Asian schoolchild drops out to complete maths doctorate

Citing his inability to grasp basic concepts that his classmates have already mastered for months now, School Administrators at the Xin-Xu Juan Middle School in Beijung, China, have today announced their reluctant decision to temporarily expel eight-year-old Xiang Luan and send him on a remedial catch-up maths camp at Harvard University’s Department of Advanced Theoretical Mathematics.

“He’s been falling behind his classmates for some time now,” said class teacher Lu Shao. “It’s all that Grade 8 Master’s violin and Grandmaster Chess that he’s been spending his idle time on. If he’d focussed more, it wouldn’t have had to come to this repeating a year.

The Headmaster now hopes that the course at Harvard will help young Xiang to revise basic concepts covered in their lower grades so that he can one day re-join his classmates.

“It shouldn’t take him too long I hope,” said seven-year-old classmate Jiang Xu-bai (BSC, MA, PhD). “Hopefully we’ll see him for the start of the new year in January.”

This is just the latest in a string of controversies in the Chinese education sector. Earlier in May of this year, a scathing educational report found that over 70% of Chinese school children aged six and below had the mathematical abilities of only a 25-year-old American graduate.

“Our school system has taken a huge knock in the past couple of years,” said Chinese Minister of Education Byang Bai-Li. “Some of our middle-school entrants can’t even compete against their 28-year-old American counterparts.”

In any case, Luan’s parents say that young Xiang should graduate summa cum laude by November at least, making him eligible to go into grade 10 next year.

“We just hope that this minor setback and waste of a year redoing his childhood tutoring won’t knock his self-confidence too much.”

Most wizards “horribly underprepared” for normal society

A new study co-released by the Ministry of Magic’s Departments of Education and Statistics has shocked the wand-wielding world this morning, after it unleashed a scathing indictment of Schooling for Witchcraft and Wizardry, saying that the mostly magic-focussed schooling system leaves almost 90% of young wizards “horribly unprepared” for normal and everyday society.

According to the study, many famous institutions, such as Hogwarts School, focus too much on “arcane and not-that-useful subjects such as Potions, Alchemy and Defense Against the Dark Arts” and entirely leave out vital fields of study such as languages, mathematics, statistics, geography, politics, and sexual education.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Minister of Magic Neville Shortbottom. “Our schools teach skills that you might use once or twice in your life, like Alohamora or Expecto Patronum and yet they teach you nothing about basic addition or subtraction, calculus, grammar or spelling. Many say, ‘oh, but we have magic for that,’ but what if you’re out in the Muggle world or don’t have your wand?”

This isn't the first criticism of the Wizarding world's governance, legislation, social bounds and norms and general normalised societal conventions. In early 2011, the Wizard world was accused of being a "racist, almost Apartheid-like separation of races, magic and non-magic, which revels in secrecy, discrimination, technophobia and incredibly dangerous and unnecessary inventions", such as the ridiculous risky game of Quidditch, and prisons full of dangerous sorcerers guarded by horrific soul-sucking demons (which are then posted to guard schools).

However, this is just the beginning of scandalous findings against the Magic world’s schooling system, after a seven-book report, published by Rowling, J et al exposed the horrific dangers that school-going wizards face on a daily basis.

This report, which focused mostly on Hogwarts School, showed how schools have declined under the headmastership of noted wizards, such as maybe-homosexual-maybe-not Albus Dumbledore.

“Hogwarts in particular was a real shock to all parents,” said Head of The Association for Schooling Safety, Mandy Castmoore. “We found that in many cases, there had been no rigorous HR-approved hiring policy or system of controls, background scrutiny or checks and balances for employing new teachers, often hiring dangerous and entirely unqualified madmen and servants of the Dark Lord himself as educational instructors and professors. The school grounds and classrooms are filled with deadly poisons and vicious animals, and there were no Emergency Medical Services available during any of the Quidditch Matches, which were often played in lightning and rain. Add to this the fact that some idiot thought it would be a good idea to let walking undead Soul-Vacuum-cleaners prowl around the campus on the flimsy basis of ‘security’, and you have yourself a ticking timebomb.”

Wizards who have been through the schooling system are reportedly already feeling the brunt of this ruinous education system.

“This guy walked into my shop the other day and bought a chocolate frog for 32 Knuts, a bag of unicorn hair and serpent’s venom for 53 Sickles, and a new wand for 6 Galleons 82 Sickles. When he asked me how much I owed him, I had no clue,”said shop owner Eric Mandelson. “When I admitted it to him and asked him if he knew, he said no, and we just stood there awkwardly. I don’t even have a calculator spell. I know Muggles have machines and 'apps' to prevent this problem, but even if I had one I wouldn’t know how to use it.”

The Ministry is reportedly now looking at improving wizards' and witches' education by replacing "arcane and outdated subjects", such as Divinity and Levitation, with more modern fields of study such as Maths, Physics and Language studies.

"We're excited," said Minister Shortbottom. "This will be a Patronus of knowledge right up the arse of the Dementor of ignorance."