It is usual for Chinese schools to pay much more attention to studies than sports. However, the problems of students' physical health have drawn (吸引) people's attention recently. In 2021, the Sports Literacy Evaluation System (体育素养评价体系) was officially put into use. In order to help improve students' health, the Ministry of Education (教育部) required that primary and high school students must do an hour of sports activities a day to improve their physical health.
Tang Jiangpeng, a head teacher from Jiangsu Province, asked all of his students to take one PE class a day and exercise for at least an hour. "If students can't get high scores, they will fail to enter a good university. But if they just have high scores, they may fail the test of life," he said.
Tang said that half of the boys were taller than him, but very few of them could do the school's chin-up (引体向上) test, and 132 boys couldn't even do one chin-up. After just one term of sports classes, most students can do 50 push-ups in a minute now. "Before the sports classes, I could only do two to three chin-ups. But now I can easily finish 10," Zhang Kunpeng, a first-grade student said. The changes show that exercise is necessary.
Schools now offer different kinds of sports classes, including basketball, volleyball, swimming and yoga to students as they hope to encourage students to do more exercise. Besides, well-trained coaches will teach sports classes.
