Read a newspaper published more than 100 years ago, make a garment with playing cards, make a television with recycled products. These may sound like impossible missions even for adults, but they are actually assignments for students in elementary and middle schools in China.

As the new semester kicked off on Monday, a lot of students have rushed to finish their homework to meet the deadline. Chinese schools usually assign homework during winter and summer vacations. But Chinese authorities have been trying to cut the load of homework on students and encourage them to be more creative and take part in extracurricular activities to better promote all-round development. 

As a result, the assignments are not confined by textbook knowledge, but hand-written posters, handcrafts, sports, physics experiments, and so on.

The intention of these assignments is to encourage parents to spend time with their children and do the assignments together, but more often, it becomes a show of the parents’ talents and knowledge. But if anxious parents’ extensive involvement is not enough, or if they are incapable of doing them, they turn to the almighty Internet for help, hiring ghostwriters to do creative homework. 

For example, parents can buy a semi-finished hand-written poster on China’s e-commerce platforms by providing the theme, children’s gender and age, which could be done within half a day. Some schools assigned students to make lanterns for the Lantern Festival, an important holiday for reunion during the Spring Festival. As a result, semi-made lanterns for around  twenty to thirty yuan (about three to four US dollars) are available online.

A parent, surnamed Zhang, from Nanjing, the capital city of China’s eastern Jiangsu Province, said, “I do know some parents who want to save trouble and ask others to help their children do the craftsmanship, but I don’t think it is necessary. Doing handcrafts is good for children. There is no definite answer, and you don’t have to hand in a piece of art.”

A teacher surnamed Zhao with the Beijing National Day School, said such assignments are not compulsory for everyone. “Parents and children can choose whether or not they want to do it. Some kids are very interested in making handcrafts, and they will ask voluntarily to do more. It is more meaningful to do assignments like this than taking tests, because they combine their knowledge in arts, Chinese language, or even mathematics. ”

According to Assistant Researcher Guo Yuanjie with the Chinese Academy of Educational Sciences, the phenomenon warns that schools and students should make reasonable arrangement during vacations.

“Schools should take all aspects into full consideration. For first and second graders in primary school, they don’t know many Chinese characters yet, and possess limited painting skills, it is unrealistic to expect them to finish a handwritten poster by themselves.”

At the same time, Wang Zongping, Director of Motility Quotient Research Center with Nanjing University of Science and Technology, said the problem is deeply rooted in the unchanged examination-oriented education system. 

“Such creative works are not in the tests, while traditional test standard does not change much accordingly. So parents don’t have any motivation to supervise their children to do such tasks. They would rather spend dozens of yuan to hire ghostwriters to do the work before school starts. ”