One of the reasons why there are so many single men and women of marriageable age in today's society is the unnecessarily long schooling system, a law maker in Guangdong province said recently. This seemingly true explanation does not hold water when looked at carefully, says an article in Yangcheng Evening News. Excerpts:

The first thing to bear in mind is that single people of marriageable age are mostly so through choice. Some well-educated single men and women of marriageable age might have seemed to have wasted their valuable youth at school by failing to become involved in a relationship or marriage. But after receiving higher education, they have different views on marriage and love and make the decision to remain single.

Of course, this neither defends the education system nor supports arguments such as "the 12-year schooling length is in accordance with a human's cognitive principle" which has been put forward by some experts. People are concerned about the quality of education rather than the number of years spent on studying.

Many people may give a negative answer to questions such as what on earth have we learned from primary school to high school and how much of the knowledge we learned in university have we actually applied in later life. As a result, they tend to regard going to school as a waste of time and so they support the proposal to compress the length of schooling.

Therefore, the education system is not to blame for either the phenomenon of singles of marriageable age nor the fact that students fail to adapt to society after graduation. The real culprits are the teaching method and content. In fact, if the teaching content was genuinely so useful that students could apply what they have learned at school in social practice rather than rigidly cramming knowledge, there would be no question of cutting the length of schooling by one or two years.