A set of textbooks designed to help high school students learn about traditional Chinese culture is to be published soon Beijing Times reported on Monday.

The books are the first national-level works of their kind and have been developed by a working group that promotes traditional culture. They will be used by students from autumn this year the report said.

The set contains four classics from ancient times. Two of the works Confucian Analects and Mencius are for 10 ^th -grade students while the other two Great Learning and Dao De Jing will be used by 11 ^th graders.

The initiative follows a series of steps the authorities have taken in recent years to spread and promote traditional Chinese culture on campus.

Last April the Ministry of Education released a series of guidelines requiring the inclusion of more information about traditional culture in primary and middle school textbooks especially those used for subjects such as Chinese language history art and physical education.

The guidelines said students’ knowledge of traditional culture will be tested in the senior high school entrance examination and the gaokao --- the college entrance exam.

The British psychoanalyst John Bowlby maintains that separation from the parents during the sensitive "attachment" period from birth to three may scar a child's personality and cause emotional problems in later life. Some people have drawn the conclusion from Bowlby's work that children should not receive day care before the age of three because of the parental separation it results in, and many people do believe this. But there are also arguments against such a strong conclusion.

Firstly, authropologists（人类学家）point out that the isQulated love affair between children and parents found in modern societies does not usually exist in traditional societies. For example, we saw earlier that among the Ngoni（恩戈尼人）the father and mother of a child did not raise their infant alone - far from it.

Secondly, common sense tells us that day care would not be so widespread today if parents, caretakers found children had problems with it. Statistical studies of this kind have not yet been carried out, and even if they were, the results would be certain to be complicated and controversial.

Thirdly, in the last decade, there have been a number of careful American studies of children in day care, and they have reported that day care had a slightly positive effect on children's development. But tests that have had to be used to measure this development are not widely enough accepted to settle the issue.

But Bowlby's analysis raises the possibility that early day care has delayed effects. The possibility that such care might lead to, say, more mental illness or crime 15 or 20 years later can only be explored by the use of statistics. Whatever the long-term effects, parents sometimes find the immediate effects difficult to deal with. Children under three are likely to protest at leaving their parents and show unhappiness. At the age of three or three and half almost all children find the transition to nursery easy, and this is undoubtedly why more and more parents make use of child care at this time. The matter, then, is far from clear-cut, though experience and available evidence indicate that early is reasonable for infants.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________