Teachers roped in for a loss cause?

Standing testimony to China’s growing weight in the world is the fact that of its 1.38 billion people, 46 million are obese and 300 million are overweight.

More alarmingly, a recent study by the University of Washington found that 23% of Chinese boys and 14% of girls under 20 are either obese or overweight too. Little wonder then that potbellies are no longer revered there now as symbols of abundance but deemed plain corpulence.

Meanwhile, it cannot be denied that teachers’ words generally carry an inordinate amount of weight. What hours of remonstrations at home cannot accomplish, admonitions in the classroom can achieve in a fraction of that time. So it is not surprising that Beijing authorities have hit upon the novel idea of making teachers responsible for the weight of children in their class to curb rising juvenile obesity.

China probably hopes that the scrapping of its one-child policy – which had led to chubby ‘little emperors’ – will thin out averages, too, creating more mouths to feed. However, its current ‘playducation’ gambit of exhorting children to “eat a rainbow” (a variety of foods) clearly does not pack much heft. And without teachers being given pedagogic guidelines and tools to accomplish the goal of ‘obesity prevention and control’, this move may do a fat lot of good, as well.