A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT from Nanchong, Southwest China's Sichuan province, wrote a letter to the cleaners at her school, seeking their pardon and understanding for her classmates' ripping up their schoolbooks as a way of releasing their growing exam pressure. Yanzhao Metropolis Daily comments:

Tearing up schoolbooks has become a common form of catharsis for students about to sit the national college entrance exams, which increases the workload of school cleaners. The student writing the letter sincerely apologized to the cleaners at her school on behalf of all the students that chose to vent their feelings in this way, and implored the cleaners at her school to forgive her classmates for causing them extra work.

Those about to sit the national college entrance exams often live in a state of high anxiety and repression, because the exams remain quite competitive, even though China has markedly expanded college enrollments since the late 1990s.

However, tearing up schoolbooks and throwing the paper from the windows of school buildings is not a rational way to bid farewell to high school life, because it makes teaching buildings and campuses a total mess.

Worse, some students throw other things, such as bottles and garbage, directly out of the windows of their classrooms. This is quite a dangerous way of celebrating the ending of their high school life. Should anything more than paper hit someone below, the student that threw the object will be held accountable.

It is time to say goodbye to the trend of ripping up books to say farewell.

Schools should put an end to the practice by strengthening control of the students' unruliness before they walk out of the gates for the final time.