A recent report making the headlines of several newspapers in the southwest province of Sichuan reported that 15 junior middle school students ran away from home together. On April 7, after morning classes, students of a township middle school were asked to go home and take a half-day break so that the classrooms could be used as the venue for a parents meeting.

That afternoon, 17 students from a grade-one class, who either have poor academic performance or poor school discipline, worried that their bad manners would be reported to parents, who were going to return home and punish them. After discussing what they should do, the 17 students finally decided to run away to another city to earn a livelihood. At the train station, two students changed their minds but the other 15 students, eight boys and seven girls, boarded the train for what they thought would be a new life.

After receiving the report from the parents, the police from two cities searched for the runaway children in the neighboring cities. After two days, the police located the children and returned them to their parents.

Although the school authorities told the reporters the school would not punish the students, this incident once again mirrors the chronic problems of China's basic education: a rigid teaching systems and heavy workload.

With pressure so intense from parents and teachers, it is understandable that they want to drop out or run away from home as an extreme way of protest.

China's current education reforms still place more attention on providing equal education opportunities for the masses. Yang Dongping, a professor of Beijing Institute of Technology, wrote an editorial saying that the education system places stress on building infrastructure while ignoring the serious problems of education methodology.

He wrote the obsession with high marks in examinations in primary and middle school education and academic corruption and low quality in higher education are all problems that cannot be simply addressed by increase of input. He emphasized that increasing the quality of education would be much slower and more complicated than solving the problems of finding money for school construction or collecting extra tuition from students. However, this reform is absolutely necessary for the success of every family and the nation.

Professor Yang suggests in the article that in the new round of education reform, the central government should learn from the country's medical reform and to widely solicit opinions from the public.

Tianjin, a city 120 km southeast of Beijing, has two top universities, Nankai University and Tianjin University. Several years ago, the city education authorities embarked on a creative education reform. He Zhiyu, head of Tianjin Education Committee, told reporters of People's Daily that the old education system paid too much attention to students' scores on exams and ignored the nurturing of students' capacities.

He said the priority of the reform is to switch focus on the cultivation of students' innovation capacity and independent thinking. Toward this goal, Tianjin launched the reform several years ago first in primary schools and in 2006 to high schools.

The concrete measures include requiring teachers to allocate more time for students to discuss in class and organize more amateur students sports and performance activities for them to understand the society at an earlier age.