There’s no ignoring that China, with a population exceeding 1 billion people as well as burgeoning economic capabilities, is a force to be reckoned with. Throw in the fact their kids too often score better in math and science than students in the United States and what does not make sense about getting Minnesota and Chinese educators together?

Forty-nine principals from all over China made a cross-global trek to meet last week with Minnesota educators in the first-ever U.S.-China Principals’ Summit hosted by the University of Minnesota’s China Center and the Minnesota Association of Secondary School Principals, among others.

The four-day event, also sponsored by the Beijing-based China-American Education Foundation, was a conversation about the commonalities and differences in each nation’s system of schooling their children.

Education is “their number one priority and their number one fiscal commitment. They are intentionally focusing on becoming a world leader in first-rate education. We need to collaborate with China and we need to keep them a close educational partner,” explained Joann Knuth, executive director of the principals’ group.

There is also Chinese students’ widely recognized academic reputation, said Youngwei Zhang, director of the center. “They outscore their counterparts in many countries in math and science. These are things we need to know about so our students can do better,” he said.

For instance, MinnPost reported last December on recent Program for International Student Assessment, a.k.a. PISA, scores where students in Hong Kong and Singapore outperformed American high school students.

The forum benefits University officials as well, Zhang said, since the University has the largest population of students from China of any U.S. campus. Currently, about 2.5 percent of the University’s student body is international students, and the intent is to double that number. He estimates the U received about 800 student applications from China.

Though international differences in education approaches are difficult to swallow in one big gulp, I asked two educators, Knuth, and Chin Yi (Chin is his family name), to share their initial reactions to the summit.

Chin, who is director of international programs from the Middle School attached to Hunan Normal University, and spoke in English, had this to say.

He praised the American educational system’s “creativity.” “One of the first things that attract me is the creative spirits I found in the American high school teachers and students. We often found that American high school students are very creative, although the Chinese kids have a solid academic foundation, they lack the creative spirit,” he said.

The American system seems more open to new ideas and innovation, he said, with China having a “unified curriculum.”

In addition, China attaches great importance to academics, Chin said, claiming more than 95 percent of its students graduate from high school – much exceeding U.S. rates.

“Also, I like to point out China is attaching great significance to education by the parents. You say the involvement. In China there is no problem in parent’s involvement,” he said.

Knuth, who also represents Minnesota at the National Association of Secondary school Principals in Washington, D.C., shared these thoughts:

“I was very intrigued by China’s commitment to education. Education is their number one priority.” For instance, they talked about a 10- year education reform program where they expect to establish 110 key universities and how they are investing $2 billion in poly-technical colleges, what Americans call technical or vocational schools, she said.

“This is an extraordinary commitment. When you think about their population and the impact it will have on global education, it’s amazing.”

However, China recognizes the need to reform some cultural aspects of their kindergarten through 12th-grade system, she said. “Right now it’s very intense.” She talked to a Carleton College student from China at the conference who told her Chinese students regularly spend 10 to 12 hours a day in “intensive study.”

What the Chinese are looking to infuse into their education system from the American system is innovation. “[Chinese] students are very good at rote learning, but the idea is to learn concepts and then be able to think about, analyze and create new. That is not the cultural pattern in their schools,” Knuth said.

It was 1972 when Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit the People’s Republic of China, thus opening the door to normal relations with the Communist nation. The U’s China Center has worked since 1979 to encourage understanding and cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese people and cultures.

Source: MinnPost.com, MN
http://tinyurl.com/4xte2v

For generations, scholars have debated whether language constrains the ways we think. Now, neuroscientists studying reading disorders have begun to wonder whether the actual character of the text itself may shape the brain.

Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian.

Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal. It’s the same with dyslexia, psychologist Li Hai Tan at Hong Kong Research University and his colleagues reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The problems occur in areas not involved in reading other alphabets.

Using two brain-imaging techniques, they identified striking differences in neural anatomy and brain activity between children able to read and write Chinese easily and classmates struggling to keep pace. Both were at odds with patterns of brain activity among readers of the English alphabet.

Even when readers in both languages looked at the same written characters, the brain activity was different, other researchers found. Arabic numerals of standard arithmetic — used by readers of Chinese and English alike — activate different brain regions depending on which of the two languages people had first learned to read, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China’s Dalian University of Technology reported in 2006.

“In this sense, we may regard dyslexia in Chinese and English as two different brain disorders,” Dr. Tan said, “because completely different brain regions are disrupted. It’s very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English.”

By any measure, reading is a complex and peculiar task. At the speed of thought, readers of English turn letters they see into sounds, sounds into words, and words into meaning. Fluency is measured in milliseconds. Spelling variations are speed bumps in the brain.

Until recently, researchers who study reading abilities focused mostly on Western alphabets. English and 218 other languages, from Alsatian to Zulu, share variations of the same Latin character set. But that set is only one of 60 writing systems used among the world’s remaining 6,912 spoken languages. Even so, those studies convinced many scientists and educators that the brain’s response to the written word, regardless of the language, is universal.

The new research suggests they’re wrong. The schooling required to read English or Chinese may fine-tune neural circuits in distinctive ways.

“We have to recognize that the writing system in China is different, the demands on the brain are different and the characteristics of dyslexia are different,” said Georgetown University pediatric learning specialist Guinevere Eden, who is incoming president of the International Dyslexia Association.

To document the effects on brain development, Dr. Eden and her colleagues are launching a five-year study in Beijing and Washington to compare the neural changes in 60 schoolchildren learning to read either Chinese or English. “Nobody has ever done this across two writing systems,” Dr. Eden said.

In ways that ancient scribes never imagined, text has transformed us. Every brain shaped by reading, whether it is schooled in Chinese or English text, measurably differs — in terms of patterns of energy use and brain structure — from one that has never mastered the written word, comparative brain-imaging studies show. “There are real differences that emerge because of literacy,” Dr. Wolf said.

Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception. In January’s Psychological Science, MIT researchers reported that European-Americans and students from several East Asian cultures, for example, showed different patterns of brain activation when making snap judgments about visual patterns.

No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archaeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization.

“Once you have different writing systems in place,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett. “They may reinforce the perceptual and cognitive trends that preceded the invention of writing. They may go hand in glove.”

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://tinyurl.com/6c4gax

A study of a research team of the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), demonstrated for the first time that brains of dyslexics differ in readers of different languages.

The study, which compared dyslexic children who are readers of Chinese to those of English, indicated structural and functional differences between both groups. The findings implied that dyslexia may be different neurological conditions in readers of different languages. This research may help tailor-making therapies for children who grow up in different cultures.

The work “A structural-functional basis for dyslexia in the cortex of Chinese readers” by Dr Siok Wai Ting and her colleagues in HKU was published in April 2008 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of the United States of America, a prestigious international multi-disciplinary scientific journal. Dr Siok is Principal Investigator of the State Key Laboratory and Assistant Professor of Linguistics.

Developmental dyslexia affects 7% to 9% of children in Hong Kong, and up to 17% throughout the world. It results in a severe learning disability in acquiring reading skills.

Previous neuroimaging studies have revealed that dyslexic readers of alphabetic languages like English have decreased gray-matter volume in posterior brain systems, and have weak reading-related activity in the left temporoparietal and occipitotemporal regions of the brain.

In order to assess whether these abnormalities were universal, or culture-dependent, Dr Siok said her team had been studying dyslexic Chinese children. She explained that while alphabetic languages like English were learnt using letter-to-sound conversion rules, pronunciations in a non-alphabetic language like written Chinese, which is composed of square-shaped or picture-like characters, must be memorized by rote.

In this latest study, the team used two brain imaging techniques.

Firstly, voxel-based morphometry, an established whole-brain gray-matter assessment technique, was used to analyze the high-resolution 3D anatomical images acquired with magnetic resonance images (MRIs) from 16 Chinese dyslexic subjects and 16 age-matched normal children as controls. The children, who were studying in Beijing primary schools, were all native speakers of Putonghua, on average aged 11, and all strongly right-handed.

It was found that the gray-matter volume in the left middle frontal gyrus region, which is important for the coordination of cognitive resources in working memory and previously has been shown to play a role in Chinese reading and writing, was significantly smaller in dyslexic children than in normal subjects. But at the same time, their more posterior brain systems remained unaffected. Previous studies have revealed that dyslexic English readers have decreased gray-matter volume in their posterior regions.

Secondly, a functional MRI experiment was conducted on a subset of 12 of each of the dyslexics and control groups. They were asked to decide whether two Chinese characters viewed simultaneously rhymed with each other. The rhyme judgment task involves phonological processing which would reflect in activation of some regions in the brain. It was found that the normal subjects had much stronger activation of the left middle frontal gyrus region during the task than the dyslexic group. The dyslexic Chinese readers demonstrated little activation in the posterior brain regions related to reading-related activity in English readers.

The fact that Chinese and Western dyslexics show structural abnormalities in different brain regions suggests that dyslexia may even be two different brain disorders in the two streams of culture.

“What causes brain structure abnormalities for dyslexia is currently unknown. Previous genetic studies suggest that malformations of brain development are associated with mutations of several genes and that developmental dyslexia has a genetic basis. Our brain imaging findings may well provide useful clues for further genetic studies in dyslexia,” said HKU’s Professor of Linguistics Tan Li-Hai, who is also Principal Investigator of the State Key Laboratory.

Dr Siok, lead author of the study, said the study would certainly help in the development of more efficient tests for early identification of Chinese children with reading disabilities, and more effective strategies to remediate dyslexia, tailored made for Chinese.

Dr Siok explained that the left middle frontal gyrus is responsible for working memory and is spatially close to the motor cortex, whereas the left posterior brain areas are involved in letter-to-sound mappings and are spatially close to the auditory cortex. “Our findings suggest that educational intervention for Chinese dyslexia may involve working memory and sensorimotor tasks. Current treatments of English dyslexia already use the aspects of letter-sound conversions and phonological awareness“, she said. (…)

Source: ScienceBlog.com, CA
http://tinyurl.com/5v8wpr

Dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. That finding, reported in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures.

“This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics’ brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese,” said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. “Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia.”

Millions of children worldwide are affected by dyslexia, a language-based learning disability that can include problems in reading, spelling, writing and pronouncing words. The International Dyslexia Association says there is no consensus on the exact number because not all children are screened, but estimates range from 8 percent to 15 percent of students.

Reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words.

Past studies have suggested that the brain may use different networks of neurons in different languages, but none has suggested a difference in the structural parts of the brain involved, Tan explained.

Tan’s research group studied the brains of students raised reading Chinese, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. They then compared those findings with similar studies of the brains of students raised reading English.

Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University in Washington, said the process of becoming a skilled reader changes the brain.

“Becoming a reader is a fairly dramatic process for the brain,” explained Eden, who was not part of Tan’s research team on this paper.

For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently.

For example, English-speaking children learn the sounds of letters and how to combine them into words, while Chinese youngsters memorize hundreds of symbols which represent words.

“The implication here is that when we see a reading disability, we see it in different parts of the brain depending on the writing system that the child is born into,” Eden said.

That means, “we cannot just assume that any dyslexic child is going to be helped by the same kind of intervention,” she said in a telephone interview.

Tan said the new findings suggest that treating Chinese speakers with dyslexia may use working memory tasks and tests relating to sensor-motor skills, while current treatments of English dyslexia focus on letter-sound conversions and sound awareness.

He said the underlying cause of brain structure abnormalities in dyslexia is currently unknown.

“Previous genetic studies suggest that malformations of brain development are associated with mutations of several genes and that developmental dyslexia has a genetic basis,” he said in an interview via e-mail.

“We speculate that different genes may be involved in dyslexia in Chinese and English readers. In this respect, our brain-mapping findings can assist in the search for candidate genes that cause dyslexia,” Tan said.

In their paper, the researchers noted that imaging studies of the brains of dyslexic children using alphabetic languages like English have identified unusual function and structure in the left temporo-parietal areas, thought to be involved in letter-to-sound conversions in reading; left middle-superior temporal cortex, thought to be involved in speech sound analysis, and the left inferior temporo-occipital gyrus, which may function as a quick word-form recognition system.

When they performed similar imaging studies on dyslexic Chinese youngsters, on the other hand, they found disruption in a different area, the left middle frontal gyrus region.

The study was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the University of Hong Kong.

In a separate paper, published two years ago, University of Michigan researchers reported that Asians and North Americans see the world differently.

Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene.

Source: The Associated Press
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hobiJ-tiOnp79R-0onuBx8oMn2CwD8VT8R1G1

As a young migrant worker, Lei Gailing sought her fortune in China’s fast-industrializing and freewheeling south. She found a steady factory job and a less stable boyfriend, then became pregnant.

That decision carried implications that Ms. Lei never fully anticipated, marking her as something of a social outcast in a country that still strictly controls population growth and makes few concessions to women like her.

Today, at 41, Ms. Lei says she has no regrets, even after facing a life of bitter twists and turns: pretending to be divorced at one point to avoid bringing shame on her son and ultimately marrying a much older man in an effort to obtain the basic identification her boy needed to go to school or receive other social services.

For all this, Ms. Lei, who now lives with the older man in Beijing in what she describes as an abusive relationship, said she would do it all over again for her son. “I look at him today, and know it was worthwhile,” she said, tears forming in her eyes. “He is so lovely, I cannot regret it.”

In a society where until quite recently premarital sex was often punished, the issue of single motherhood has been slow to enter the public arena. But now, a new awareness of the issue is raising questions about the status of women in China, as well as other rights issues like the hukou, or residency permit, a central tool of population control passed down from the Maoist era that restricts movement by linking people to the towns of their birth.

The Chinese government has long maintained that the Communist Party liberated women in 1949 along with the rest of the country. But in an era of rapid modernization, China has lacked anything like a broad current of thought about women’s rights.

“When we argue that a woman owns the uterus, and it’s her right to decide whether to deliver the baby or not, people won’t buy it,” said Yuan Xin, director of psychology at the Consulting Center of Nankai University. “If you are a woman, your personal choice is monitored and supervised by a lot of others, and they expect you to do what everyone else does.”

Official statistics on the number of single mothers are unavailable in China. But with premarital sex now commonplace and women’s earning power growing, particularly in the wealthy cities of the east, experts believe their numbers are rising fast, albeit from a small base.

“This is of great significance,” said Li Ling, a professor of arts and sciences at Beijing Language and Culture University. “It’s hard for me to judge other people’s choices, good or bad, but it means a lot that women are making such decisions on their own, as a matter of choice. In Chinese tradition, women don’t have such rights. We are only the bearers of offspring for our husbands’ families.”

In many ways, Xie Jing, 33, a newspaper reporter in Shanghai, is typical of an emerging generation of single mothers who are professionals and whose choices on child-rearing are eased by their financial security.

Ms. Xie said that she became pregnant while she was engaged, but that her fiancé’s ambivalence over the unexpected news prompted her to set her own course. When her former fiancé asked her, “What is the point of having a child if we are no longer together?” she had a ready answer: raising the child alone.

“My quality of life isn’t so bad, so I don’t want to lower myself to staying with another person just for the sake of being together,” Ms. Xie said. “If that means I have to sacrifice a lot, so be it. But I am in a good situation now with my baby, and I’m not willing to lose it.”

Her son was born two years ago in a partly foreign-owned hospital, where registration of the pregnancy with a neighborhood committee — standard in most of China — was not required. Ms. Xie lives with her parents, who are retired and help take care of her boy. To all but her closest friends, she explains that the father is overseas on a three-year assignment. Her son bears Ms. Xie’s family name, and the father was told that if he did not accept legal responsibility as a parent, he would be kept at bay until the boy turned 18.

Asserting herself in this way was made easier by virtue of Ms. Xie’s residence in Shanghai, a wealthy city by China’s standards with relatively liberal provisions for awarding residency permits. “I checked out Shanghai’s Public Security Bureau’s Web site, and discovered an item indicating children born outside of marriage could apply for hukou,” Ms. Xie said. “The staff was mean to me when I applied, but there were written rules guaranteeing the rights of my child, so there was nothing they could do to prevent me.”

Every province and major city has some leeway in how it applies those rules. But for peasants and working-class mothers without much education, money or standing, choices can seem limited.

Zhong Yu, 23, a music teacher in Chongqing, one of China’s largest cities, said she considered getting an abortion when she recently discovered that she was pregnant. Abortion is legal, widespread and freely available in China, but she could not afford the hospital fees. She hid her situation from her family, and by the time she had saved enough money, she was five months pregnant — too late, she believed, to end the pregnancy safely.

Today Ms. Zhong calls the father, who has no fixed job, a “vagrant” and says she was silly to have become involved with him. “But when I saw my child, I thought no matter how hard my life will be, I will bring him up,” she added.

Ms. Lei, the mother in Beijing, also had few resources and, partly because of that, a difficult path. After returning to her village to give birth, she went to Beijing to look for work and a husband, leaving her son behind with her mother. But fearing he would be taunted as a bastard in the village, she brought him with her to Beijing when he reached school age.

In the capital, Ms. Lei faced new problems. Without a father she could not establish a hukou, or residency permit. In 2006, Ms. Lei described her plight on the Internet, drawing the interest of a Chinese journalist, who wrote about her. Soon afterward, men began contacting her with marriage inquiries.

She agreed to meet one of them one day under a highway overpass. He had described himself as 60, but looked at least 10 years older, she said. The man, a retired and widowed engineer with a mentally disabled son, said he needed an heir to continue his family line, and she needed the help of a man to register her son so he could attend school. Out of their mutual needs came a marriage of convenience.

“He needed a kid and I needed a home,” Ms. Lei said. “My kid needed to go to school, so we pooled together a family. There was no contract of any kind.”

They married, but their hasty pact quickly unraveled. The man balked at registering the boy in his name out of fear he could be breaking the law. Now, Ms. Lei said, he is cold toward her child and mean to her. For now, the boy, Jirong, 7, attends a neighborhood school that has looked the other way over his lack of a residency permit.

“Most people in this situation would have given away their child to others for adoption,” Ms. Lei said. “Almost no one would choose to bring up the child on her own.”

Source: New York Times, United States
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/world/asia/06china.html

When two University of Illinois scientists set out to learn about the differences in Chinese and American parenting behaviors at mealtime, they learned something important about the reliability of cross-cultural research.

In the study, 22 first-generation Chinese immigrant families with at least one 2-1/2 to 5-1/2-year-old child were videotaped during a shared meal. Two female Chinese research assistants and two female European-American research assistants then analyzed 755 minutes of video to get a large sample of a wide variety of behaviors.

Analysis was done by research assistants who were trained to categorize certain behaviors as either sensitive, intrusive, detached, having negative affect (do family members appear angry or hostile?), having positive affect (do family members seem to enjoy each other?), and the degree of parents’ confidence.

When their work was complete, the research assistants were asked to give detailed reasons for their ratings. Their reasons highlighted their different cultural perspectives about parent-child relationships.

“Although you can train a Chinese research assistant to say that it’s intrusive for a parent to put a bite of food in a four-year-old’s mouth, you can’t actually get him or her to believe it. Their cultural bias causes them to see this behavior as sensitive and loving,” said Angela Wiley, a U of I associate professor of human and community development.

“That’s important because those biases influence their coding in subtle ways, calling into question the validity of much of our past research that compares parenting behaviors across cultures,” she said.

Even when cross-cultural research assistants evaluate behavior as U.S. researchers train them to, the parenting behaviors of other cultures often suffer in comparison, she said.

“If an American research assistant notes behaviors such as the Chinese parent feeding the four-year-old, the researcher will conclude that Chinese parents are suppressing the independence of their children. There’s an inevitable bias toward our own cultural interpretations,” she said.

Chinese culture deems verbally and emotionally expressive persons as socially immature and lacking in self-control. In contrast, expressiveness, including direct verbal communication, is a major behavioral component by the individualism valued by Western cultures.

The influence of these perceptions on cross-cultural studies can be difficult to eliminate, Wiley said.

“Even so, it’s clearly important to continue and expand observational cultural research in an era of increasing contact with other cultures,” she said.

In the study, published in the January issue of Social Development, Wiley and her colleagues recommend using a combination of research assistants from both cultures for all data to minimize the researcher’s tendency to interpret behaviors using their own cultural framework. This collaborative approach maximizes cultural understanding in addition to improving the quality of comparative research, she said. (…)

Source: EurekAlert, DC
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/uoia-cbm040308.php

Red Lantern Diary: Seattleite’s dispatches from Hong Kong

Of all the things I thought would be difficult about living in Hong Kong - and being a parent in general - I never imagined that getting my daughter into preschool and then kindergarten would top the list. The word, “nightmare,” comes to mind as I go from school to school here, watching three year olds learn to read and write and making decisions that elicit disapproving emails from kindergarten admissions directors. Who would have thought? Then again, in this hyper competitive market, I shouldn’t have been surprised. In any case, I feel like I’ve been applying to schools since we first decided to move to Hong Kong two years ago, and that’s because in fact, I have been.

It all started two years ago, as we prepared for our move and I called my friend, Jen, who had previously lived in Hong Kong with three young children, to ask about preschools. At the time, Elisa was just over eighteen months old. She explained that in Hong Kong, children begin preschool at 2 years, 8 months, and the scramble to get into the “right” school was somewhat akin to an eighteen year old trying to gain access to Harvard.

Some international preschools are part of an elementary – or as they say here - primary school while others are standalone. Admission into primary school begins at age 3, 4, or 5, depending on the school. All require lengthy applications and many “assessments” where the children are scheduled into small group visits for testing and observation. This usually happens between two and two and a half years old. If a child cries or clings to a parent, he is automatically disqualified.

After applying to several preschools and being placed on waiting lists, we eventually decided on several criteria: we chose to avoid schools that required an assessment on the grounds that this was not something we desired for our daughter at two years old; we would not consider at so young an age enrollment in a preschool that was part of a primary school; we did not want our daughter in an academic environment where she would be learning to read and write at 3; and we wanted a school with a nice outdoor area to play. With this in mind, one school ermerged as our first choice. We sent in our applications, held our breath, and waited.

In the meantime, I enrolled – after clearing another wait list – in a mommy/baby program at one of the schools. I hoped to gain insight into this crazy process and make new friends. I started the program relieved, believing that although I had not yet secured a spot in our preferred preschool, I had completed all my applications and there was nothing further I could do.

My relief was ephemeral. Within weeks, concerned mothers began asking me where I had submitted applications for Primary school. I was surprised and told them Elisa was just two. They laughed at my innocence and explained that in Hong Kong, schools allow kindergarten applications from birth and that in fact, two was already a bit late. They then asked me where my husband’s firm maintained a “debenture.”

It was the first time I had heard this word. I soon learned that “debentures” are long-term debt instruments sold to parents and companies by schools to raise funds for capital projects. Families and employers are able to purchase them to leapfrog other students in the application process. At the Chinese International School (CIS), one of the well-respected schools in Hong Kong, a debenture, or as the schools calls it, a corporate nomination right, costs HK$600,000 (roughly US$80,000), and 11% of their students attend under this scheme. A scandal last summer revealed that Chinese International School debentures were being sold on the second-hand market for HK$3 million.

Many companies purchase and then offer debentures to employees as an enticement to work in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, my husband’s firm does not. So, we joined those families applying for the remaining open spots. However, this does not spare us from additional admission fees. As part of the application, non debenture parents must agree to pay an “individual nomination right” for the bargain price of - again I’ll use CIS as an example - HK$75,000 (approximately US$10,000). The school holds this non interest bearing sum until the day your child graduates or withdraws from the school, when it is refunded to parents.

At this point, any sensible person would take a another look at local schools. “What is the harm in learning a little Cantonese?” I asked myself. Why not simply bypass the international schools that - due to shortages in space - left over 300 children without any school at all last year? Well, as it turns out, Chinese schools are no picnic either. Children begin academic studies in a primary school at 3 and by age 5, it is not unusual for them to be doing homework until 11 pm. One of my Chinese friends told me of several children she knew who had suffered from stress undergoing the intensity of local schooling. Their parents had sensibly moved them to the kinder, gentler, international system.

The academic rigor of local schools may be justified by the complexity in learning to read and write Cantonese, but still, I didn’t want my daughter doing 6 hours of homework at night at the tender age of 5. And so my saga continued as I began to call, one by one, the international schools and make appointments to tour the schools.

Source: seattlepi.com Mariners blog
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/redlantern/archives/135493.asp?from=blog_last3

Education chief Michael Suen Ming- yeung is today expected to announce the reopening of all schools on Monday, ending the extra-long Easter holiday for younger students.

Primary and special schools, nurseries and kindergartens were shut on March 13 following a flu outbreak and the death of three children from unknown causes.

Secretary for Food and Health York Chow Yat-ngok and senior officials from the Department of Health and the Education Bureau met yesterday to discuss the reopening.

An announcement was expected after the meeting but an official said it was decided to wait until today to allow medical authorities another day to study hospital admissions.

“The most important thing now is that flu viruses have been found not to be especially cruel. They are just normal viruses,” Suen said.

He said the bureau is in constant contact with schools and parents should have no fears about allowing their children return to lessons.

The Centre for Health Protection has recorded no significant upward or downward trend in infections over the past few weeks with the average remaining at 76 cases per 1,000 consultations at private doctors.

The center said there were no hospital admissions yesterday of children suffering from serious flu complications and no new influenza outbreak had been reported in the past 24 hours.

The vice-president of Hong Kong University’s infection research center, Ho Pak-leung, said there is no serious danger to children as data has shown no mutation of the flu virus.

Hong Kong Education Policy Concern Organization chairman Mervyn Cheung Man-ping said an early announcement of the reopening would help parents and warned the Education Bureau it faced a firestorm of criticism if there is a repeat of the hasty manner in which it shut schools earlier for the Easter break.

Cheung also urged the bureau to brief schools on the latest sanitary policies and to provide them with abundant supplies of items such as facial masks and sanitizers. He also expects the bureau to shorten the summer break since schools are on course for the minimum number of prescribed school days this year.

Source: The Standard, Hong Kong
http://tinyurl.com/27qz73

Hong Kong shut all primary schools and kindergartens, halting classes for more than half a million students, after four children with flu-like symptoms died.

“We have been working closely with the Department of Health and the secondary schools the last few days to know more about this spread,” said Anna Chan, an officer with the Education Bureau.” The young get contaminated more easily.”

Hong Kong announced the closures late yesterday, five years after severe acute respiratory syndrome killed 299 people and crippled the city’s economy. The government closely monitors influenza outbreaks, with the airport screening all incoming passengers for signs of fever.

“At this time of the year, it’s a viral soup everywhere,” said Peter Cordingley, the Manila-based spokesman for the World Health Organization’s Western Pacific region. “There is nothing exceptional in what is happening in Hong Kong at the moment.”

Two of the children who died tested positive for influenza A, the Health Department said. It declined to cite influenza as the cause of the deaths. Another two children died after suffering flu-like symptoms, the department said, adding that tests haven’t yet confirmed the presence of influenza A.

China’s government will cooperate with its “Hong Kong counterparts to control this flu incident so it does not spread,” Li Changjiang, head of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, told reporters at a press conference in Beijing today. He didn’t say what action China would take.

“Little Drastic”

Closing schools “might be a little drastic, but it’s a reassurance to the community,” Hong Kong Secretary for Food and Health York Chow told reporters today.

The influenza viruses circulating in Hong Kong this year are predominantly type B and a variant of the type A (H3N2) strain that caused epidemics in Australia last year, including the deaths of three children, said John Nicholls, associate professor of pathology at the University of Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong, “there is a large number of kids being infected,” he said. Actual deaths from the disease are still very low, he said in an interview yesterday.

A 7-year-old boy died at the city’s Tuen Mun Hospital and the school closed amid the flu outbreak, state broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong reported. A 3-year-old and 27-month-old have also died. No common factors between the deaths have been identified at this stage, according to the government.

“High Anxiety”

“If you look back to SARS, you can understand why there is a high level of anxiety in Hong Kong,” WHO’s Cordingley said. “Hong Kong is a very jam-packed-tight type city and it’s the perfect place for transmission lines to thrive.”

The deaths will be investigated to see whether the virus is mutating, Yuen Kwok-yung, a University of Hong Kong professor in microbiology, said at a press conference yesterday.

The Hospital Authority said it has earmarked HK$20 million ($2.6 million) to implement measures up to the end of April to cope with a surge in demand for public hospital services.

Flu outbreaks were confirmed at three primary schools yesterday, the Centre for Health Protection said on its Web site. The outbreak is suspected to have spread to 20 other schools, it said.

Last week, 13 cases were confirmed, still below the peak of 22 recorded during 2007’s flu season, the center, part of the government’s health department, said. Hospital admission rates due to flu among children younger than five years old and the elderly, while rising, are still below those recorded during the peak seasons in the past two years, the center said.

Hong Kong had 140,783 kindergarten and 410,516 primary students the school year ended July 2007, according to the Hong Kong Education Bureau’s Web site. The closures affect children aged between 3 and 11.

Resistant Viruses

The current northern hemisphere flu season is the strongest in four years, and hasn’t been this severe this late in the season in more than 10 years, said Craig Maxwell, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. health-care analyst in London, in a note to clients.

The jump in flu cases is happening because this year’s vaccine is effective against fewer than half the strains infecting people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Scientists have also found strains of the H1N1 seasonal flu virus capable of evading Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu antiviral drug in 20 countries in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific during the past three months.

The prevalence of resistant viruses ranges from 3 percent in Australia to 66 percent in Norway. In Hong Kong, 11 out of 116 samples from patients infected with the H1N1 virus harbored resistance to the pill, the World Health Organization said in a statement on March 6.

Source: Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aVeAzaASQsLE&refer=home

Concerned by the whopping number of children in the age group of six to 59 months suffering from anaemia, the government is taking several steps, including providing supplementary and fortifying food and vitamins supplements to rectify the malady.

Health and Family Welfare Minister Anbumani Ramadoss told Lok Sabha on Wednesday that 69.5 percent of children in the age group of six to 59 months are suffering from anaemia of which 63 percent are in the urban areas and 71.5 percent in the rural areas.

“Anaemia is a multifaceted problem. The important reasons for widespread anaemia are inadequate intake and absorption of iron from cereal based diet, inadequate consumption of green leafy vegetables and citrus fruits,” he said.

He also pointed out that poverty and illiteracy are the contributory factors leading to anaemia among children.

Pointing out that the government is highly concerned about the matter; he said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently held a meeting to chalk out a strategy to deal with the problem.

The ministers for women and child development, human resource development, rural development and health attended the meeting, he said.

“We have decided to introduce fortified food in mid-day meals,” he said.

He said under the reproductive and child health programme (RCH-11) the government is providing iron and folic acid tablets to all pregnant and lactating women and preschool children to control anaemia.

“Now it has been decided that children six months to five years would be given 20 mg iron and 100 mcg folic acid supplement in liquid form,” he said.

Children in the age group of six to 10 years would be provided with 30 mg iron and 250 mcg of folic acid, while adolescents in the age group of 11-18 years would receive the same dose as adults, he added.

“Children in the age group 0-6 years receive supplementary nutrition. Supplementary food is also provided through national programme of nutritional support to primary education,” he added.

The minister said they are planning to provide vitamin A supplements to children till five years of age. Also, health ministry has launched a pilot project on fortification of micronutrients with flour and oil.

Ramadoss said the government is planning a huge awareness campaign on breast-feeding and the ASHAs or the women health volunteers have been asked to inform the villagers to use locally nutritious food. (…)

He said even children born in affluent families are anaemic. “About 56 percent of children in affluent families are anaemic.” (…)

Source: Times of India, India
http://tinyurl.com/288psg