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Silly control on teachers' height

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-08 07:39

The rigid regulation on the height of teachers should be discarded, says an article in Yangtze Evening News. An excerpt follows:

Authorities in a prefecture in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region recently issued a document stipulating female teachers should be no shorter than 150 cm and male ones no less than 160 cm. Such an inflexible stipulation has kept several excellent candidates away from their dream of becoming qualified teachers. According to the Yili prefectural education authorities, the profession teaching is special and thus demands teachers be of a certain height. Short teachers cannot even be seen by students in the back seats, it said.

But being only one or two centimeters shorter cannot stop candidates from becoming qualified teachers. It is well known that wheelchair-bound Stephen William Hawking, a famous British theoretical physicist, is a great Cambridge University professor, although he suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Contemporary historian Xu Zhaoyun, also confined to a wheelchair owing to poliomyelitis, still works well as a professor with Taiwan University and the University of Pittsburgh.

If the rigid stipulation on height like Xinjiang's had taken effect decades ago, then Lu Xun, a revolutionary writer and thinker, would be deprived of his teaching position. The 158-cm-tall Lu was once a well-known teacher in Peking University, Xiamen University and Sun Yat-sen University and other prestigious institutes.

(China Daily 01/08/2009 page8)