The Forbidden Flourish
July 24, 2024 10:31 Shanghai
"I died at the night after the college entrance exam ended"
In June 2023, an 18-year-old girl walked out of the high school academic proficiency test, more widely known as the "gaokao" (college entrance exam). Looking around at the excited students rushing out the gates, she felt neither the long-awaited relief since her senior year nor the anticipation for future life, nor the joy of liberation. Gazing at the crowded people before her, she suddenly felt empty and lost: The exam was over, and the words "gaokao" would no longer be part of her future life. So, what is the meaning of life? She couldn't figure it out and was secretly afraid that the answer wouldn't be what she had hoped for. In a video posted online, she said, "I feel like I died the night after the gaokao ended."
Chinese Education Policy
In 1978, under the visionary decision-making and leadership of Comrade Deng Xiaoping, the reform and opening-up policy was officially implemented, ending a decade of catastrophe and turmoil since 1967. In the following decades, China's economy advanced rapidly, entering the ranks of the world's top three economies. Since the restoration of the college entrance exam in 1977, China's education has developed at a remarkable pace over nearly half a century. However, China's education system seems unable to keep up with economic development, exposing many urgent shortcomings in need of reform in the rapidly changing information age. Many media and literary creators describe China's education system as a suffocating "cage" of high pressure. Chinese students are bound and suppressed by traditional exam-oriented education, barely able to breathe. Undoubtedly, media reports exaggerate facts to some extent, but they do reflect some shortcomings in Chinese education, namely exam-oriented education and a highly tense learning environment. Many scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with China's current education system: Professor Zheng Yefu once taught a course called "Critical Social Pedagogy" during his tenure at Peking University, and Yu Minhong, founder of New Oriental Education, also expressed concerns about the "backwardness" of China's education system in an interview. However, among the analyses of numerous scholars, it is difficult to find research on the traditional mindset of Chinese educators. As a key element, understanding traditional educational concepts will greatly promote the renewal of China's education system. Understanding concepts is understanding the essence of education. Therefore, it is imperative to study China's traditional educational concepts and implement reforms accordingly.
According to the Xinhua Dictionary, "concept" is used to describe "a systematic collection of subjective and objective understanding of things by someone." The dictionary shows that the term "concept" depicts subjective and person-specific views and opinions. Understanding Chinese people's educational concepts is largely about understanding how Chinese people view education, including family and school education work, etc. Undeniably, the concept of exam-oriented education still deeply influences the educational philosophy of Chinese families and educators and the development of specific teaching work. The prominent feature of Chinese education currently is "one exam determines a lifetime," that is, using standardized test scores as the main evaluation criteria to assess and characterize students' academic performance, thereby determining their further education. For most families, scores obtained in China's standardized examination system, namely the "middle school and college entrance exam" system, represent almost everything - the equation "high scores = good university = good job = successful life" has become deeply rooted in people's minds, greatly influencing Chinese people's views on education. Francois Ouellete, a Canadian physics professor who has been teaching at Chengdu University since 2017, pointedly stated: "The college entrance exam is almost a matter of life and death for Chinese students, and it also brings tremendous pressure to their studies." The importance of grades for further education in Chinese education and the resulting emphasis people place on it have placed a heavy burden of study pressure on Chinese students.
Of course, if we review China's long historical process, it is not difficult to see the rationality of traditional Chinese educational ideas. Traditional education in East Asian countries has been greatly influenced by China throughout history. In the 6th century AD, during the Sui Dynasty, the central government introduced a talent selection system based on the need for talent selection - the imperial examination system - which would have a profound impact on China for the next 1,600 years. The imperial examination system strongly emphasized selecting talents helpful for government work through layer upon layer of selective examinations and tests, breaking the aristocratic monopoly in China's education field for thousands of years, and thus giving the peasant class the first opportunity to compete fairly and justly to change their fate and achieve class mobility. After the founding of New China, a middle and high school entrance examination system with more diverse and objective evaluation criteria and test content was gradually established. From this system, we can glimpse the great foresight and wisdom of the founding leaders. China's total population was about 400 million in 1949, and by the 2020s, it had significantly increased to 1.4 billion. In both eras, China's total population ranked first in the world. In 2023, the total number of students in China was a staggering 291 million, with 12 million entering the college entrance exam venues in early June. With such a huge student base, China's education system inevitably cannot overemphasize individualized education like the West, and the development of Chinese education must necessarily adapt to our national conditions and social development. Under these circumstances, Chinese education will inevitably emphasize elimination and competition, because only through high-intensity competition can truly top talents be selected.
At the same time, due to its high competitiveness, society's emphasis on education has reached an unprecedented level, which has further led to an almost pathological pursuit and focus on grades. Grades have become almost the only standard for evaluating learning outcomes, and have had an increasingly deepening impact on China's education system through hundreds of years of continuous accumulation. Competition within China's education system is extremely fierce. In the 2023 college entrance exam, the admission rate for top-tier universities in China was 25.2%, while the admission rates for 985 and 211 universities were as low as 5.02% and 1.65%, comparable to the admission rates of Ivy League schools in the United States. This means that most Chinese students did not get into their dream schools in the college entrance exam system and missed out on China's top education. China began participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2009, and its scores have consistently topped the rankings in several consecutive evaluations. This proves that the academic ability of Chinese students is undoubtedly beyond reproach. However, when we turn to assessment results in other areas, we inevitably have some concerns: The results show that Chinese students put in an extraordinary amount of effort into their studies, to the point of exhaustion - PISA 2018 results show that Chinese students spend up to 57 hours per week on studying, far exceeding the international student average of 44 hours. According to 2018 Ministry of Education statistics, Chinese middle school students spend 11 hours per day at school, while primary school students spend 8.7 hours, increases of 42.9% and 20.9% respectively compared to 2010. The amount of energy Chinese students put into studying is heartbreaking, but we are concerned to see that Chinese students' learning is not efficient. In the PISA 2015 test results, Chinese students' learning efficiency ranked only 43rd among 56 countries and regions globally, far lower than Nordic countries like Finland that spend less energy on learning. The test also reflected disturbing data: Chinese students' satisfaction with their schools and happiness in learning were also low, ranking only 61st among the 68 countries and regions participating in PISA 2018. Chinese students carry such heavy expectations and hopes that they view education as a task and mission rather than a pleasure and exploration process. Similarly, in the cruel environment of fierce competition and elimination, Chinese students have to abandon their hobbies and personal interests to invest more time in studying in hopes of improving their grades. For too many students, doing practice problems and taking exams have become synonymous with youth, even the only impression of youth; for too many Chinese students, the price of grades is their entire youth.
Under the leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, the State Council promulgated and implemented the "double reduction" policy in the summer of 2021, focusing on cracking down on the chaotic situation of off-campus subject training institutions, thereby reducing students' extracurricular burdens and promoting their physical and mental health development. Under strict law enforcement, the policy achieved remarkable results for a time, sweeping away the chaos of offline subject tutoring across the country. As the People's Daily said, our country's education has achieved historic achievements and undergone structural changes, "children have fewer off-campus training classes, less homework burden, and more time for sleep, exercise, and practice." However, regrettably, the "double reduction" policy has a flaw, which is the failure to implement simultaneous reforms in vocational education and examination difficulty along with policy implementation. Under the influence of traditional involution and discriminatory attitudes towards vocational education, most students face heavy academic pressure and educational bias, with no choice but to seek help from extracurricular private tutoring institutions. Therefore, at the forefront of reform, underground tutoring institutions have flourished again like unquenchable weeds, seriously affecting the implementation effect of the "double reduction" policy. The problems exposed during the implementation of the "double reduction" policy make us clearly aware that: to achieve thorough reform in the field of education, it is necessary for the country to advance simultaneously in vocational education and traditional education. It is necessary to distribute educational resources more fairly to these two educational fields, on the one hand improving the status of vocational education so that vocational education talents can also contribute their share to national development, and on the other hand changing the educational concept of excessively pursuing grades in the traditional education system, emphasizing the simultaneous development of morality, intelligence, physique, aesthetics, and labor, promoting the development of whole-person education, and providing a more open and inclusive environment for students' physical and mental development. However, we should be cautious: China's education system is so large that even a small mistake would bring huge and long-lasting negative impacts on the overall development of the education system. But we should have firm confidence in China's education system, adhere to teaching and educating people with Xi Jinping's new era educational thought, and cultivate new era talents who are diligent in exploration, daring to question, courageous in practice, and open-minded!
We are confident that the future of Chinese education will be bright, with clear skies and brilliance!
Writer: Zakary Song
Editor: Lisa Zhou
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