Wooing five year olds

Mainland China is reaching a critical point with its attempts at population control. Apparently if the policy is not changed soon there will be a crisis due to the fact that the number of aging people far outweighs the number of working people. Of course this is due to a government that wants just a little too much control over it's population and although one could argue that more foresight could have prevented the problem, governments rarely do well with foresight, especially ones that need to be large and powerful enough to read and censor everyone's e-mail.

Interestingly, Taiwan is having a similar population problem, but there was no particular governmental directive that lead to it, there is just a low birth rate. Although many would say that ultimately less people is a good thing, it causes some immediate problems. Although this smaller generation is now very young we can already see some of the effects. This leads to my story.

Every Wednesday we have some sort of teacher's workshop. When it deals with curriculum I sometimes don't have to go, but it is often fun and often involves food. 4 times a semester I am supposed to teach a teachers' class. I was supposed to do that yesterday, but we had something else to get done, we had to paint cups. I thought we might get to keep our cups and I began planning an interesting abstract and minimalist design. Then I found out why Roxanna described the activity as something "We had to do." Apparently we were making the cups for kindergarteners in the area to woo them towards our school. Our school, along with many other smaller schools is having enrollment issues. You can see it in the class numbers. The 6th grade has 25 students per class while the 1st grade has merely 18. If there are less then 15 students per class the classes are combined and the youngest teacher at the school has to go look for new work. Hence, cups. I wanted to ask if the cups would actually work, but it didn't seem like a good subject to broach.

The problem is two fold. One is the decreasing population. I was told that it used to be very profitable to open an after-school school or a kindergarten, but now that the number of potential students has dropped only the largest and most well known stay afloat. Which leads to the second issue, the philosophy that bigger is always better. I find this funny in terms of schools because in the states it is almost exactly the opposite. You want your kid in a smaller school so that he/she won't get lost in the crowd, will get personal attention and likely have smaller class sizes. Here people look to the larger schools and see more resources and nothing else. Knowing people who work at these larger schools they definitely don't seem much better, but then there is the Jr. High. The junior high our school feeds into is not that great, and junior high is where it one lays the foundations for the rest of one's life, apparently. Bad Jr. High means students will do bad in High school, which means they will go to a college that is not so great and they will never have a good job. Harsh thing to put on a 12 year old, or for that matter a five year old.

So back to the cups. Despite the somewhat sad reason for making them I enjoyed myself. I made my first cup with sailboats and my second with Teddy Bears. Then I thought I should actually be appealing to the parents not the child and I made a nice landscape. Maybe I will see them before they are gifted away.