Seven years ago, when my niece QQ entered primary school in China, everyone in the family was excited.

After all, this marked a turning point in the life of a lovely, lively and very clever little girl. Expectations, either explicitly stated (you must listen to the teacher and study hard) or implicitly assumed (she will be an excellent pupil) were piled on her.

QQ, however, did not have much understanding of what was happening.

Happy excitement soon turned to shock and confusion. QQ turned out to be a naughty pupil.

At the age of 6, she was unable to follow the teacher's requirements to keep her arms behind the chair for 45 minutes, the length of a class period. She could not refrain from speaking to other pupils during self-study classes.

When the teacher was teaching, QQ was playing with her hands or with any study tools she could lay her hands on, like erasers or pieces of paper. She did not always complete the load of homework, and she sometimes fell asleep in class, after telling the teacher she was sleepy.

Almost every day, she received reprimands from her teachers at school and scoldings from her parents at home.

Along with phone calls of complaints from her teachers, her parents were sometimes singled out at parent-teacher meetings for failing to discipline their daughter. Family conversations, arguments and attention revolved around QQ. Everybody hoping desperately she would behave and be a good pupil. But she didn't.

The only consolation to the family was her good grades in the final examinations and her imaginative, beautifully written compositions, which were often used as models by her teachers.

Was she happy at school? By and large, she was. Despite the daily scolding, QQ still loved to attend school, and she never complained about any of her teachers. I was very surprised, and indeed secretly happy, to see her resilience and her defense mechanisms against such constant and overwhelming pressure.

QQ simply did not seem to care. She went about her business as usual moving her arms around during class, playing with her hands or her eraser, daydreaming or talking to other students, and generally having fun until she visited Australia five and half years later and spent two weeks in an Australian primary school.

After her first day at school in Australia, a neighbor came over. "QQ, school here is easy, isn't it?" asked the neighbor.

QQ blinked her eyes, thought for a couple of seconds, and then, slowly but firmly said, in English, "Easy, but happy."

Not wanting to make the two-week school attendance a burden for her, I told her to have fun and to make friends at school. I also told her (and her teacher) that the family had no expectations of her, and that she didn't have to do any schoolwork if she didn't want to. After all, she had only two weeks.

To my great surprise, QQ fully participated in all class activities. She volunteered to give an oral presentation about herself in English. She did all the classroom exercises. She was No 1 in math and even in the use of English dictionaries. She enjoyed the sports classes tremendously, and she got along with all her classmates, showing them how to speak Chinese and sharing sweets and popsicles.

Was she happy at school? Very much so. What was the best part about the Australian school? "No homework!" she said without the slightest hesitation.

In fact, the only homework she had to do during her brief stay in Australia was from her school in China, plus the diary and weekly Chinese compositions I asked her to do, for which she forbade me to use the word "homework".

Concerned about how this "no-homework" school might affect her after she returned to China, I tried to explain to her the importance of homework.

"But Auntie," she asked, "is homework really so important? How come no Chinese from China has ever won a Nobel Prize? Surely, we must have done more homework than anybody else in the whole world."

A perfectly legitimate question from an 11-year-old girl who had spent at least half her life buried in her studies and homework. Indeed, what is the educational goal and function of primary school for children, most of whom are less than 10 years old?

Seeing the piles of homework QQ took home daily from her school in China and watching her little hands struggling with those large sheets of A3 paper on which the homework was printed, I often ask myself: Would it matter if she solved one less math problem or did one less sheet of homework? Would she be permanently damaged academically? Emotionally? Psychologically? Would she become a social liability when she grows up?

In the long run, would she (and school children in general) be happier and healthier if she spent one more hour a day playing with other children instead of working alone at those math problems and memorizing obscure Chinese classical pieces?

Being a product of the Chinese education system myself, I always held it in high esteem, especially after seeing the kind of knowledge especially in math and skills a 9-year-old Chinese child has compared with an American or an Australian kid of the same age. I believed that school was the place to teach and to learn knowledge, pure and simple.

My belief was challenged from time to time, not by academic discussions or experts' opinions but by Chinese parents and children who had personally experienced the education system inside and outside China.

A student of mine, who used to be the headmaster of a prestigious Hong Kong school before immigrating to Australia, told me his 7-year-old daughter liked her school in Australia so much that she even wanted to go to school on Sundays.

"But does she learn anything at school here?" I asked him skeptically. "She is happy!" he replied. Being a former headmaster and a dad, this man cared more about his daughter's emotional well-being.

Many of my Chinese friends and their children have similar feelings about Australian and US schools. What happens to these children who did not do much, if any, homework during their school years but who had the opportunity to play? Although I do not have the statistics, I do know many of them have ended up in prestigious universities and did not become social misfits.

Children have their own growing pains. In my opinion, such pains should not come from school. Together with home, school should be a place to foster a happy and joyful childhood because, after all, children spend most of their waking hours in school.

Would I be happy to sit straight with my arms behind the chair for five or six hours a day, no talking and no moving around? Would I be happy to have to complete piles of homework every day in order to excel (not simply pass) exam after exam for 12 years? You know my answer.

The author is a senior lecturer in applied linguistics at the University of Canberra, Australia.