EducationWorld August 14

MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS ago, Huangdi Neijing, a classic Chinese medical text, identified obesity as a disease caused by eating too much “fatty meats and polished grains”. Until a generation ago, such a diet was an extravagance beyond imagination for all but the elite. But the Chinese waistline has since expanded, and at an alarming rate. More than a quarter of the adult population, or roughly 350 million people, is overweight or obese (more than 60 million squeeze into the latter camp). That is at least twice as many as are undernourished. With rising incomes and more diverse diets, Chinese people are consuming much more fatty food and fizzy drinks. Meals now contain more than twice as much oil and meats than in the 1980s. This is producing a health calamity, both in heart disease (which now accounts for over a third of deaths) and in a less-noticed explosion of diabetes, which is closely linked to obesity. The prevalence of diabetes has grown more than tenfold during the past three decades. According to a recent national survey, 11.6 percent of Chinese adults are diabetic, a share almost as high as in America, whose obesity rate is much greater. With a catastrophic famine still in living memory, it is little surprise that Chinese people have developed a taste for foods rich in fats and sugars. Fan Zhihong of the Chinese Nutrition Society says people who lived through the famine of the Great Leap Forward and the food shortages of the Cultural Revolution were keen to stop eating the coarse grains of the “dark old days” and have acquired a taste for refined grains and flour which are accomplices of diabetes. Xiang Hongding, a diabetologist at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, says “some felt they’d better eat the good food now before it’s too late”. Nearly one in five Chinese aged 60 years and over is diabetic, twice the national rate. The Chinese are not actually eating more as they get richer: the average daily intake has dropped a little over the past ten years, from 2,100 calories in 2002 to a little more than 2,000 today. This suggests a sedentary lifestyle may be hurting people’s health as much as changes in diet. Rapid urbanisation means more people are leaving the fields to work in less strenuous manufacturing jobs. Meanwhile in the cities, walking and biking have been replaced by driving cars and sitting in public transport. Recent surveys show that less than 10 percent of urban dwellers exercise regularly. Perhaps the most surprising consequence of urbanisation is that obesity is expanding even faster in rural China than in the cities. Households on the fringes of cities are especially vulnerable: with farmland sold for development, many dispossessed farmers now spend their days sitting around and eating fatty meals. In 2012, public-health experts gave a warning that villages around Beijing might soon see their diabetes rates surpass rates in the capital. That means the countryside is undernourished and overnourished at the same time.…

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GERMANY, AUSTRIA AND German-speaking Switzerland have an education tradition that sets them apart from most other countries. Children tend to get out of school at mid-day instead of late afternoon. Secondary schools are divided into three types. The basic one prepares for technical apprenticeships and vocational training. The middle one teaches skills such as book-keeping. And the highest, called Gymnasium (to evoke ancient Greece, not athletic facilities), leads to university. For a country that sees itself as egalitarian, this smacks of class privilege — those going to Gymnasiums tend to be disproportionately well-off. But the system also deserves credit for producing highly qualified manufacturing workers, and Germans have long approved of the arrangement. Then came the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) shock of 2001. International comparisons of 15-year-old pupils in reading, science and maths conducted by the OECD club of rich countries found German pupils merely mediocre. With education exclusively overseen by the federal republic’s 16 states, the PISA rankings also found big internal differences: pupils in Bremen and Berlin fared badly, whereas those in Saxony and Bavaria did well. The PISA shock launched a frenzy of reform. Some states tried to fix everything at once. All-day schools have become more common, with one in three German pupils now attending them. So have comprehensive schools, which combine the three types and are loved by the left. Tests and syllabuses have changed. And more parents want children to get into Gymnasiums. There are now twice as many students at university as in vocational training. Private schools, rare in Germany until the 1990s, are growing fast. Perhaps as a result, German pupils have improved in recent PISA tests. Yet far from being happier, parents in western states are livid. Their fury is aimed at one particular change: the move, a decade ago, in most states from nine-year Gymnasium programmes (for a total of 13 school years) to an eight-year one. The justification was to align German pupils, who used to enter the workforce older than their peers, with the international norm of 12 school years. But the implementation was rushed, with the same material stuffed into less time. Parents complain that children are stressed, that they have to drop afternoon activities and that they are cramming for exams without learning deeply. But Wolfgang Nowak, who was Saxony’s education secretary in the years after reunification and designed its school system, says that going back to G9 is “insanity and nonsense”, because it romanticises childhood. “There are better debates to have, such as how to offer more preschools or to find and promote the best teachers,” he contends. (Excerpted and adapted from )

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MANY PARENTS who picked up their children from Park View School, Birmingham on June 9 took home something else too: an official report excoriating the school. Ofsted, England’s schools inspector, had downgraded the largely Muslim institution to “inadequate”, saying it has failed to protect children from extremism. A few months ago, Birmingham City Council received a letter purporting to advise Muslim militants how to take over a state school. The letter might be a hoax, but it struck some as painfully accurate. Stories appeared of staff pushed out by hard-line governors (elected amateurs who appoint head teachers and set schools’ strategic direction). As the row grew, the government ordered snap inspections of 21 schools, some of whose findings are damning. But British Muslims — many of whom are Pakistani — have damned the government. Ofsted and the Education Funding Agency, which oversees quasi-independent state ‘academies’ like Park View, found much that was objectionable. Inspectors turned up examples of schools refusing to teach about sex, teaching only Islam in religion classes while telling the few pupils studying Christianity to do their own research, and inviting an extremist preacher to address an assembly. Loudspeakers are said to have broadcast the call to prayer across Park View’s playground. One of the schools banned raffles and tombolas at a fete on the ground that they are un-Islamic. None of the schools inspected is supposed to be a religious school. The government, after some internal wrangling about who had overlooked extremism has responded forcefully. Academies found inadequate will lose their funding. Ofsted may be allowed to inspect schools without giving notice: at present it normally warns them a day or two in advance. From September, all schools will be required to promote British values such as freedom, tolerance and the rule of law (at present they must merely respect them). Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, has called for mandatory training for governors. More schools are hurriedly being inspected. The trouble is many Muslims in Birmingham and beyond, trust neither the inspectors’ reports nor the government. When last inspected, some of these schools were judged outstanding, which suggests to some that inspectors went back into them with an agenda. The Park View academy chain has staged a vigorous defence, in which non-Muslims are prominent. Conspiracy theories abound. “People can’t tolerate a school in Alum Rock with Asian kids doing better than grammar schools,” suggests a young man who left Park View two years ago. Ofsted is certainly muddling the distinction between religious conservatism and the kind of extremism that feeds violence. Inspectors criticise schools for failing to raise pupils’ awareness of extremism and for engaging insufficiently with the ‘Prevent’ programme, which is part of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy. Such criticisms call forth the spectre of terrorism to condemn behaviour that is no such thing. That is both misplaced and strategically unwise. The more things the state describes as extremist, the more it risks angering many ordinary Muslims and turning them against it. (Excerpted and…

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