"Every two weeks, when the students, ages 6 to 15, return from boarding school, they climb a chain of 17 bamboo ladders, secured to a sheer cliff face and leading some 2,625 feet up, according to reports. Locals say the ladders — which lead through treacherous terrain in the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture in Sichuan province — have been there nearly as long as the village...."
WaPo reports.
More
here, with photos and video, in The Guardian:
The photographs were taken by Chen Jie, an award-winning Beijing News photographer... “There is no doubt I was shocked by the scene I saw in front of me,” he wrote.... "It is very dangerous. You have to be 100% careful...If you have any kind of accident, you will fall straight into the abyss.”
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23 comments:
Now, this is an educational remediation that hasn't been tried yet in US K-12 - and believe me, new ideas in this field are hard to come by.
A few generations of this and, maybe, a great number of K-12 deficiencies can be resolved.
Love it, buwaya! ;-D
These are the kids Yale should want.
Where are the helicopter parents when you need 'em?
Original Mike said...
These are the kids Yale should want.
Not diverse enough, OM. Plus, the Ivy League discriminates AGAINST Asian-Americans.
Oh you said "should." Yeah, probably.
Way more dangerous for kids to do that than to waterski!!
Wilbur could handle climbing the ladders, but that unsecured ledge of a path might be too much to handle. Not a good place to get the shakes.
Meanwhile..in the US..it is now apparently illegal to allow/force your child to walk a mile to school....
First worlders forget just what true poverty looks like.
When you say your prayers, remember to thank God for the grace of a birth in the good ol' US of A. The rest of the first world's a good second.
Locals say the ladders — which lead through treacherous terrain in the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture in Sichuan province — have been there nearly as long as the village.... "It is very dangerous. You have to be 100% careful...If you have any kind of accident, you will fall straight into the abyss.”
Darwin says these kids will be better at climbing than other kids. A few more generations and they may have prehensile tails--cool!
"These are the kids Yale should want."
Yes, but they don't.
"How far away from school do you live?"
"About a half mile..."
"That's not so bad --"
"... vertically."
Could be worse, though. It's clearly only uphill
*one* way.
In the olden days, our parents walked uphill to school in knee deep snow. They had it easy.
Yale affirmative action students hardest hit.
All that encouragement to exercise!! Yellow privilege!!
In my day, we climbed the ladder BOTH ways - to and from school.
Unnecessary.
I'd call in sick.
They should do a longitudinal study on these kids, follow them through life.
Is Home Schooling illegal in China? Does the Teacher's Union prevent a teacher or two from making the trip instead of all the children?
In SC, while at college, I once jogged the 10 miles from the extremely comfortable house I was living in to my alma matter, in time to make an 11:00am class, through the approximately six inches of short-lived snow that had fallen in a southern blizzard overnight, just to be able to tell my future kids honestly that I had done so. True story, they still laugh every time I tell them about it.
And yes, we southerners drawl when we type alma mater. Damn autocorrect.
On the one hand this is alarming and appalling to us spoiled developed world Americans. On the other it says much about the gap in China between more developed urban areas and amazingly undeveloped rural areas. In Guangxi we headed out to the countryside along a road that almost was not a road, dodging giant trucks bouncing down the hill laden with timber, at one point the car got stuck and we had to get out and push. My next stop was Guangzhou, with highways, fast trains to Hong Kong, and an opera house that looks like a large spaceship.
(Having fallen off a ladder in September, about 12-15 feet onto pavement, stories like this are particularly unsettling.)
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