Primary school teacher arrested for forcing students to eat garbage

A primary boarding school teacher in Henan Province has been arrested for physically abusing four students by forcing them to eat trash, including plastic bags, waste paper, and nutshells, after they failed a dorm room inspection. The two principals of the school were removed from their posts, too.

Per The Paper (in Chinese), the abusive teacher, whose last name is Jiang and who served as the head of the teaching and discipline office at Shuiquan Primary School, was found on September 11 telling four sixth graders to eat the trash that they were supposed to have thrown out the previous week when on dorm cleanup duty.

The next day, the students were sent to a hospital due to severe diarrhea and stomach pain. Their parents then reported the abuse to the local education bureau. According to Lú Qīnghé 卢清河, the director of the bureau’s security office, while Jiang was not present when the students ate the inedible items, he did order them to do so before leaving the scene. “They obeyed his order because they were terrified of him,” Lu said.

On September 10, Lu led an investigation team to the school and discovered that Jiang had violated codes of ethics as an instructor. The school was found to have major problems in its management. The school’s two principals have been dismissed.

In the past few years, a string of high-profile scandals at Chinese educational facilities have raised parents’ concerns about their kids’ safety. Perhaps the most horrifying story was a child abuse scandal in 2017 in which children were reportedly jabbed with needles and fed unknown medicines at a high-end kindergarten in Beijing’s Chaoyang District. The scandal led to the firing of several people involved and caused a cacophony of fury among Chinese parents.