Chinese students, like students across the world, have summer break: a time when they’re free to pursue non-scholarly activities. Unfortunately for a group of students, their interest in anime and comics have been hindered by an overzealous teacher.
Sina Games reports that earlier this week, a text message went viral on China’s twitter-like Weibo. The text message from the school “authority” reads as follows: “Greetings parents. Rumour has it that there will be an animation event happening at the Zhengzhou International Convention Centre tomorrow. I know that some of our students will be attending this event. I strongly urge parents to prevent their children from attending this event. Animation has been known to turn good students into bad students.”
Animation has been known to turn good students into bad students…
Sina reports that Chinese netizens are blasting the school and the school official that sent the message online. One weibo user wrote, “What do anime and comics have to do with good grades? Doesn’t it all come down to self control?”.
Reporters who got wind of the story tracked down the school to Zhengzhou Middle School number 7. It turns out the message sent to parents wasn’t from a school official per se, but rather from a homeroom teacher, who told reporters that he only sent the message because he received pressure from a small group of parents.
“The teacher didn’t want to send out this message,” said an unnamed staff member at the school. “The parents came and told us of their feelings, and then the message was sent.”
The staff member continues on saying how, during the summer holidays, some parents came to the school searching for help. The parents told the school that their children were spending their time “playing” with anime, and that some had even made plans to attend an anime get-together. “Concerned”, the parents sought out the school to do something about it, so the school had the homeroom teacher send the text to the rest of the parents of the class.
So far it’s unclear if any of the schoolchildren were actually barred from going to the convention. It was revealed by the school that one student had recently seen a drop in grades and that was supposedly influenced by the student’s interest in anime and comics. Of course, mirroring netizens, what does being interested in anime and comics have to do with receiving bad grades? It appears to be a false correlation.
校方阻止同学参加动漫展 曾毁掉许多优秀学生 [Sina]
Comments
8 responses to “Teacher Warns Parents: Anime Leads To Bad Grades”
“Doesn’t it all come down to self control?”
Hahaha, because if there’s one thing that we can all agree is synonymous with children, it’s self-control 😛
“The parents came and told us of their feelings, and then the message was sent.”
This bugs me a lot. Parents who have a problem with their kids attending anime conventions are using the school as a mouthpiece to try and convince other parents not to let their kids go. It’d be nice if the school could stand up to such parents and refuse to put out a message that has no proven basis.
As a teacher myself, I encourage students to attend anime conventions in order to gain a first-hand experience of how Japanese modern pop culture has come to influence their own culture. It probably also helps that I’m a Japanese teacher, but I don’t think that kids have to study Japanese to enjoy anime 🙂
What about games? I thought that was the root of all evil. Now I have something else to look out for…
Games? I thought it was Tee Vee…
And here I thought it was rock & roll.
Damn those Beatles guys!
You sure it’s not Jazz?
Funnily enough we are using Anime at schools to promote literacy, and it is working wonderfully well.
Id like to know what the real reason is, something is missing from this story.
Like if pantsu photo’s were found passed around the class/school, then there may be reason for concern?
I guess parents all over the world can see through PC bs.