School children take shelter under desks during a tsunami simulation drill ahead of World Tsunami Awareness Day at Futaba elementary school in Choshi, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, November 4, 2016. (Photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

Hunched at his desk and staring intently at the blackboard, Hu Yang looks like any other industrious schoolboy. But this ordinary eight-year-old finds himself in a unique position. He is the only pupil to attend his elementary school in, Fujian Province, China.

A woman waits to hear about her sister, a teacher, following a shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A man killed his mother at their home and then opened fire inside the elementary school where she taught, massacring 26 people, including 20 children, as youngsters cowered in fear to the sound of gunshots reverberating through the building and screams echoing over the intercom. (Photo by Jessica Hill/Associated Press)

Elementary school sumo wrestlers compete in the sumo ring during the Wanpaku sumo-wrestling tournament in Tokyo, Japan July 30, 2017. (Photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

Elementary school sumo wrestlers compete in the sumo ring during the Wanpaku sumo-wrestling tournament in Tokyo, Japan on October 29, 2022. (Photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

Retired Mongolian-born “yokozuna” wrestler Hakuho (far L), who now goes by the name Miyagino, watches as participants (R) try to push out Japanese wrestler Hakuoho (C) during a sumo class for youngsters on the sidelines of the 14th Hakuho Cup, a competition for young sumo wrestlers from elementary and middle school, at the Kokugikan arena in the Ryogoku area of Tokyo on February 12, 2024. (Photo by Richard A. Brooks/AFP Photo)

A pile of destroyed cars of teachers sits outside Briarwood elementary school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma May 22, 2013. Rescue workers with sniffer dogs picked through the ruins on Wednesday to ensure no survivors remained buried after a deadly tornado left thousands homeless and trying to salvage what was left of their belongings. Curvature of horizon in the photo is due to an ultra-wide angle lens. (Photo by Rick Wilking/Reuters)

A student falls asleep as she holds a book containing a portrait of China's late chairman Mao Zedong during a lesson at the Democracy Elementary and Middle School in Sitong town, Henan province December 3, 2013. In a remote part of central China, the day starts at the Democracy Elementary and Middle School with a pre-dawn jog, some revolutionary songs and then an activity long since forgotten at other schools: reciting quotations from Mao Zedong's famed “Little Red Book”. While the ruling Communist Party that Mao led continues to hold him in esteem as the leader of the Communist Revolution, his radical policies and teachings have been largely shelved since his death in 1976 in favour of a pro-market approach that has turned China from a backwater into the world's second biggest economy. The 120th anniversary of Mao's birth is on December 26, 2013. (Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters)