FENG Enhong, vice president of the Chinese National Committee of Education Experts, was once touched by the words of a visa officer working in the British Consulate-General Shanghai.

"He told me that every time he interviewed young Chinese students, he would ask them to sing China's national anthem," Feng said. However, the visa officer said he had never met a young Chinese student who could sing the whole national anthem.

China went through many hardships in the past years, yet Feng said the whole country now seems to be immersed in a thoughtless atmosphere.

"People care more about economic development, but they ignore moral values," he said. "An improvement in population quality has not kept up with the rapid increase in GDP."

Social worries

Feng's worries about the moral education of China's youth have become a matter of real urgency throughout the whole country. On March 22, the State Council of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued a document about further strengthening and improving the morality of the young.According to Feng, a document aimed at the moral education of university students would also be promulgated soon.

In Shanghai, more than 3,000 university students from Shanghai Teachers' University made use of their summer vacation to work as volunteers to help promote moral education among youngsters. With the help of local residential committees, they established over 100 summer care schools for children whose parents have to work by day and have no time to look after them.

"By doing this, we hope to help solve some social problems caused by young people," said Jin Guozhong, secretary of the Youth League Committee of Shanghai Normal University.

Having worked in Caoyang Xincun Residential Committee for many years, Zhuang Wenjun has become used to meeting some difficult young people. "The moral education of the young is a serious problem which should be given much attention," she said.

But she worried about the environment that today's children were brought up in, with society, teachers and parents subjecting children to too much pressure and pushing them to develop too quickly in an adult way.

"It is a more constrained environment and adults decide everything for children. When we set unprecedented expectations and anxieties for children, their normal demands get neglected," Zhuang said.

The nature of children is to play. But when the summer vacation they have eagerly awaited finally came, some of them still had to take various training classes to "improve" themselves.

Civilized goals

Yang Xiong, director of the Youth and Juvenile Studies Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said that to be concerned with the moral situation of the youth was to care about the future of China.

Although for a long time, schools advocated the parallel development of morality and intelligence, in reality, moral education had been put in a minor position, according to Yang.

"When a country does not cultivate an international master within 30 years, it is time for the country to reflect upon its educational system," Feng said.

He thought that the publication of the document on the morality of minors was a timely development. As a country with a large population, changing the population burden into "human resources" was a goal China had no choice but to set itself.

"Differences in social ethics only exist between civilization and barbarism, not between capitalism and socialism," Feng said. "A mere speech by leaders cannot solve the problem substantially."

The whole country has now come to understand the importance of the moral education of youngsters. But Feng hoped that an effective team could be set up to turn this call into reality. "Society, families and schools must start by changing the environment they provide for children," he said.