Teachers in China arrested for abusing students, police say

Two teachers in China's Zhejiang province have been arrested for allegedly abusing students. They are accused of pulling the ears of a student "for fun," Xinhua News Agency reported. 

The teachers were detained after a photograph of the "fun" ear-pulling surfaced online. The picture shows one of the accused teachers lifting a student off the ground by his ears, with the boy screaming in pain, BBC News reported. The news comes after other photographs of teacher abuse against students recently went viral. One such photo shows a child whose mouth was apparently taped shut. And yet more photos depict students thrown upside-down into trash can or forced to stand naked, the South China Morning Post reported.  

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The young teacher depicted in the ears photograph has been fired and along with another teacher after a child's father had called the police, noting bruising on his child's face, the BBC said.The abuse was captured on the classroom's security camera.

The abuse does not appear to be isolated. After the image went viral, a blogger created a survey about “whether or not you have been physically punished by a teacher.” Among 3,500 participants, more than 71 percent answered that they had been, The Epoch Times reported. 

“The quality of teachers is eroding,” Ji Mo wrote on Sina Weibo, (China's Twitter-like microblogging site). “I still remember the humiliation of corporal punishment in my first grade math class; I never liked math," he wrote, according to the Wall Street Journal.