a few days ago, said in his school different quantities of home assignments are set to the students of different grades.
   
"It guarantees students have plenty of time with their family or to do some thing they are interested in," the principal said.
   
But not all Chinese parents agreed with the burden reduction project. Shanghai citizen Chen Shiqin, who has a 10-year-old daughter, always complained that his daughter's homework was not enough.
   
"Her home assignment is too simple and too little to make her competitive in society," he said.
  
Chen selected extra exercises and assigned his daughter to read some famous world classics such as "Notre-Dame de Paris." Every day, his daughter actually took three hours studying.
   
The 11-year-old Huang Yuwei may seem to be lucky, but he has to play piano for two hours daily after finishing his school work, which typically lasts about half an hour.
   
"My mother told me that it is hard to vie with others in society if I don't have any specialty," he said.
   
Dong Xiuhua, Doctor of Education and Science Study College, said that tradition makes China pay more attention to education, worrying them about the actual effects of the new policies.

Cheng Wei, a socialist, says the reason for this problem is simply because the Chinese social security system is not sound. Many people in their old age must depend on their children, so children's education is important for them.

(Xinhua News Agency April 15, 2005)