THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION recently published national standards for the management of primary and secondary schools, which has attracted a lot of attention as it says that schools and parents should work together to ensure primary school pupils sleep at least 10 hours a day and middle school students sleep nine hours a day. Thepaper.cn comments:

Studies show that primary school pupils need 10 hours of sleep every day and middle school students nine hours of sleep a day. However, we interviewed some pupils' parents and none of our interviewees said they could achieve that goal. And none of the interviewees believe other parents would be able to achieve that goal.

The reason of course is the academic burden on children. Many kids have ridiculous amounts of homework to do each night, while they also suffer from the additional burden of extracurricular courses. The brutal truth is that children have to work harder than adults.

It should be noted that many parents are rather tired with this situation, and they complain about being exhausted by helping their children with homework and feel pressured by the economic burden of extracurricular courses.
Doubtlessly, the main cause lies in the competition in society. No parents want their children to fall behind in the race.

The problem is especially serious in municipalities such as Beijing and Shanghai, where there are both quality education resources and fierce competition. It is a luxury for children in these cities to sleep enough hours every day.

In order to change this, education resources need to be more fairly distributed. Especially for primary education, so that pupils and their parents do not have to compete so fiercely for the limited amount of quality education resources.

Such things are always easier said than done, of course. To equalize primary and secondary education resources will be a difficult process. But only by doing so will our children get enough sleep every day.