Good Morning, China MORNING: Featuring a Day in the Life of PING, A Student in China

Dear Reader,
Below you will find a brief, sequential story that relates the beginning of a typical day for Ping, a young fourth grader in China. It serves here as an introduction to a much more intricate story that not only tells what happens during Ping’s day at school, but also shares a typical day in the life of Sam, a fourth grader in the United States. The details of their schedules are revealed in MOTAL’s traveling exhibition, Two Roads, One Journey: Education in China and the U.S.


Wherever the exhibition is fully installed, visitors stroll among its informative panels within an 1800-square-foot footprint. Ping and Sam are similar in that they live in mid-size cities, attend middle-of-the-road, similar-sized schools, and are good students. Nevertheless, despite those equivalent circumstances and similar hopes and dreams, many fascinating differences affect their learning, attitudes, and values.

When the pandemic eases its grip on the world, MOTAL plans to get the Two Roads exhibition out of storage and on the road again as soon as possible. Please help us seek out potential venues (universities, museums, corporate buildings, cities) that might be able to lease it.*
Starting a New Day
Ping gets up at 6:30 in her family’s fifth floor apartment. She is an only child and lives with her parents who are what we would call middle class if this were the U.S. Her mother works as a professor and her father is a businessman. All cities in China are in the same time zone with the capital, Beijing, even though the country extends across five time zones. Therefore, everyone is getting ready for school or work at the same time, no matter where they might be in the wide nation, about the same the size as the United States. This gigantic nation with 1 billion, 439 million people has 260 million elementary and secondary schoolchildren. The United States has about 330 million people with 76 million schoolchildren.

When Ping gets dressed she puts on her school uniform, something most students in China’s urban schools do. It resembles a warm-up suit and the jacket keeps her warm in cool months, for in her part of China—below the 33rd parallel of latitude—schools and homes do not have central heating. Students, therefore, can be seen wearing warm jackets in classrooms. Her family’s apartment is heated by a wall space heater.


Ping must remember to put on her Young Pioneer Scarf, a bright red kerchief worn by elementary school children across the nation. If she arrives at school without it, she will need to purchase a substitute scarf at a booth near her school. Young Pioneers is the name of a group designated to inspire children ages 6 to 14. It began in 1949, stalled in 1966, and was restarted after the era of Mao ended in October of 1978. Students pledge to love the Communist Party of China, honor their motherland and its people, as well as keep themselves fit through exercise.


Breakfast today consists of congee (rice porridge) an egg (boiled), an apple (whole), and a glass of milk (soy). Some days it might be a steamed bun filled with meat and a banana with milk, but it would never be cold, boxed cereal.

When Ping fills her backpack, it gets quite heavy (10 to 12 pounds), not because the individual books weigh much, but from SO MANY books—texts and practice workbooks. Even though each paperback book is quite slim, much like a young child’s paperback picture book in the U.S., they all add up. Students in both China and the U.S. are reading more materials online in recent years, but when American students do have books, they tend to be several pounds each.


In addition to her books, Ping carries the following items in her pink Minnie Mouse backpack:
a fountain pen for perfect letters in calligraphy
white correction tape, so exercises are mistake-free
2 pencils with no erasers
5 tools for math: a ruler, a compass, a protractor, and 2 set-squares
a good art eraser (not the pink Pearl so common in the U.S.)
a glue stick

With her mother, she then must walk down many stairs from the 5th floor, for in China the apartment buildings have no elevator unless there are eight or more floors. Then Ping rides to school on the back of her mother’s electric bicycle. Where once the streets were crowded by bicycles only, cars and other motorized vehicles have taken over.


When Ping gets to school, she talks with friends on the school yard. Because she worked many hours on her homework the night before, she does not have to join the classmates busy studying at the edge of the playground. The buzzer will soon signal the time to line up and join her forty-four classmates. They will spend the day together in the same classroom while a wide variety of specialized subject matter teachers engage them in fast-moving lessons, including language lessons in both Chinese and English that started in third grade, but some schools have their students start in first grade. 


Along with other fourth-grade students in China, Ping will have a busy day full of memorization. By the end of the school year, she will be expected to read 2,500 Chinese characters and write 2,000 characters.
So much more can be learned by those fortunate individuals able to visit Two Roads, One Journey!


Submitted by Greta Nagel, PhD
MOTAL President and CEO