Is the education system really to blame?
The two boys put on their school uniforms, left home and then killed themselves.
A 15-year-old leapt to his death at Times Square in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay; days before, he told his parents that he was unhappy at school.
This month, at least five students in Hong Kong took their own lives.
Another was stopped by authorities. She told her family that school pressures were just too overwhelming. She is 12.
It’s the latest in a rash of suicides by students in Hong Kong. Thirty-five students took their own lives in 2016; one was just 11 years old. Between 2010 and 2014, Hong Kong saw an average of 23 student suicides a year, according to the University of Hong Kong’s Center for Suicide Research and Prevention.
Hong Kong’s education system is famously cutthroat, and experts compare it to a pressure cooker. The government’s Territory-wide System Assessment system tests students regularly starting in third grade. Schools are judged on their kids’ scores. Students are forced to compete for limited spots in the country’s university system. At a hearing on the territory’s education system, one fourth-grader compared going to school to going to prison. “In the classroom, I was not allowed to move, drink water, eat, go to the toilet, or talk,” Chan Yu-ling said at the hearing. “The teachers spent little time teaching.
