全国中小学校安全教育日

The Safety Education Day has been observed in China since 1996. But Mrs. Yu, mother of a 10-year-old boy in Beijing, says she has never heard of it.

"I really didn't know today was the day. I think children are safe at school. I'm more worried about the journey between home and school. There's too much traffic. If the use of school buses can be popularized, we are willing to share some costs."

Yu is not alone in supporting the use of school buses. Zhang Ting is a head teacher at Jinan Huicai Primary School in eastern Shandong Province. She says school buses not only lower the risk of traffic accidents, but also prevent other potential dangers.

"Because of the time and location of the parents' work, some of them drop off their children at school before 7 a.m. But our class starts at 8:30, so the teachers have to come in early and watch the kids. Some schools keep their gates closed, and the children who arrive early have to wonder around outside. Then safety becomes an issue."

A tragic incident in southeastern Fujian Province two years ago shocked the nation when a man killed eight children and seriously wounded another five. He attacked them at 7:20 a.m. as they were lining up outside the school gate at Nanping Experimental Elementary School, waiting to enter.

The school is offering its students a week of safety education in different forms to mark the Safety Education Day this year. While Jinan Huicai Primary school in Shandong only delivered a 20-minute speech on safety education to the children in the morning and gave them a follow-up survey in the afternoon.

Professor Wang Dawei, a child safety expert at Chinese People's Public Security University, says that safety education is an urgent matter.

"A wrong idea about safety education in schools is that people put a lot of focus on reacting to incidents after they occur, but not enough on preventing them from happening."

Wang Dawei says that's because lots of educators, parents and children have a very poor awareness of safety education.

"Once when I was giving a lecture, a headmaster told me he was neither interested in safety education, nor thought it was necessary for him to learn about it. He wanted to learn about relevant laws so when incidents happened, he could use that knowledge to draw a line on the legal obligations between the school and parents."

Wang Dawei adds that whenever safety education is conducted, it is utterly important to ensure it will have a practical effect. Children should be equipped not only with knowledge, but also skills to keep themselves safe.

For CRI, this is Ding Lulu.