In a conservative culture it takes a shift in mindset for a college to encourage students to date. But to educate a young population on the art of love will take further action.

A Chinese youth can get married while attending college - on the condition he reaches 22 years of age and she 20, which is China's lowest age for marriage. But college students are generally discouraged from dating - on the assumption that dating will disrupt their schoolwork. That makes Ningbo Institute of Technology unique: It lists among its general guidelines that each student should date at least once no matter whether it results in anything like a long-term relationship or not.

Dating has always been widespread on Chinese university campuses whether or not it is tolerated. Even sex is by no means uncommon. During the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was in college, sex would get you expelled if the school authority got wind of it. Nowadays I guess schools do not go out of their way to crack down on it and would take punitive action only if they are forced to. Overall, the trend is clearly toward higher tolerance.

But to encourage students to engage in romantic rendezvous is a whole new thing.

To understand the fuss about young adults being attracted to each other, a little cultural background is needed. In China, many parents take an either-or attitude to their children's academic study vis-a-vis other pursuits. For the older generation, every minute not spent cracking a book is a minute wasted. They were fed ancient tales to reinforce this, like one about a young scholar who tied his long hair to a high beam and placed needles on the back of his chair so that whenever he dozed off from his study he would automatically have his hair pulled and his behind pricked. They feed this tale to their kids as something of a role model.

For me, this is not an exemplar of hard work in academia. If the guy could design such an elaborate device to keep himself awake, he sounds suspiciously like a masochist. Someone that sleepy and who is not into masochism should not keep on reading. He should have a good sleep, period.

Now Chinese parents are not entirely at fault for taking an extreme view of what's good for a student. Young people are tempted by all kinds of things and many of them do not have a good intui-tion about prioritizing. So, if one is addicted to online games, for example, he may well spend an inordinate amount of time on this - until his parents pull him back, often with equally excessive means such as grounding the kid or depriving him of all leisure activities. In college, someone in love may be carried away to the point that everything else, including academic work, will simply fade away from the priority list.

However, prioritizing can be learned. A college life doesn't have to be that of a bookworm or of a social butterfly. It can and should incorporate courses and hobbies and social contacts of every kind. While obsessive learning has indeed produced a small crop of virtuosos - piano prodigy Lang Lang comes to mind - it has also created an imbalance that is hazardous to the growth of a young mind. Even success stories like that of Lang come at a heavy cost. He thought of killing himself when he was pushed too hard by his father.

Look at Sun Yang, China's superstar swimmer. He has had several fallouts with his coach because the latter forbids him from romantic involvement with anyone. To keep on winning championships across the world, Sun must devote himself completely to training, argues the coach. But Sun is 21 and has a right and a need for a little romance. It is inhumane to try to turn him into a sporting machine. Whether he is dating the right girl is simply irrelevant.

Chinese students should be taught the concept of time management. The skill of managing several tasks does not come intuitively, at least not for everyone. College is the place where one grows mature by trying out different things, including various disciplines of learning. It is better to try and fail in college than repeat the same process out in the real world. Here, they have a protective layer of counselors, teachers and classmates.

Compared with my time, a college curriculum is much more diverse now, with many courses that open up a wider vista of knowledge and interests. Extracurricular groups have also proliferated and people are constantly juggling with their schedules and rushing from one classroom to another, or one group event to another. Students as a result have a stronger grasp of handling multiple jobs than I had while I was in college.

It is high time the school authorities endorsed romantic courtship as a normal activity for students.

Courting is a learning process. People are mostly clumsy at first, though guys love to brag about their feats. While romantic stories tend to trumpet love-at-first-sight serendipity, in reality most will require trial and error to get things right. For my parent's generation, it seems much simpler: either there is mutual attraction or there is not. So, they prohibit their children from dating in college, yet they expect youngsters to hitch up right after graduation. "Get married one year later, and have a kid of your own in two years," so goes their master plan. Dating is essentially squeezed to one or two meetings.

If the two of you date for a whole year and break up, they may think you have something wrong and accuse you of behaving irresponsibly. They have taken it for granted, from their own experience, that courtship should be simple and straightforward. No wonder their generation went through an outbreak of divorces when the social atmosphere was loosened up. Many of the inherent problems that plague a couple did not surface until they had started a family and bore kids of their own.

Granted, romantic love is more an art than a science. By pushing it to the periphery of a youngster's pursuit, we have relegated it to a status only those with high emotional quotient can intuitively achieve. Nobody teaches the proper use of pick-up lines and no textbook, as far as I know, imparts the skill of fending off undesirable approaches. Even the task of teaching young women defense against rape falls on the mother alone. In Chinese culture, love and sex belong to an area traditionally more suggested than analyzed.

Sometimes I imagine that one day some college may open a course on romantic love. It may sound like a horrible idea because it will demystify what many hold as sacred. "It's chemistry," they would say. If real chemistry can be taught, why not the psychological kind? Leaving everything to instinct seems fine for previous generations, but the chances of a successful match will be higher if both sides know how to express themselves on top of what to express, and for self-protection or respecting the other party, where to draw the line.

As it stands, knowledge of this kind is embodied in popular entertainment like romance novels and romantic comedy movies. As such, it is often exaggerated. Of course glossy magazines have an abundance of related information. But a college course could be more comprehensive and backed up with science. And like the Ningbo guideline, it will make the news.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 09/06/2013 page30)