Here children will find a real drill.
Crying children — a typical pattern for Chinese youth sports schools, where previously, very young children gave the trainers to become Olympic Champions. Children aged six years here waiting for a grueling workout. However, now the situation is gradually changing: due to the demographic collapse, increase of welfare of the population and the spread of other types of education.
Chinese sports training system has become one of the most successful in the world after the country returned to participate in the Olympic games in 1980. Greatest prosperity it has reached, when China took the first place in the standings summer Olympic games in Beijing in 2008 and fell only to second during the London Olympics four years later.
Now, fewer parents want to send their children with an iron fist coaches, causing the number of students in sports schools has decreased dramatically. In China, more attention is paid to cultural education. Some schools closed, others had to revise the system of education. In 1990, these schools, there were 3687.
The debate about the relevance of the system of sports schools was started during the Olympics 2008 in Beijing, as it turned out that is difficult for athletes to find their place in life after retiring from sports because of the high demands for education among the growing middle class in China.
The decline of fertility in China because of the policy of “one family — one child” did little to improve the situation together with a rigid education system in which students have to spend two times more time on homework than in other countries of the world.
In 2010, the Chinese authorities responded to the concerns of citizens by introducing a new policy called Document 23, which requires schools to raise the standards of education and provide more support to former athletes.
In children’s sports school in Pudong New area room 1 in Shanghai three years ago abolished the forty-year tradition, according to which all the disciples had to learn to train and live on campus. Now more than half of the 700 pupils of the sports school are studying other subjects in other schools. Of the remaining 300 pupils residing on the school grounds, only about 10% live abroad.
Other schools, such as the Shanghai youth Amateur sports school, Shanghai come to kindergartens, to promote among parents gymnastics as extracurricular gaming activities for children. They call it “happy gymnastics”.
The Beijing Shichahai school, decorated with posters honoring former students who became Olympic Champions, offers an integrated development and pupils develop skills that will be useful in life after the sports career.
Sports school of Shanghai, among the students which is the former Olympic swimming champion Liu Zsiga, in 2012, stopped accepting athletes who have not passed the academic entrance exam. The school parents say they want to use sports training for education and not as an end in itself. According to the Director of the school, many educational institutions are moving in this direction, but the process is quite painful, because now, there is a perception that education and training is two different ways you can not be both a champion and a scholar.
The Chinese authorities do not publish statistics record in sports school, but there are indications that changing circumstances have begun to affect the quality and quantity of sports staff in the country. In April, the newspaper China Sports Daily reported that since 1987 the number of athletes attending table tennis, fell by almost a quarter, 23 to 266 people.
The reform of the system of sports education while is difficult. In March, the state study showed that some schools of nine cities and provinces have spent enough money for education and many local education departments have paid little attention to the improvements, the prescribed “Document 23”.
But such sportsmen as 25-year-old van Linwen, a former professional athlete in the martial art of Wushu, argues that the reforms, even small, is vitally important for those who want to enroll in school sports. In the five years prior to his retirement from the sport in 2009, she spent all weekdays during training, but to study was only a weekend. “I lost a lot, because they have not experienced the effect of the education system. Reform is good, so pupils of sports schools will go from there with no knowledge at all”.
