Protests in China Continue Over Medication of Kindergarteners Without Parental Consent

Earlier this month, the Chinese government

ordered a nationwide investigation into allegations that
kindergarten schools in several provinces were treating their
students with anti-viral medication. Authorities say the dispensing
of medication could be part of an effort to boost attendance, which
is apparently tied to revenue at the schools. The ‘president’ of at
least one kindergarten school that spurred the investigation
admitted to dosing students with over-the-counter anti-fever meds
as well as vitamins. Protests
continued this week amid revelations that kindergartens in yet
another province may have been medicated without parents’ consent.
According to lawyers for the parents involved, there are
no laws prohibiting administering medication to students
without parental consent, something parents and their attorneys say
they want to see as a result of the crisis.

Even while admitting official statistics show 91 percent of
kindergartens in one province as “private,” the state media agency
Xinhua has used the crisis to
attack private schools:

The official statistics show that Guangxi has 7,554
kindergartens, 6,900 of which are private. Of these, 4,000 plus are
operating without licenses. With poor infrastructure, unqualified
teachers and shortcuts on safety, many private kindergartens are
nothing more that sources of profit for their owners and wholly
neglect their fundamental function as educational institutions,
Yuan said.

The number of unlicensed private kindergartens seems to be a direct
result of a lack of alternatives in preschool education. “The
authorities did not expect so many preschool children decades ago.
They failed to make a long-term plan for expansion of
kindergartens,” said Xiong Bingqi, deputy head of the 21st Century
Education Research Institute.

Exactly how private the schools in a nominally communist country
really are is difficult to ascertain, and there is no specific
reporting on the public/private identification of each of the
schools accused of medicating their students. Tying revenue to
attendance isn’t common among private schools in the West, and
doesn’t seem like it would be a smart arrangement in Chinese
private schools either. Schools need the ability to budget on a
year-to-year basis based on expected tuition revenue. It doesn’t
make business sense to tie that revenue to student attendance,
because most of the underlying costs of educating that student
don’t appreciably decrease with lower attendance. Yet what makes
sense in a private school in China could be very different because
of the way the government constricts and distorts whatever private
education market might exist there.

Tying attendance to revenue sounds a lot more like a strategy
that would be deployed in
government-funded schools, where the government could point to
high attendance rates as a success. Nevertheless, the South
China Morning Post comes closest to explaining the phenomenon
by reporting that at nursery schools “absent pupils don’t pay
fees.”

According to the blog Dongbei Daishu, private schools in

China re-emerged in 1992, having been obliterated after the
communists took over in 1949.