SHANGHAI, Nov 17, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) A teacher was sentenced to 18 months in prison for cutting off the finger of a naughty kindergarten pupil, the Shanghai Youth Daily reported Friday.

Lin Yifen, a nursery school teacher of Yuhuan County in Zhejiang Province, cut off a third of six-year-old Li Xinjiang's left index finger on August 2 because the boy would not listen to her in class, the paper reported.

The People's Court of Yuhuan County ruled November 16 that Lin Yifen should serve 18 months imprisonment for deliberate injury, and compensate the child more than CNY 8,000 (966 dollars) for medical expenses, the report added.

Violence in Chinese schools is reaching worrying proportions with increasing reports of violence against children in the Chinese press, as teachers use coercive methods to push children to better results in under-funded schools.

Lin, who chopped little Li's finger off with a pair of scissors after he misbehaved, was found to have no teaching qualifications although she had held her post for two years.

Violence against school children is on the rise as competition for limited higher education places sharpens, despite modern training methods for the increasing numbers of teachers.

An editorial in the Worker's Daily in October documented several cases of student abuse, including a recent case where a student in a branch school of the Shaolin Martial Arts School in central Henan province was beaten to death by his teacher for failing to follow orders while cleaning the dormitory.

"If there were only a few teachers doing this kind of stuff, we could say that these were rare incidents, but in the last few years this kind of thing has not stopped and has led us to reflect on a hidden social reason for this type of behavior," the paper said.

It blamed both parents and teachers for turning a blind eye on the growing violence and for "believing that beating is the same as extracting filial piety or that hitting and kicking can get good test scores."

Invariably it was China's education system which was pressuring schools and parents to raise the level of education so students could get into better schools and universities and be guaranteed good jobs in their adult life, it said.