Taiwanese Children Spend More Time On Homework, Less On Sports

Taiwanese children spend seven times the hours on homework that American students do - and more than twice as much time as youngsters in Japan, a newspaper reported Wednesday.

The homework hours mean less time spent in games or sports because Taiwanese first-graders spend the same amount of time watching television and reading as Americans and Japanese, the United Evening News reported.

The report quoted a study by National Chengkung University professor Hsu Cheng-ching, who collected data on more than 2,000 students for 15 years.

Hsu said Taiwanese children sacrifice the health and stress-reduction benefits of play and fall behind in social skills and respect for rules.

Taiwanese first-graders spend an average of 8.2 hours on homework during their weekends compared with 1.2 hours for American first-graders and 3.9 hours for Japanese.

That doesn’t include time spent in “cram schools” to supplement classroom study or time spent learning English, which public schools don’t begin teaching until junior high school.

Hsu suggested that the reduced amount of time for play and its benefits may be a root cause of a wave of adolescent crime that has shaken Taiwan in recent years.

Despite generally high levels of education, heavy workloads and cutthroat competition for places in good schools weed out students after junior high school.

Those left-out students are blamed for more than 70 percent of juvenile crime, according to police figures published Wednesday.