For long it is trendy that everybody will mention Yang Si when talking about school education reform. It seems that Yangsi experience has become the Bible for Chinese middle schools to follow. Media play the most important role in heating it up.

But the fact is if there is only one voice existing in the education field，this will be abnormal and quite dangerous.

Frankly speaking, I have no objection to their class reform: Learn first and then teach, practice on the spot, thus the students have formed a great habit of self-studying, one of important studying abilities. I think this is challenging and feasible and has set a good example for us to follow.

We can refer to Yang Si experience, and nonetheless just focus on its class reform experience.

Yang Si is a junior school with students aged from 12 to 14. Besides learning subjects, the kids are supposed to have their own life. But In Yang Si the students are being molded from a single type extruder---- the deadly strict regulations and rules: They live far away from parents, they get up and sleep by clock, even they eat in a certain fixed pattern. Rules Everywhere! A student must be most careful to avoid being trapped. Under such conditions, a young kid will be likely to be stressed out. Students are like puppies whose performance has been already designed by the school. What they can do is to adapt to the circumstance which seems hard for the teenagers.

After class they have to take a different and colorful life of their own. It shouldn’t be a military school. But it really is in discipline or restriction education.

My main concern is that an overemphasis on discipline education like this will lead to a lack of time and freedom for the kids to enjoy their own true childhood, full of laughter, individualism, proper joining the society and family union, etc. Do they have such active elements in their life? Apparently most schools nationwide has the same problem.

Qualification –oriented education doesn’t only exist in class, but also involves every aspect of school life.

Yang Si’s so-called qualification-oriented education is not well worth following and copying. Kids’ isolation from families and society for long will result in big problems.

Yang Si is just like a modern production line producing students in batch in a closed and isolated island.

Compared with ordinary schools, Yang Si surely does better in the class teaching reform. We must learn something from it. I think Yang Si is much stricter with the students in all activities after class. All their out-of class activities are programmed and checked pretty closely. They also have morning reading lessons and evening self-study lessons, which are not allowed to arrange for the juniors in the ordinary schools.

Do the foreign juniors have such extra lessons? They are doing real qualification-oriented education.

We are not. And Yang Si is not, either.