According to the latest issue of China Comment, a bi-monthly magazine, the average time spent by primary school students on physical labor is 1.2 hours a day in the United States, 0.7 hour in the Republic of Korea and 12 minutes in China.

Student physical labor in most schools is not playing the role that it is supposed to. There are not enough opportunities for students to really engage in physical work or practice. Schools offer this class just to show that they have fulfilled the requirement of the country's educational system.

Social service was originally designed to make up for the shortage of on-campus physical work. However, due to the lack of work sites and resources, the arrangement cannot really help students gain any skills.

In the past, every class was responsible for a patch of land on campus, where they regularly pulled weeds and did other work. Nowadays, people are hired to do this work. In some extreme cases, classrooms are cleaned by workers, not by the students who usually take turns every week.

Physical work is an important part of education for adolescents. It's thus necessary for families, schools and society to join hands to make labor classes really effective, instead of replacing or squeezing out the class.

(This is an edited excerpt of an article originally published in Workers' Daily on June 12)