Setting minimum height for teachers illegal

A GRADUATE of Xi'an-based Shaanxi Normal University was informed by the school's employment center that she cannot obtain a certificate to work as a teacher just before leaving school, because she is shorter than the province's minimum height requirement for teachers－1.5 meters for women and 1.55 meters for men－jointly settled by the Shaanxi education and public health authorities in 2009. ThePaper.cn comments:

The education authorities of Jiangxi and Sichuan provinces and the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region have canceled similar regulations. But Shaanxi seems not yet ready to do so.

Yet the woman was admitted by the teachers' university as an English major four years ago, without being told that she was too short to work as teacher, and she has been educated and trained to be one for four years.

She was also selected by a national program, which exempts university tuition fees in return for the graduates working as teachers in their home provincial-level regions for at least six years.

The woman has already found a teacher's job at a local school. But if she cannot get a teacher's certificate, she will be unemployed when she graduates this month.

That she has been engaged in the national program for four years, the standards and requirements of which are fixed by the Ministry of Education, means she has won recognition of the ministry and can be educated as a future teacher. If her school denies her teacher qualification, it also vetoes the Ministry of Education's program.

Even the Teachers' Law does not have any stipulations on a minimum height for teachers. According to the law, as long as she is physically and mentally healthy, which has already been proved by the results of her physical examination organized by the school, her alma mater has no power to say no to her career choice for physical reasons.

The Shaanxi education and public health authorities should abolish their discriminatory regulation as soon as possible. The student has every right to sue her schools and the local authorities for violating the Teachers' Law, if the school insists on siding with a local regulation that goes against the law.