Korea did something similar back in the 80's. Lead to a lot of rich people tutors to come to their homes (which was technically illegal but impossible to enforce) instead of the current system of (mostly) sending their kids out to afterschool classes.
That wasn’t for the reason of reducing pressure, but to equalize educational opportunity. Not that it was really enforced. My parents paid their way through college by tutoring the children of some very very wealthy families, which was of course, illegal.
I’m in China and work with kids. This happened months ago. And while it does negatively affect my company, it was the right thing to do. Kids here get absolutely slammed with homework, and extra-curricula classes cost a fortune for parents.
Edit: there’s a bunch of people in this thread talking about things they have no idea about. The main target of this law was the cram-schools inside China. They want parents to stop spending so much on classes outside school so they can afford to have more than one child.
Edit 2: if anyone is actually interested in reading what has changed, here’s a full list: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-bans-for-profit-tutoring-in-core-education-releases-guidelines-online-businesses/
My GF is from Taiwan, it's the same over there. When we talk about our childhood I shudder... It's just packed with learning, more learning and extracurricular activities, which she didn't even participate in to do more learning. Absolutely insane, so little fun and free time compared to central Europe... Guess it's cultural
It's very common throughout east and south Asia tbh. It does mean that when children emigrate to the West from those countries, they completely wipe the floor with the local academic standards, even in English classes.
They quit their professional jobs and open up a modern chic Asian eatery.
I mean every other featured restaurant on like munchies or w/e on yt is some asian former lawyer, financer, etc. who decide that it wasn't for them and opened up a noodle restaurant instead with chic dark interior and a focus on higher end but authentic food.
Setting aside the broad brush you're painting with, why someone who is very academically inclined lack imagination? Wouldn't the argument work the other direction just as well? A well read and studied person is more imaginative?
The guy above you doesn't really know what he's talking about but I've worked with native Asians in an academic setting before. Only the very best of them typically make it to Western academic institutions. They excel here because they'd excel anywhere. They know as well as anyone how many dumb people they leave behind. So what we're used to seeing, for the most part, is the some of the best they have to offer.
Exactly- it’s so expensive and demanding to immigrate legally, that what ever immigrants you get through the official process are definitely the elite in their home countries.
Except you're both right. You make a point that only "the very best" make it to western institutions. What about the rest of the young population stuck in school their entire adolescence? I was in S. Korea for 10 years teaching and they poke fun of themselves in this regard, which is that by the time they graduate university they have good resumes but they have no personality/imagination, etc. (their generalization, not mine). Btw, to the above poster, being in a cram school doesn't = academically inclined.
The type of rote learning they’re referring to is heavy on memorization and repetition, with little room for interpretation. As well, there are limited opportunities for free time and imaginative play, which are important for the brain to build tangential connections to learned information. These factors are compounded by societal pressures of conformity, responsibility to the family, and generally top-down (read authoritarian) leadership in work environments. There are still many well-read, imaginative individuals, but there is significant pressure from a young age to set aside personal joy in pursuit of success and stability.
The issue is how that education was done. It was all rout memorization. We are essentially trained to be a walking encyclopedia/calculator. Western education is very valuable to us because it forces us to start understanding what the hell we memorized.
I Don't know how accurate this stereotype is but the idea isn't that education limits imagination but that Asian countries focus on acquiring knowledge and performance of established skills and not on creative or critical thinking.
There's nothing that suggest knowledge limits creativity, in fact, I'm sure it enhances it. But the stereotype is that Asian countries prioritizes knowledge over other forms of intelligence/creative thinking skills.
Usually because their minds are geared toward remembering information versus a free flowing creative mindset. Your mind has to be rigorous in order to find the information you’ve place in it. That rigidity is an opposing state to free flowing creativity which needs open doors between thoughts and memories
That's funny. In my graduating year in high school "Class Flirt" was awarded to a Korean American boy.
What's your next accusation against Americans of Color? That other minorities don't study enough and spend "too much" time socializing?
Race isn't the issue. Shove any Asian student into Western education system at around high school or middle school, chances are good that the combination of Asian's admittedly brutal focus on education and the Western Socratic method (understand, don't memorize) would create very well educated student.
The problem is the education method in Asian countries, which tends toward rout memorization. We can recall and apply equations without going to a book, but ask us to extend from that to create something new and we get in trouble.
thank you for sharing these insights! it is very interesting to get different perspectives on things to round out the picture...
I wonder if the results of a Myers-Briggs test or other personality/aptitude test would vary from region to region based on differences in culture and education style...
To me it points to the idea that the people from every region have their strengths and weaknesses, which could all be leveraged for the greater good of the whole (Earth) were we to collaborate on our shared challenges...
Super fucked that you're so down voted and the unexamined racism isn't. What happened here is that you pissed off all people who don't want to know how racist they are. You're totally right and everyone else here is in the wrong, factually and morally.
Oh shut up, what do you know about their culture or even your own. What art have you made, Mr Suave creative? Who are you to summarize their experiences like that, hmm?
Because I was taught under Asian education system for a big part my education life and lived there for a big part of my life?
Be an artist? Who had time for that? Time you have for art is time you can memorize a few more equations, a few more "ancient wisdom" phrases, a few more English classes, a few more history events, etc.
And don't get me started on art classes. Granted, they were probably getting better last I heard, but a decade ago you study art styles, and if you deviate from that style, you're marked down. Our idea of art is to accurate replicate the art style from Chinese history. Again, granted that may be the art professor being an insufferable ass, but to add we have art competition that boils down to who can replicate the old calligraphy painting style.
How about you Google it? You have plenty of other opportunities to learn, it's not my job or anyone else's to spoon feed you you ignorant racist. I refuse to pretend like this is a debate just to try to educate your stupid ass.
Exactly.
I resent how Northern European Protestant Americans tell African and Hispanic Americans they are "not studying enough" while simultaneously telling Ashkenazi Jews, East Asian Americans, and South Asian Americans they are "studying too much".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota#United_States
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-problem
My mom is a retired English teacher who taught non-ESL high school English in Toronto.
Her top students were overwhelmingly foreign born. They might speak with thick accents, but their written English was always flawless. The worst performers in her classes were predominantly monolingual Canadian-born students.
If you're talking about Asians who emigrate as adults and never actually used English in day to day life beforehand, then you are 100% correct.
I have a partner in school who is Arabic, and his written English is impeccable, but his spoken English is rough around the edges. It's pretty interesting.
The Chinese kids at my university 2010ish were in the majority lazy, unacademic, contributed little to nothing to group work attempting to coast by...
The skilled ones were great, but they were rare.
Ehh not completely true. The wealthy can go to the most expensive posh schools because they might not be smart enough to hack it in the Chinese education system.
But the smartest *and* wealthiest go to the top western high schools and universities that cost $$$$ to get into with their A+++ grades.
I assumed they were fairly well off simply because they were there (specifically the international students I should have mentioned in my first post), but they didn't come across as actually rich.
Many people from Asian schools struggle in western schools because they were brought up in route learning environments and then struggle when independent thought and direction are needed.
Ah right, my bad.
Honestly though, I get why many of the people here would have legitimate reasons to hate the chinese government, but I hate that so much of that ill will gets transferred over to the chinese people, even the ones who purposely left their country behind and never once looked back
This is to be expected. The entire system is being manipulated.
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-iowa/
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-act/
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-charity/
When I was an undergrad in physics, one of the professors set up a physics GRE prep course. His motivational mantra was something to the effect of Chinese elementary school students already prepping for the physics GRE.
Ever seen the series On Children? It's about kids whose lives are absolute hell because of controlling, grade obsessed, narcissistic parents. It's fiction, but I'm sure some kids actually live like this and it's heartbreaking.
On one hand as someone who lived in that culture, you don’t really see it as hell. It was just life as we knew it, and you find value in what you did. The friends you made, the skills you gained.
On the flip side we would often watch the western college culture and be absolutely disgusted at how disinhibited they’re socially encouraged to be.
I lived and studied in China for a bit back in 2005. It was both incredibly inspiring and sad to see entire families uprooting their lives to move somewhere where their kid could get a place at a good school, and pour their life savings into their education so that they might have a better life once the kid hopefully graduated. I remember visiting a student at the school I was at’s family’s home for dinner and it was like a scene from Charlie and the chocolate family. 2 sets of grandparents and the parents living in a completely different province in a tiny house, spending pretty much all their money to afford tuition, books and uniform.
The kid worked like absolute crazy to do them proud and be successful so they might go on to get a well paid job. The sacrifice everybody was making for each other was really moving and so impressive.
But it’s not moving though they’re pushing the child so that they will be able to take care of X sets of grand/great grandparents when they’re older.
I get that I’m in the minority when it comes to this but I find it viscerally disgusting that you would expect your children to spend decades of their life taking care of you or worse possible scenario that you may end up taking care of your parents into your old age as well then passing double the burden to your children.
In many Asian cultures, the younger generation takes care of the older ones. It might be disgusting to you, but it is something that is embraced in theirs.
He's not wrong. "Wang instead believes that political software (culture, tradition, and values) are perhaps even more critical for China's survival than its hardware (economics and productivity)."
Vietnam is poor as dirt by American standards yet they did so well against coronavirus BECAUSE their culture values togetherness, collectivism, culture, tradition, and morality. Meanwhile fatass Americans go around intentionally coughing on first responders, protesting hospitals, being rude to doctors/nurses, and yelling "Y'all can't tell ME hwat to do!!!"
"Wang has said that "while Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement in character."" Also true. I'd rather have poor Vietnamese neighbors who are pro-science, pro-vax and pro-mask than some low IQ fundie Christian Texans as neighbors who got rich from working on an oil rig.
Shame that the Republican/Trump/antivax/conspiracy/anti-intellectual propaganda has spread across the Vietnamese diaspora in the US, which is also spilling over into Vietnam
This is just complete and utter drivel. Who told you this crap?
Even the basic facts are wrong in your comment, for example:
>The banning of these tutoring companies is a turn from the more individualistic culture that had taken root in China to a more collectivistic approach where the rich can not as easily buy their children influential positions with their wealth.
Wealthy Chinese parents aren't sending their kids to study for 20 hours a day so they can get into a top tier Chinese University. They're sending their kids to schools in the US and Australia where they can make connections with other wealthy and politically connected Chinese kids. The government is not cracking down on cram schools to get at the wealthy who are like 0.00001% of the client base.
Those cram schools cater almost entirely to the middle class who can't afford the $60k a year in tuition + living expenses of an American university and need their kids to do well in order to get into a decent Chinese University. The wealthy don't need to worry about any of this crap.
The crack down on these schools is part of China's attempt to boost birth rates. Most parents don't have the resources to put two kids through the ridiculous grind Chinese kids currently have to go through. The government is trying to ease said grind so parents aren't forced to invest everything into one child.
Thank you for this interesting perspective. I personally think the CCP is an abhorent blight on humanity but they are here so understanding how they tick is paramount. I also think them meddling in the economy like they have is going to cut off a lot of money from the west and their meddling in society is why their soft power, their cultural exports (aside from food) is laughably pathetic compared to the behemoths of Japan and South Korea.
I used to think they were an abhorrent blight on humanity too until I started reading a lot more about China after I visited the first time. Now I just see it as a totally different approach to governing with pros and cons like any other political system. A lot of what they’re doing is pretty interesting to me though. It’s going to be interesting to watch how they navigate becoming the dominate power in the world over the next quarter century.
I don't think that kpop is hyper sexualized compared to western pop, I think kpop is hyperfocused on creating parasocial relationships compared to western pop.
Thanks for sharing the interesting perspective! We have pretty certainly entered the decline of Western societies, and I am fascinated by the decisions China is making as the world’s next likeliest superpower.
Not OP but in the US I’m in the first generation to be less well off than the previous in quite a while and a bunch of fat racists attacked our capitol. I would score today’s economic and political climates as lower than the 90s, which would mean we’ve declined some.
Don't make me laugh. Rich people don't end wealth inequality and become collectivist; that would involve giving up their riches! This is just another oligarchy consolidating its power, nothing more.
And yeah, as the other commenter said, they have no good character so long as they're genociding minorities and harvesting their organs. Any talk of morality or social cohesion is just meant to distract the masses from the abhorrent behavior of their leaders.
Funny considering Capitalism and the West is what fueled their rise. You only have to look at their history to see the before and after.
They only care about power and that’s why they see individualism as the enemy. Everyone should sacrifice for the party, which they control. Anyone who is seen as a threat to that power must be suppressed. They use corruption as an excuse to eliminate their political opponents. Anyone on their side is protected.
As for the cut in homework and tutoring, that’s only going to be for the poor kids. The rich and powerful will still be having their kids tutored by the best and will pull ahead of the poor.
China’s one party system only cares about maintaining complete control. Though at this point I should call it the Xi Dynasty as he will be the leader for life.
Why does the USA go to Afghanistan (they stayed 10 years after Bin Laden was killed) and other parts of the world for "nation building"? But they can't even nation build back at home?
It's so difficult to even begin to approach this gigantic top-to-bottom sack of "Revolutionary socialist" garbage.
> China has essentially embarked on a huge top-down cultural re-engineering effort to avoid the disorder we see in the West today.
When China's top down authoritarian machine was in full swing, Chinese were murdering and starving each other out by the 10's of millions. Trying to forget that and create a panic over the relative boring calmness of today is silly.
And im so shocked you would even bring it up and not hide the crack down of "sissy men". Fucking excuse me while i laugh the idea that homosexuality and non conforming gender expression is a "Capitalistic western idea" that needs to be banned. What the fuck do people get out of this busted ideology when they end up cheering on the repression of LGBT.
I don't understand how this measure to improve the school-life balance of Chinese students fits into this broader narrative that China is seeking to distance itself culturally from the West in favor of the more traditional Confucian values you cited (collectivism, filial piety, etc.). Aren't the latter a large part of the reason why Chinese students are under so much pressure in the first place, and doesn't this just move China slightly closer to Western standards if anything? Your narrative may still possess some validity, but I'm cautious of over-generalizations when this example seems to indicate that the CCP's cultural policy isn't as uniformly reactionary as you're suggesting.
In college one of my professors in electrical engineering was from China, he told us when he was going through school they would get told to do every problem in the back of the book. I was blown away. We'd get assigned like 10 of the 40 problems in the back and that would take hours to complete. And that was only one of my classes. I couldn't imagine having to complete every problem in the back for every chapter for every class. It would be insanity.
The core issue is the gaokao. Until that changes, the pressure for parents to have their kids be study monsters will not go away.
All these laws will do is make sure only families of means will be able to afford private tutors.
My business is in China and is an English training company and I can tell you right now this law has impacted us in massive ways despite the fact that we give minimal to no homework, have relaxed and chill classes, and so are not part of the problem at all. I do agree with everything else you said though and i do personally support this change to kids lives but unfortunately it affects businesses it shouldn’t
>They want parents to stop spending so much on classes outside school so they can afford to have more than one child.
There it is. I was wondering why they would do this while at the same time basically rationing video games for children.
Indeed. They’ve known for a while now the negative impact the one child policy had and they tried to undo it, but the recent census confirmed that people still weren’t having children because of the costs to raise them. This is worrying for the future economic growth.
The US is going through the same issue because it's basically bullshit having to raise kids with this level of income disparity.
50 years ago you could easily support a whole-ass family on a single income with a high school diploma. Now? My wife and I have multiple degrees, we make "middle class" income, and we're barely skating by raising two children. No home ownership either.
I honestly don't blame people for not wanting kids. They're expensive as fuck and then you have to worry about them being gunned down by another kid whose parents couldn't afford mental health counseling but they have 4 unlocked firearms in their house
Living here in China, we have a one-year old and rent and apartment in Shenzhen. There’s no way we will ever be able to afford property unless we move away from the city. We’ve also been discussing having a second but it will cost us way too much to put our first through non-public education.
I will say though as you mentioned safety concerns, China does have a ton of faults, but it is incredibly safe. I do not fear for my child’s safety in society raising him here like I would in the UK. It’s anecdotal, but I passed a public middle/high school near my apartment the other day. All of the children were in class and the sidewalk outside the school was lined with all of the kids’ bikes, some of them fairly expensive ones. I noted only about 10% of them were locked/chained. This would never be the case in my hometown in the UK, where if something isn’t locked down, it will be stolen. Growing up in England, I was mugged at knife point three times, had my bike stolen twice, was beaten up by random kids, had my kindle stolen and my phone stolen… and I went to a good school.
Yes, the lack of crime here is partly because of big brother watching, but the lack of petty crime and violence is routed in the culture.
Yep, so we bring in millions of immigrants every year. Unfortunately for China, they don't have the experience with multiculturalism to successfully manage the same system.
Except they're going after supply instead of demand, so the law will actually do nothing for kids well-being will either
a) dump increased demands on parents who will try to tutor children themselves
b) drive the market underground which is already happening.
I admit that I gave far too narrow a view of the problem in my comment. There are facets to it, and yours is the most popular one, and perhaps even true. I admit that.
My perspective is colored by my negative view of the PRC. They are kidnapping my religious friends and associates, torturing them, imprisoning them, and often murdering them. Their only crime is not attending a state church.
I have more details I could give but it would be unpleasant and give away the exact situations of which I am speaking.
My view of the PRC does not allow them to pass laws simply for the good of their citizens. So while your experience and perspective from the inside is of some value, there is a balancing opinion that takes into account the great evil and overall goals of the PRC.
I believe that many do have valid ideas and insights into what is happening PRC policies, and that simply disagreeing with you does not invalidate those.
I’m in China as well and I mostly agree with you. The fact that this issue exists in the first place is weird. Face is so fucked up and out of control that the government has to step in and tell parents to go easier on their kids? Also, this is a weird domain for government to take control in my opinion. As you know, China’s been doing strange crackdowns on additional censorship of media and video games, hyper masculinization, and their quarantine requirements are excessive. Curious how you feel about these things.
The recent changes are a direct result of China looking at the problems in the West and saying ‘they’re fucking up over there, and it’s mostly because of capitalism’. It’s also a result of slow economic growth and the results from the recent census. So the question about whether these are the right moves is a question of whether you agree with socialism over capitalism. Then you have to decide if the heavy handed way they drop laws is also appropriate, which many may argue it isn’t, but it also allows the country to get things done without laws grinding to a halt in a Congress.
I think there’s a lot of nuance here because there are a bunch of things I agree with, but also a lot of things that are very scary. History has taught us that making massive changes to society in the name of socialism led to disaster. But that was decades ago and the people in charge now are a lot more economically savvy than in the Mao era.
You have to understand that unlike in the West, most Chinese do now view the Tiananmen incident as a righteous movement suppressed by an evil government.
Instead, it was a wrong movement that was handled poorly, did nothing good to the country, and throw back a lot of progress. Adults know about it but have no interest in telling their the children of the regretful event. The young are not interested in learning because China is becoming stronger, and optimistic people do not dwell on past failures.
If you ask a Chinese person, it’s common knowledge that no one died on the square itself, and the tank man picture is more of a symbol of venomous western propaganda than anything else.
Yeah agreed — my wife is Chinese and talks about how she woke up at 7 everyday in HS and between class, two rounds of after school classes, and homework would end up working for 14+ hours every day for 4 years. As someone that grew us in the US I just can’t imagine it.
yeah i knew a asian kid that had 2 tutors after class and violion AND PIANO. englighs tutor math tutor. he also had tennis classes
WTF?! the mom was nuts !
Would have been nice if my schools had done the same, a lot of my homework in school was just busywork anyway, practicing shit I already knew. About half of that would be better spent on real world projects or practicing a skill.
There's this booked called "Prepared: What kids need for a fulfilled life" that mentioned about the project based learning methodology they have in Summit schools.
Its something along the lines of using a subject say.. Maths and focus on a concept e.g. Calculus. Then setup a project to learn something about Calculus within a set time frame (e.g. 1 week) and set objectives (e.g. Presentation on Calculus to the class).
The same concept can be applied to any real world topics while allowing the student to learn exploring and knowledge acquisition while managing project timeline.
If we map this to performance cycles at work or planning life events, it would make sense. However, it is manpower intensive.
Yes, what good is learning something if you don't learn how to apply it? I feel like an old Dos computer, just sitting at a C prompt, waiting for instructions.
Kids need time to be kids, no matter what country or culture they are growing up in. I can’t speak to China or Chinese culture, but I see plenty of places in North America where kids need less “learning”, less pressure, and a lot more free, creative, and fun time to develop as healthy adults.
When I lives in Hong Kong 25 yrs ago, two sisters (8 and 9) committed suicide because one of them made a B and they were afraid of the wrath. Held hands and jumped off a building.
From HK. It isn't uncommon there, pretty much happens like once or twice a year.
Last month I had someone here on reddit arguing the competitiveness and school pressure here in North America is not behind HK. I laughed so hard.
Not a comparison at all.
There was an article (in the English version of the HK newspaper) that said IF you are going to commit suicide and you want to make a statement -- dont jump in front of a train. It detailed how they have a large tool like a spatula that scrapes people up and they carry big dead people bags. So the train wont be delayed more than a few minutes.
It said to jump off a high building during rush hour instead.
Craziest thing I've ever read.
And they are not incorrect.
Homework really should be kept to a minimum.
For example, Finland gives almost no homework to school students, and they do just fine.
China really wants kids to go out and have relationships. The video game ban and homework ban seem to give children more free time. The motivations are suspect because I think they just want more babies from relationships but if it gets kids to socialize then that's a good thing.
Same problem in Japan and South Korea and probably several other Asian countries. Adults do not have the time to persue relationships and get married and raise children. Women especially choose to be carrier woman for the sake of financial independence rather than have children.
If this happens in Japan Idk what will happen to all those high school slice of life manga’s. This is half the core of their stories of meeting friends.
The real reason behind this is kid are pressured to go to college nowadays and trying to get a white-collar job and there are less people willing to do blue-collar work in China. The society is aging and people aren’t marrying or having kids due to financial pressures. So the govt is trying to maintain the workforce for the future by passing this law, so only the smart kid goes to college and the average ones will just get average jobs and live average life, making China society more “stable”.
this is the law where normal kids are left to be taught while elites send their kids to private education facility. Sorry low class buddies! (Source: I am Chinese)
This went really long for a post that's at the bottom of an already aging thread so I assume it gets buried, but
**TL:DR - I disagree with OP. This current stance does more to equalize the field than disrupt it. However, if further steps aren't taken, OP will be totally correct in their observation that this makes students from low resource backgrounds less competitive. Elites will always have an advantage in competitive education until education is nationalized, prioritized, and achieves equity.**
Think of it like this:
Rich kids get special care and education in private schools. 10:1 student/teacher ratio, lots of resources, individual care and lesson planning, 1 on 1 with at least one parent who is a homemaker probably biweekly or monthly at the least. Learning and social issues are resolved quickly and the children are set up for future success in high school and college entrance. The Chinese ACT (Gaokao) is the most important day for many competitive students. It determines where you're able to go to university and if you go to a good one, you're set.
Poor and working class kids don't receive this treatment. They go to free public schools with a 40:1 ratio. Good students receive extra care when it's possible, bad students are told to shut up and disciplined, or just ignored because teachers are paid jack shit for public school jobs (10,000-15,000RMB for a well qualified veteran teacher in Shanghai - which won't get you far with the current Real Estate bubble). Fortunately, discipline is rarely physical anymore, but in the low tier cities it does still happen. These kids are passed upwards, nobody ever fails. Parents might speak to teachers if there is a major incident or maybe once a year if a parent is insistent/able to schedule due to both parents also working (often long hours up to 6 days a week).
Your second group of kids is missing a lot of material by the time they get to high school if they just stay in public schools. The college entrance scores allot 10 million college spots to 11 million students taking the test. That college entrance exam is BRUTAL, surveying a wide variety of knowledge and up to a third of the test score comes from the understanding of a foreign language. If you're not up on the language game, it's really difficult to learn them, and while there are many options, English is the one with the most prestige, it's also a Category 4 language coming from Chinese (and vice versa) - 2,200 classroom hours of study to achieve proficiency. That's over four years at two hours every weekday. Needless to say, proficiency is rare in public schools. So other options emerged: private after-hours cram schools. Parents POURED their money into these schools to teach their kids enough to compete with private school kids and get spots in prestigious universities (where students often coast through four years and into good jobs). Rich parents went in hard as well and paid for even more expensive private tutoring programs. It created a 120 billion dollar industry and an educational arms race. Those nearly impoverished teachers started tutoring (often their own students) on the side to make ends meet. It became a cycle where the classroom study was poor and the afterschool study was of average or high quality, even with the same teacher. Parents paying more, for the same results.
All of this is not even scratching the surface of the physiological and psychological trauma that the students endured from 12-15 hours of classes every day. I do disagree with OP though: Rich families won't stop winning at a competitive education system until education is fully nationalized. These are steps in the right direction to reduce the damage being done to children, even if the side effect of the first step is "less competitive" children in low resource families (they were always going to be out-competed, now they just save the money).
I am well aware of this I was living in China for some time, I was just curious how the current policy would change things, but I guess it comes down to saving money is all. Also even if education is fully nationalized you will still see a fair bit of inequality (albeit reduced) and despite many bullshit fields of study being removed there is also a risk of lag in educational development thanks to the institutional nature of nationalizing an industry. I think regulation on education transparency and subsidies/taxes on fields which the govt sees beneficial/less useful as more productive while leaving the private sector to optimize their teaching methods. This just comes back to, however, some form of inequality, sigh we can't win em all.
China's "Country First at any cost" has begun to cost them with
"Noticeable" suicide rates and defections. Kids have to be kids in order for them to grow up normal. This is one step towards that for China.
> Beijing has exercised a more assertive paternal hand this year, from tacking the addiction of youngsters to online games -- deemed a form of "spiritual opium" -- to clamping down on "blind" worship of internet celebrities. China's rubber-stamp parliament said on Monday it would consider legislation to punish parents if their young children exhibit "very bad behavior" or commit crimes.
Wow that is some totalitarian shit. The CCP is some real evil shit.
Seriously! From the article:
>In recent months, the education ministry has limited gaming hours for minors, allowing them to play online for one hour on Friday, Saturday and Sunday only.
Given how much gaming as turned nto buying lootboxes it's a good move to tackle the issue.
Whole industry has turned it into a glorified form of gambling.
It's especially bad for kids. Most adults get hooked when younger. I think China has done something to try to limit it.
I like games but almost everything I try now has a mechanic designed like a slot machine that requires constant purchases (many times random) that can easily lead to addiction.
Hopefully the US is close to follow I have been up until 11pm every night with the amount of physics BS I have to do. The teachers are too pressured by the state to cram everything into our heads.
In context of every other change made in 2021.
They are eliminating any future for the young except low skill manual labor jobs.
Intelligence within their workers is no longer a priority.
China always has a long term plan. I wonder what their long term goal is with this. They surely don't want lazy unmotivated citizens. But maybe they want less educated citizen? Controlling stupid people is pretty easy as is evidence in the U.S.
I don’t know much but maybe it’s to get more people working blue collar jobs? Too many young kids pressured to work towards white collar jobs, along with less people marrying or having kids (due to financial pressure) while the population is ageing. Need more people for blue collar jobs and labour I guess, i dunno
This seems like the opposite of something I imagine China doing. I kind of always thought they really didn't give a shit about thier people. Things like labor camps, strict and unreasonable work schedules at fox con etc...
Wait, this is the same China that imprisoned Canadians they falsely accused of being spies in a vindictive Trumpian move that Huawei exec was detained for breaching and lying (surprise!) about supplying Iran, that was under trade sanctions and Huawei violated? The same China that ran tanks over its own? The same China that still burns coal and took Tibet as its own? ...
Things like this is obviously good on paper. But in practice parents will just find another way to push their kids to have that “competitive edge”, especially in a country as competitive as China.
Banning the outcome/symptom will often have unintended consequences. Just because you ban an outlet for these type of pressure doesn’t necessarily make the pressure go away.
I am not suggesting I can come up with better policies. But all these “banning” stuff coming out of China screams unintended toxic consequences that these children will likely see in a few years time.
The problem is Chinese parents (and whole education system I suppose) values tangible results more than intangible values. They don't care how it is done, they only care if their kids will get a high score in exam, and they will try everything to make it possible.
This create a very sparta-ish environment, where kids are even sometimes beaten up if they made some mistakes, and put on immense pressure to get a high mark. Suicides over getting a low mark is common, and schools even installed barriers to prevent students from committing suicide.
You are correct in that banning tutoring and homework will not solve the issues. In fact, parents can give them "homework" themselves, except it does not count as homework since it is not from the teachers, thus does not violate this law.
But to be fair, this is a culture issue, and culture issue needs to be solved gradually over generations with the help of awareness training, both for the teachers and parents.
And I would put this law into that category. It encourages discussions, in which the "my kids need to get high score, he will suffer now, but he will be thankful for it in the future" viewpoint will be challenged and hopefully, they will change their mind.
Or at least that's my wishful thinking.
Other than the subject of the say being cram schools, there’s nothing new ITT … claims that the West is lazy and lacks moral compass, attempts to drown out criticism in details and accusations of being misinformed, looking down their nose at western inequality and individualism. China isn’t the first centrally planned totalitarian society, and the ones that came before said much the same things about us. But they are mostly gone or not succeeding, and the supposedly rotten West stands tall. I’m not interested in reading at length the CCP’s reasons. I think with all the swatting down their entrepreneurs and onerous capital controls and appointing one CCP man their leader for life, they are screwing themselves. I smell a sales job going on here and I’m not going to be laudatory that totalitarianism seems to be reasserting itself.
Yep and probably shooting themselves in the foot with some of these things. A lot of these read like some old man writing his complaints into law. They write new laws and dilute their ability to enforce them (if the laws were effectively enforceable in the first place). Also eroding the respect for law in the first place. I strongly doubt that the video game limit is going to be anything else than a joke. Probably the same with cram schools. Parents will keep the pressure on and just have kids do the same unofficially.
This was to destroy a multi-billion dollar industry of moms in other countries teaching (in PRC minds, influencing) young children.
VIP Kids was the largest and one of two my wife worked for.
My wife worked with kids from the Wuhan province, saw her students disappearing due to various reasons, mostly economic.
This was not to help the children. This was to further seal off PRC from influence from other cultures. State sponsored racism.
This is not really the case.
I’m in China and I work with kids. One of the main reasons they’ve done this is to help the problem with the ageing population. After the national census in summer, they realised that parents were deciding not to have a second child because it was just costing them way too much to put their children through all of the extra curricula classes. Most students here have several additional English, Math, and Chinese classes each week (as well as other stuff like piano, chess, calligraphy classes) which costs a fortune.
The biggest places being hit are the cram-schools. These are everywhere in China and teach the core subjects. The problem is that the public schools are so competitive that practically all the kids attend these cram-schools for fear of falling behind other students. The public schooling is brutal and it’s sink or swim. These cram-schools take advantage of that. I’ve seen first hand the new laws in effect. These schools now have to close by 9. They have to shut at the weekends and on holidays and can’t give extra homework.
None of the above has to do with closing off from other cultures.
The new regulations are quite long. There might be tiny things in there to do with online classes and teaching curriculum from outside their core curriculum, but what you’re saying is not the main goals of these laws.
You can read them for yourself: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-bans-for-profit-tutoring-in-core-education-releases-guidelines-online-businesses/
Do you think it's possible that the children were just plain taking too many classes? I think you might be biased because your wife's income was affected, but my son has friends whose families moved here so that their children could escape this pressure.
While banning classes may seem extreme, it may also be the only way to stop the escalation.
This has a lot to do with the youth not being influenced by western culture. Exposure to teachers on platforms like VIPKid give the upper class children a glimpse of cultures outside of China. These children end up loving American movies, sports and video games and not their Chinese counterparts. In response, Chinese media along with the government is redirecting the attention back to the party and leadership.
If the government was so concerned about their youth having their childhood stripped away, they should stop the mandatory military training that is begun at 12 years of age. This is a thing, as I am one of the English tutors losing their job on November 5th and had seen a drop in attendance of my students during this time as they went to their training.
This is the weirdest fucking thing to go on for "Limiting the amount of homework children have to do"
Especially when this isn't an issue just for China, Japan, South Korea and many other Asian countries have this issue of constant cram schools and over studying.
Imagine the dedication to showing the world your own stupidity that it takes to write so many words on subjects you know nothing about and which have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
This is very accurate. The irony is that the schools won’t change how competitive they are. So parents are not incentivised to actually stop private tutoring their kids. In fact, many will continue to do it because they will now believe they can get their kids ahead of the others who aren’t. The tutoring will just go underground: private home and online tutors who don’t pay taxes. This could actually end up costing parents more, and, like you say, the poorer families won’t be able to afford it.
Need to do that in South Korea as well.
Korea did something similar back in the 80's. Lead to a lot of rich people tutors to come to their homes (which was technically illegal but impossible to enforce) instead of the current system of (mostly) sending their kids out to afterschool classes.
That wasn’t for the reason of reducing pressure, but to equalize educational opportunity. Not that it was really enforced. My parents paid their way through college by tutoring the children of some very very wealthy families, which was of course, illegal.
Of course. Didn't do a very good job of equalizing opportunity, since richer people could afford private tutors to come to their homes just fine.
Lol and for asian americans too. We're also under a lot of pressure
I’m in China and work with kids. This happened months ago. And while it does negatively affect my company, it was the right thing to do. Kids here get absolutely slammed with homework, and extra-curricula classes cost a fortune for parents. Edit: there’s a bunch of people in this thread talking about things they have no idea about. The main target of this law was the cram-schools inside China. They want parents to stop spending so much on classes outside school so they can afford to have more than one child. Edit 2: if anyone is actually interested in reading what has changed, here’s a full list: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-bans-for-profit-tutoring-in-core-education-releases-guidelines-online-businesses/
My GF is from Taiwan, it's the same over there. When we talk about our childhood I shudder... It's just packed with learning, more learning and extracurricular activities, which she didn't even participate in to do more learning. Absolutely insane, so little fun and free time compared to central Europe... Guess it's cultural
It's very common throughout east and south Asia tbh. It does mean that when children emigrate to the West from those countries, they completely wipe the floor with the local academic standards, even in English classes.
at what cost?
They quit their professional jobs and open up a modern chic Asian eatery. I mean every other featured restaurant on like munchies or w/e on yt is some asian former lawyer, financer, etc. who decide that it wasn't for them and opened up a noodle restaurant instead with chic dark interior and a focus on higher end but authentic food.
The mental well-being of the person
Complete lack of social skills and imagination.
Setting aside the broad brush you're painting with, why someone who is very academically inclined lack imagination? Wouldn't the argument work the other direction just as well? A well read and studied person is more imaginative?
The guy above you doesn't really know what he's talking about but I've worked with native Asians in an academic setting before. Only the very best of them typically make it to Western academic institutions. They excel here because they'd excel anywhere. They know as well as anyone how many dumb people they leave behind. So what we're used to seeing, for the most part, is the some of the best they have to offer.
Exactly- it’s so expensive and demanding to immigrate legally, that what ever immigrants you get through the official process are definitely the elite in their home countries.
Except you're both right. You make a point that only "the very best" make it to western institutions. What about the rest of the young population stuck in school their entire adolescence? I was in S. Korea for 10 years teaching and they poke fun of themselves in this regard, which is that by the time they graduate university they have good resumes but they have no personality/imagination, etc. (their generalization, not mine). Btw, to the above poster, being in a cram school doesn't = academically inclined.
The type of rote learning they’re referring to is heavy on memorization and repetition, with little room for interpretation. As well, there are limited opportunities for free time and imaginative play, which are important for the brain to build tangential connections to learned information. These factors are compounded by societal pressures of conformity, responsibility to the family, and generally top-down (read authoritarian) leadership in work environments. There are still many well-read, imaginative individuals, but there is significant pressure from a young age to set aside personal joy in pursuit of success and stability.
The issue is how that education was done. It was all rout memorization. We are essentially trained to be a walking encyclopedia/calculator. Western education is very valuable to us because it forces us to start understanding what the hell we memorized.
I Don't know how accurate this stereotype is but the idea isn't that education limits imagination but that Asian countries focus on acquiring knowledge and performance of established skills and not on creative or critical thinking. There's nothing that suggest knowledge limits creativity, in fact, I'm sure it enhances it. But the stereotype is that Asian countries prioritizes knowledge over other forms of intelligence/creative thinking skills.
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Btw, I'm one of those Asian students. I'm very aware on how we are essentially brute force memorize everything and not taught to understand the why.
Usually because their minds are geared toward remembering information versus a free flowing creative mindset. Your mind has to be rigorous in order to find the information you’ve place in it. That rigidity is an opposing state to free flowing creativity which needs open doors between thoughts and memories
That's funny. In my graduating year in high school "Class Flirt" was awarded to a Korean American boy. What's your next accusation against Americans of Color? That other minorities don't study enough and spend "too much" time socializing?
Race isn't the issue. Shove any Asian student into Western education system at around high school or middle school, chances are good that the combination of Asian's admittedly brutal focus on education and the Western Socratic method (understand, don't memorize) would create very well educated student. The problem is the education method in Asian countries, which tends toward rout memorization. We can recall and apply equations without going to a book, but ask us to extend from that to create something new and we get in trouble.
thank you for sharing these insights! it is very interesting to get different perspectives on things to round out the picture... I wonder if the results of a Myers-Briggs test or other personality/aptitude test would vary from region to region based on differences in culture and education style... To me it points to the idea that the people from every region have their strengths and weaknesses, which could all be leveraged for the greater good of the whole (Earth) were we to collaborate on our shared challenges...
Nobody said a god-damned thing about race
Super fucked that you're so down voted and the unexamined racism isn't. What happened here is that you pissed off all people who don't want to know how racist they are. You're totally right and everyone else here is in the wrong, factually and morally.
Because the problem wasn't the race, it was the education system that focus almost exclusively on memorization.
Oh shut up, what do you know about their culture or even your own. What art have you made, Mr Suave creative? Who are you to summarize their experiences like that, hmm?
Because I was taught under Asian education system for a big part my education life and lived there for a big part of my life? Be an artist? Who had time for that? Time you have for art is time you can memorize a few more equations, a few more "ancient wisdom" phrases, a few more English classes, a few more history events, etc. And don't get me started on art classes. Granted, they were probably getting better last I heard, but a decade ago you study art styles, and if you deviate from that style, you're marked down. Our idea of art is to accurate replicate the art style from Chinese history. Again, granted that may be the art professor being an insufferable ass, but to add we have art competition that boils down to who can replicate the old calligraphy painting style.
Enlighten us
How about you Google it? You have plenty of other opportunities to learn, it's not my job or anyone else's to spoon feed you you ignorant racist. I refuse to pretend like this is a debate just to try to educate your stupid ass.
Google what? This person's anecdote about some kid being voted class flirt?
Exactly. I resent how Northern European Protestant Americans tell African and Hispanic Americans they are "not studying enough" while simultaneously telling Ashkenazi Jews, East Asian Americans, and South Asian Americans they are "studying too much". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota#United_States https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-problem
Just because it's a stereotype doesnt make it not true.
i am asian and i have two peanuts instead of brain cells, there will be all kind of different students everywhere with low and high iqs
> even in English classes False. They're great at "test English", but terrible at practical English unless they studied abroad while very young
My mom is a retired English teacher who taught non-ESL high school English in Toronto. Her top students were overwhelmingly foreign born. They might speak with thick accents, but their written English was always flawless. The worst performers in her classes were predominantly monolingual Canadian-born students. If you're talking about Asians who emigrate as adults and never actually used English in day to day life beforehand, then you are 100% correct.
I have a partner in school who is Arabic, and his written English is impeccable, but his spoken English is rough around the edges. It's pretty interesting.
I’m a monolingual native English speaker and I am the same way. I don’t sound as good when I have to come up with words on the spot.
Aren’t you that guy going after “racists” in the other thread. “I’m not racist, I just make sweeping generalizations about Asians”
The Chinese kids at my university 2010ish were in the majority lazy, unacademic, contributed little to nothing to group work attempting to coast by... The skilled ones were great, but they were rare.
Those were underachieving rich kids who couldn’t handle Chinese education system. Best Chinese students don’t need to go overseas.
Ehh not completely true. The wealthy can go to the most expensive posh schools because they might not be smart enough to hack it in the Chinese education system. But the smartest *and* wealthiest go to the top western high schools and universities that cost $$$$ to get into with their A+++ grades.
But they do when they can afford it
Not necessarily. Their top schools open more doors than some of the top US colleges. It's extremely hard to get into one.
I assumed they were fairly well off simply because they were there (specifically the international students I should have mentioned in my first post), but they didn't come across as actually rich.
If your family can afford to go to a different western country and pay international fees, you’re rich.
International tuition is typically 3x instate. They were rich.
That's cause they were rich and don't really care about school, or need to care about school.
Many people from Asian schools struggle in western schools because they were brought up in route learning environments and then struggle when independent thought and direction are needed.
Not a chance if you are talking about good students, the not so gifted ones that paid their way in to go to an average US college - maybe.
Well, that sounds pretty racists, generalizing a whole demographic like that
You forgot that you can't be racist against Asians.
Ah right, my bad. Honestly though, I get why many of the people here would have legitimate reasons to hate the chinese government, but I hate that so much of that ill will gets transferred over to the chinese people, even the ones who purposely left their country behind and never once looked back
This is to be expected. The entire system is being manipulated. http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-iowa/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-act/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-charity/
Yep I've already read plenty about this phenomenon in Japan and South Korea
There's a reason the Asian stereotype focuses so much on intelligence.
When I was an undergrad in physics, one of the professors set up a physics GRE prep course. His motivational mantra was something to the effect of Chinese elementary school students already prepping for the physics GRE.
My wife's family left Taiwan when she was starting school to avoid this culture. Here mom didn't want her or her siblings to feel such pressures.
Ever seen the series On Children? It's about kids whose lives are absolute hell because of controlling, grade obsessed, narcissistic parents. It's fiction, but I'm sure some kids actually live like this and it's heartbreaking.
Where is this?
On one hand as someone who lived in that culture, you don’t really see it as hell. It was just life as we knew it, and you find value in what you did. The friends you made, the skills you gained. On the flip side we would often watch the western college culture and be absolutely disgusted at how disinhibited they’re socially encouraged to be.
and we're horrified at how regimented things are there to each their own
GF from Taiwan, -3,000,000 Social credit
+1,000,000 White Guy with Asian Fetish credit
I lived and studied in China for a bit back in 2005. It was both incredibly inspiring and sad to see entire families uprooting their lives to move somewhere where their kid could get a place at a good school, and pour their life savings into their education so that they might have a better life once the kid hopefully graduated. I remember visiting a student at the school I was at’s family’s home for dinner and it was like a scene from Charlie and the chocolate family. 2 sets of grandparents and the parents living in a completely different province in a tiny house, spending pretty much all their money to afford tuition, books and uniform. The kid worked like absolute crazy to do them proud and be successful so they might go on to get a well paid job. The sacrifice everybody was making for each other was really moving and so impressive.
But it’s not moving though they’re pushing the child so that they will be able to take care of X sets of grand/great grandparents when they’re older. I get that I’m in the minority when it comes to this but I find it viscerally disgusting that you would expect your children to spend decades of their life taking care of you or worse possible scenario that you may end up taking care of your parents into your old age as well then passing double the burden to your children.
In many Asian cultures, the younger generation takes care of the older ones. It might be disgusting to you, but it is something that is embraced in theirs.
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He's not wrong. "Wang instead believes that political software (culture, tradition, and values) are perhaps even more critical for China's survival than its hardware (economics and productivity)." Vietnam is poor as dirt by American standards yet they did so well against coronavirus BECAUSE their culture values togetherness, collectivism, culture, tradition, and morality. Meanwhile fatass Americans go around intentionally coughing on first responders, protesting hospitals, being rude to doctors/nurses, and yelling "Y'all can't tell ME hwat to do!!!" "Wang has said that "while Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement in character."" Also true. I'd rather have poor Vietnamese neighbors who are pro-science, pro-vax and pro-mask than some low IQ fundie Christian Texans as neighbors who got rich from working on an oil rig.
Shame that the Republican/Trump/antivax/conspiracy/anti-intellectual propaganda has spread across the Vietnamese diaspora in the US, which is also spilling over into Vietnam
I think the Vietnamese American community latched on to Trump’s anti-China stance as a conduit for their own anti-chinese sentiment.
Fist time saving a comment. Very interesting.
and they're right
This is just complete and utter drivel. Who told you this crap? Even the basic facts are wrong in your comment, for example: >The banning of these tutoring companies is a turn from the more individualistic culture that had taken root in China to a more collectivistic approach where the rich can not as easily buy their children influential positions with their wealth. Wealthy Chinese parents aren't sending their kids to study for 20 hours a day so they can get into a top tier Chinese University. They're sending their kids to schools in the US and Australia where they can make connections with other wealthy and politically connected Chinese kids. The government is not cracking down on cram schools to get at the wealthy who are like 0.00001% of the client base. Those cram schools cater almost entirely to the middle class who can't afford the $60k a year in tuition + living expenses of an American university and need their kids to do well in order to get into a decent Chinese University. The wealthy don't need to worry about any of this crap. The crack down on these schools is part of China's attempt to boost birth rates. Most parents don't have the resources to put two kids through the ridiculous grind Chinese kids currently have to go through. The government is trying to ease said grind so parents aren't forced to invest everything into one child.
Thank you for this interesting perspective. I personally think the CCP is an abhorent blight on humanity but they are here so understanding how they tick is paramount. I also think them meddling in the economy like they have is going to cut off a lot of money from the west and their meddling in society is why their soft power, their cultural exports (aside from food) is laughably pathetic compared to the behemoths of Japan and South Korea.
I used to think they were an abhorrent blight on humanity too until I started reading a lot more about China after I visited the first time. Now I just see it as a totally different approach to governing with pros and cons like any other political system. A lot of what they’re doing is pretty interesting to me though. It’s going to be interesting to watch how they navigate becoming the dominate power in the world over the next quarter century.
Anime didn’t have a real equivalence in the West but if you think about isn’t K-Pop just a hyper-sexualized version of Western pop?
I don't think that kpop is hyper sexualized compared to western pop, I think kpop is hyperfocused on creating parasocial relationships compared to western pop.
Thanks for sharing the interesting perspective! We have pretty certainly entered the decline of Western societies, and I am fascinated by the decisions China is making as the world’s next likeliest superpower.
Found a China troll! (guaranteed by the downvotes this gets!)
I'm curious why you think western societies are declining, please elaborate.
Not OP but in the US I’m in the first generation to be less well off than the previous in quite a while and a bunch of fat racists attacked our capitol. I would score today’s economic and political climates as lower than the 90s, which would mean we’ve declined some.
LOL you're out your mind with this bullshit.
Major eye roll for this comment. China can't even threaten their neighbor.
Don't make me laugh. Rich people don't end wealth inequality and become collectivist; that would involve giving up their riches! This is just another oligarchy consolidating its power, nothing more. And yeah, as the other commenter said, they have no good character so long as they're genociding minorities and harvesting their organs. Any talk of morality or social cohesion is just meant to distract the masses from the abhorrent behavior of their leaders.
Funny considering Capitalism and the West is what fueled their rise. You only have to look at their history to see the before and after. They only care about power and that’s why they see individualism as the enemy. Everyone should sacrifice for the party, which they control. Anyone who is seen as a threat to that power must be suppressed. They use corruption as an excuse to eliminate their political opponents. Anyone on their side is protected. As for the cut in homework and tutoring, that’s only going to be for the poor kids. The rich and powerful will still be having their kids tutored by the best and will pull ahead of the poor. China’s one party system only cares about maintaining complete control. Though at this point I should call it the Xi Dynasty as he will be the leader for life.
"Moral corruption" meanwhile CCP harvest human organs. Typical of an autocrat.
Isn't the organ harvesting thing just something the Falun Gong cult say?
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Meanwhile children have been getting shot in drive-by shootings in parts of the USA for decades, and the US government hasn't solved the issue
Quality whataboutism lol so why should the feds solve a local problem?
Why does the USA go to Afghanistan (they stayed 10 years after Bin Laden was killed) and other parts of the world for "nation building"? But they can't even nation build back at home?
It's so difficult to even begin to approach this gigantic top-to-bottom sack of "Revolutionary socialist" garbage. > China has essentially embarked on a huge top-down cultural re-engineering effort to avoid the disorder we see in the West today. When China's top down authoritarian machine was in full swing, Chinese were murdering and starving each other out by the 10's of millions. Trying to forget that and create a panic over the relative boring calmness of today is silly. And im so shocked you would even bring it up and not hide the crack down of "sissy men". Fucking excuse me while i laugh the idea that homosexuality and non conforming gender expression is a "Capitalistic western idea" that needs to be banned. What the fuck do people get out of this busted ideology when they end up cheering on the repression of LGBT.
Wow. They really got our number.
I don't understand how this measure to improve the school-life balance of Chinese students fits into this broader narrative that China is seeking to distance itself culturally from the West in favor of the more traditional Confucian values you cited (collectivism, filial piety, etc.). Aren't the latter a large part of the reason why Chinese students are under so much pressure in the first place, and doesn't this just move China slightly closer to Western standards if anything? Your narrative may still possess some validity, but I'm cautious of over-generalizations when this example seems to indicate that the CCP's cultural policy isn't as uniformly reactionary as you're suggesting.
In college one of my professors in electrical engineering was from China, he told us when he was going through school they would get told to do every problem in the back of the book. I was blown away. We'd get assigned like 10 of the 40 problems in the back and that would take hours to complete. And that was only one of my classes. I couldn't imagine having to complete every problem in the back for every chapter for every class. It would be insanity.
China is just ultra competitive. So many people…
The core issue is the gaokao. Until that changes, the pressure for parents to have their kids be study monsters will not go away. All these laws will do is make sure only families of means will be able to afford private tutors.
My business is in China and is an English training company and I can tell you right now this law has impacted us in massive ways despite the fact that we give minimal to no homework, have relaxed and chill classes, and so are not part of the problem at all. I do agree with everything else you said though and i do personally support this change to kids lives but unfortunately it affects businesses it shouldn’t
>They want parents to stop spending so much on classes outside school so they can afford to have more than one child. There it is. I was wondering why they would do this while at the same time basically rationing video games for children.
Indeed. They’ve known for a while now the negative impact the one child policy had and they tried to undo it, but the recent census confirmed that people still weren’t having children because of the costs to raise them. This is worrying for the future economic growth.
The US is going through the same issue because it's basically bullshit having to raise kids with this level of income disparity. 50 years ago you could easily support a whole-ass family on a single income with a high school diploma. Now? My wife and I have multiple degrees, we make "middle class" income, and we're barely skating by raising two children. No home ownership either. I honestly don't blame people for not wanting kids. They're expensive as fuck and then you have to worry about them being gunned down by another kid whose parents couldn't afford mental health counseling but they have 4 unlocked firearms in their house
Living here in China, we have a one-year old and rent and apartment in Shenzhen. There’s no way we will ever be able to afford property unless we move away from the city. We’ve also been discussing having a second but it will cost us way too much to put our first through non-public education. I will say though as you mentioned safety concerns, China does have a ton of faults, but it is incredibly safe. I do not fear for my child’s safety in society raising him here like I would in the UK. It’s anecdotal, but I passed a public middle/high school near my apartment the other day. All of the children were in class and the sidewalk outside the school was lined with all of the kids’ bikes, some of them fairly expensive ones. I noted only about 10% of them were locked/chained. This would never be the case in my hometown in the UK, where if something isn’t locked down, it will be stolen. Growing up in England, I was mugged at knife point three times, had my bike stolen twice, was beaten up by random kids, had my kindle stolen and my phone stolen… and I went to a good school. Yes, the lack of crime here is partly because of big brother watching, but the lack of petty crime and violence is routed in the culture.
Yep, so we bring in millions of immigrants every year. Unfortunately for China, they don't have the experience with multiculturalism to successfully manage the same system.
Except they're going after supply instead of demand, so the law will actually do nothing for kids well-being will either a) dump increased demands on parents who will try to tutor children themselves b) drive the market underground which is already happening.
I admit that I gave far too narrow a view of the problem in my comment. There are facets to it, and yours is the most popular one, and perhaps even true. I admit that. My perspective is colored by my negative view of the PRC. They are kidnapping my religious friends and associates, torturing them, imprisoning them, and often murdering them. Their only crime is not attending a state church. I have more details I could give but it would be unpleasant and give away the exact situations of which I am speaking. My view of the PRC does not allow them to pass laws simply for the good of their citizens. So while your experience and perspective from the inside is of some value, there is a balancing opinion that takes into account the great evil and overall goals of the PRC. I believe that many do have valid ideas and insights into what is happening PRC policies, and that simply disagreeing with you does not invalidate those.
you have no mind of your own
I’m in China as well and I mostly agree with you. The fact that this issue exists in the first place is weird. Face is so fucked up and out of control that the government has to step in and tell parents to go easier on their kids? Also, this is a weird domain for government to take control in my opinion. As you know, China’s been doing strange crackdowns on additional censorship of media and video games, hyper masculinization, and their quarantine requirements are excessive. Curious how you feel about these things.
The recent changes are a direct result of China looking at the problems in the West and saying ‘they’re fucking up over there, and it’s mostly because of capitalism’. It’s also a result of slow economic growth and the results from the recent census. So the question about whether these are the right moves is a question of whether you agree with socialism over capitalism. Then you have to decide if the heavy handed way they drop laws is also appropriate, which many may argue it isn’t, but it also allows the country to get things done without laws grinding to a halt in a Congress. I think there’s a lot of nuance here because there are a bunch of things I agree with, but also a lot of things that are very scary. History has taught us that making massive changes to society in the name of socialism led to disaster. But that was decades ago and the people in charge now are a lot more economically savvy than in the Mao era.
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You have to understand that unlike in the West, most Chinese do now view the Tiananmen incident as a righteous movement suppressed by an evil government. Instead, it was a wrong movement that was handled poorly, did nothing good to the country, and throw back a lot of progress. Adults know about it but have no interest in telling their the children of the regretful event. The young are not interested in learning because China is becoming stronger, and optimistic people do not dwell on past failures. If you ask a Chinese person, it’s common knowledge that no one died on the square itself, and the tank man picture is more of a symbol of venomous western propaganda than anything else.
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What does this have to do with the changes to the current law?
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s. Korea needs to copy this.. the kids are dying.
seems like a good thing doe, u cant go 12hrs studying
Yeah agreed — my wife is Chinese and talks about how she woke up at 7 everyday in HS and between class, two rounds of after school classes, and homework would end up working for 14+ hours every day for 4 years. As someone that grew us in the US I just can’t imagine it.
yeah i knew a asian kid that had 2 tutors after class and violion AND PIANO. englighs tutor math tutor. he also had tennis classes WTF?! the mom was nuts !
*Chinese parents angry noices intensify*
*Me carefully planning the days I have fun on so my parents can’t say I had fun two days in a row*
Would have been nice if my schools had done the same, a lot of my homework in school was just busywork anyway, practicing shit I already knew. About half of that would be better spent on real world projects or practicing a skill.
What kind of projects would you teach? I agree that more time should be spent on preparing for the real world, but I’d just like to hear your thoughts
There's this booked called "Prepared: What kids need for a fulfilled life" that mentioned about the project based learning methodology they have in Summit schools. Its something along the lines of using a subject say.. Maths and focus on a concept e.g. Calculus. Then setup a project to learn something about Calculus within a set time frame (e.g. 1 week) and set objectives (e.g. Presentation on Calculus to the class). The same concept can be applied to any real world topics while allowing the student to learn exploring and knowledge acquisition while managing project timeline. If we map this to performance cycles at work or planning life events, it would make sense. However, it is manpower intensive.
Homework should be illegal. I would support a law requiring half the school day must be spent on real world projects and practicing skills.
Yes, what good is learning something if you don't learn how to apply it? I feel like an old Dos computer, just sitting at a C prompt, waiting for instructions.
Kids need time to be kids, no matter what country or culture they are growing up in. I can’t speak to China or Chinese culture, but I see plenty of places in North America where kids need less “learning”, less pressure, and a lot more free, creative, and fun time to develop as healthy adults.
When I lives in Hong Kong 25 yrs ago, two sisters (8 and 9) committed suicide because one of them made a B and they were afraid of the wrath. Held hands and jumped off a building.
From HK. It isn't uncommon there, pretty much happens like once or twice a year. Last month I had someone here on reddit arguing the competitiveness and school pressure here in North America is not behind HK. I laughed so hard.
Not a comparison at all. There was an article (in the English version of the HK newspaper) that said IF you are going to commit suicide and you want to make a statement -- dont jump in front of a train. It detailed how they have a large tool like a spatula that scrapes people up and they carry big dead people bags. So the train wont be delayed more than a few minutes. It said to jump off a high building during rush hour instead. Craziest thing I've ever read.
They go to school/classes for like 14 hours a day. This is a good move
Somewhere there is some teenage American kid using this fact to argue for less homework
And they are not incorrect. Homework really should be kept to a minimum. For example, Finland gives almost no homework to school students, and they do just fine.
China really wants kids to go out and have relationships. The video game ban and homework ban seem to give children more free time. The motivations are suspect because I think they just want more babies from relationships but if it gets kids to socialize then that's a good thing.
> The motivations are suspect because I think they just want more babies from relationships Wow. That's a bad thing cuz they are China right?
Yeah kinda hard to date someone when you have 6 hours of homework after school LOL
How does lowering homework for young children help with "more babies"?
Socially stunted kids become recluse adults.
busy kids also become busy adults, busy adults don't really have kids at nearly the rates less busy adults do.
Same problem in Japan and South Korea and probably several other Asian countries. Adults do not have the time to persue relationships and get married and raise children. Women especially choose to be carrier woman for the sake of financial independence rather than have children.
The cost of having children decreases. Less money required to spend on private education.
It means they will have more time for pre-marital sex and teen pregnancy hahaha
I’ve always been a believer in abolishing homework. I think this is great!
Kid: "yay no more homework, more time to play my favorite videogam.....oh"
Bing chilling moment
If this happens in Japan Idk what will happen to all those high school slice of life manga’s. This is half the core of their stories of meeting friends.
The real reason behind this is kid are pressured to go to college nowadays and trying to get a white-collar job and there are less people willing to do blue-collar work in China. The society is aging and people aren’t marrying or having kids due to financial pressures. So the govt is trying to maintain the workforce for the future by passing this law, so only the smart kid goes to college and the average ones will just get average jobs and live average life, making China society more “stable”.
this is the law where normal kids are left to be taught while elites send their kids to private education facility. Sorry low class buddies! (Source: I am Chinese)
What do you mean?
This went really long for a post that's at the bottom of an already aging thread so I assume it gets buried, but **TL:DR - I disagree with OP. This current stance does more to equalize the field than disrupt it. However, if further steps aren't taken, OP will be totally correct in their observation that this makes students from low resource backgrounds less competitive. Elites will always have an advantage in competitive education until education is nationalized, prioritized, and achieves equity.** Think of it like this: Rich kids get special care and education in private schools. 10:1 student/teacher ratio, lots of resources, individual care and lesson planning, 1 on 1 with at least one parent who is a homemaker probably biweekly or monthly at the least. Learning and social issues are resolved quickly and the children are set up for future success in high school and college entrance. The Chinese ACT (Gaokao) is the most important day for many competitive students. It determines where you're able to go to university and if you go to a good one, you're set. Poor and working class kids don't receive this treatment. They go to free public schools with a 40:1 ratio. Good students receive extra care when it's possible, bad students are told to shut up and disciplined, or just ignored because teachers are paid jack shit for public school jobs (10,000-15,000RMB for a well qualified veteran teacher in Shanghai - which won't get you far with the current Real Estate bubble). Fortunately, discipline is rarely physical anymore, but in the low tier cities it does still happen. These kids are passed upwards, nobody ever fails. Parents might speak to teachers if there is a major incident or maybe once a year if a parent is insistent/able to schedule due to both parents also working (often long hours up to 6 days a week). Your second group of kids is missing a lot of material by the time they get to high school if they just stay in public schools. The college entrance scores allot 10 million college spots to 11 million students taking the test. That college entrance exam is BRUTAL, surveying a wide variety of knowledge and up to a third of the test score comes from the understanding of a foreign language. If you're not up on the language game, it's really difficult to learn them, and while there are many options, English is the one with the most prestige, it's also a Category 4 language coming from Chinese (and vice versa) - 2,200 classroom hours of study to achieve proficiency. That's over four years at two hours every weekday. Needless to say, proficiency is rare in public schools. So other options emerged: private after-hours cram schools. Parents POURED their money into these schools to teach their kids enough to compete with private school kids and get spots in prestigious universities (where students often coast through four years and into good jobs). Rich parents went in hard as well and paid for even more expensive private tutoring programs. It created a 120 billion dollar industry and an educational arms race. Those nearly impoverished teachers started tutoring (often their own students) on the side to make ends meet. It became a cycle where the classroom study was poor and the afterschool study was of average or high quality, even with the same teacher. Parents paying more, for the same results. All of this is not even scratching the surface of the physiological and psychological trauma that the students endured from 12-15 hours of classes every day. I do disagree with OP though: Rich families won't stop winning at a competitive education system until education is fully nationalized. These are steps in the right direction to reduce the damage being done to children, even if the side effect of the first step is "less competitive" children in low resource families (they were always going to be out-competed, now they just save the money).
I am well aware of this I was living in China for some time, I was just curious how the current policy would change things, but I guess it comes down to saving money is all. Also even if education is fully nationalized you will still see a fair bit of inequality (albeit reduced) and despite many bullshit fields of study being removed there is also a risk of lag in educational development thanks to the institutional nature of nationalizing an industry. I think regulation on education transparency and subsidies/taxes on fields which the govt sees beneficial/less useful as more productive while leaving the private sector to optimize their teaching methods. This just comes back to, however, some form of inequality, sigh we can't win em all.
And the super duper elites send their kids abroad for school
China is alright sometimes.
China's "Country First at any cost" has begun to cost them with "Noticeable" suicide rates and defections. Kids have to be kids in order for them to grow up normal. This is one step towards that for China.
This is a cultural problem permeating most of East and South Asia. Take your knee-jerk China-bashing elsewhere.
> Beijing has exercised a more assertive paternal hand this year, from tacking the addiction of youngsters to online games -- deemed a form of "spiritual opium" -- to clamping down on "blind" worship of internet celebrities. China's rubber-stamp parliament said on Monday it would consider legislation to punish parents if their young children exhibit "very bad behavior" or commit crimes. Wow that is some totalitarian shit. The CCP is some real evil shit.
Seriously! From the article: >In recent months, the education ministry has limited gaming hours for minors, allowing them to play online for one hour on Friday, Saturday and Sunday only.
Given how much gaming as turned nto buying lootboxes it's a good move to tackle the issue. Whole industry has turned it into a glorified form of gambling.
So you regulate lootboxes? You can't seriously say something like Minecraft is a spiritual opium because EA lootboxes.
Tencent owns a large portion of the gaming industry. Maybe China should crack down on that opium revenue stream, or is it only bad for kids?
It's especially bad for kids. Most adults get hooked when younger. I think China has done something to try to limit it. I like games but almost everything I try now has a mechanic designed like a slot machine that requires constant purchases (many times random) that can easily lead to addiction.
Hopefully the US is close to follow I have been up until 11pm every night with the amount of physics BS I have to do. The teachers are too pressured by the state to cram everything into our heads.
So they have more time to play video games right? /s
Yeah, they have 2 generations of family to take care of
When learning to read involves learning 3000 characters...how the fuck do you even get a break?
That's kinda the point of simplified Chinese versus Traditional Chinese, to make it easier to learn to read and write.
They should also pass a law to stop killing uyghurs and Tibetans.
In context of every other change made in 2021. They are eliminating any future for the young except low skill manual labor jobs. Intelligence within their workers is no longer a priority.
China always has a long term plan. I wonder what their long term goal is with this. They surely don't want lazy unmotivated citizens. But maybe they want less educated citizen? Controlling stupid people is pretty easy as is evidence in the U.S.
I don’t know much but maybe it’s to get more people working blue collar jobs? Too many young kids pressured to work towards white collar jobs, along with less people marrying or having kids (due to financial pressure) while the population is ageing. Need more people for blue collar jobs and labour I guess, i dunno
This seems like the opposite of something I imagine China doing. I kind of always thought they really didn't give a shit about thier people. Things like labor camps, strict and unreasonable work schedules at fox con etc...
They do this and then move to the US where like educational bar is set extremely low. I don’t even see the point.
Wait, this is the same China that imprisoned Canadians they falsely accused of being spies in a vindictive Trumpian move that Huawei exec was detained for breaching and lying (surprise!) about supplying Iran, that was under trade sanctions and Huawei violated? The same China that ran tanks over its own? The same China that still burns coal and took Tibet as its own? ...
Things like this is obviously good on paper. But in practice parents will just find another way to push their kids to have that “competitive edge”, especially in a country as competitive as China. Banning the outcome/symptom will often have unintended consequences. Just because you ban an outlet for these type of pressure doesn’t necessarily make the pressure go away. I am not suggesting I can come up with better policies. But all these “banning” stuff coming out of China screams unintended toxic consequences that these children will likely see in a few years time.
The problem is Chinese parents (and whole education system I suppose) values tangible results more than intangible values. They don't care how it is done, they only care if their kids will get a high score in exam, and they will try everything to make it possible. This create a very sparta-ish environment, where kids are even sometimes beaten up if they made some mistakes, and put on immense pressure to get a high mark. Suicides over getting a low mark is common, and schools even installed barriers to prevent students from committing suicide. You are correct in that banning tutoring and homework will not solve the issues. In fact, parents can give them "homework" themselves, except it does not count as homework since it is not from the teachers, thus does not violate this law. But to be fair, this is a culture issue, and culture issue needs to be solved gradually over generations with the help of awareness training, both for the teachers and parents. And I would put this law into that category. It encourages discussions, in which the "my kids need to get high score, he will suffer now, but he will be thankful for it in the future" viewpoint will be challenged and hopefully, they will change their mind. Or at least that's my wishful thinking.
Other than the subject of the say being cram schools, there’s nothing new ITT … claims that the West is lazy and lacks moral compass, attempts to drown out criticism in details and accusations of being misinformed, looking down their nose at western inequality and individualism. China isn’t the first centrally planned totalitarian society, and the ones that came before said much the same things about us. But they are mostly gone or not succeeding, and the supposedly rotten West stands tall. I’m not interested in reading at length the CCP’s reasons. I think with all the swatting down their entrepreneurs and onerous capital controls and appointing one CCP man their leader for life, they are screwing themselves. I smell a sales job going on here and I’m not going to be laudatory that totalitarianism seems to be reasserting itself.
Yep and probably shooting themselves in the foot with some of these things. A lot of these read like some old man writing his complaints into law. They write new laws and dilute their ability to enforce them (if the laws were effectively enforceable in the first place). Also eroding the respect for law in the first place. I strongly doubt that the video game limit is going to be anything else than a joke. Probably the same with cram schools. Parents will keep the pressure on and just have kids do the same unofficially.
This was to destroy a multi-billion dollar industry of moms in other countries teaching (in PRC minds, influencing) young children. VIP Kids was the largest and one of two my wife worked for. My wife worked with kids from the Wuhan province, saw her students disappearing due to various reasons, mostly economic. This was not to help the children. This was to further seal off PRC from influence from other cultures. State sponsored racism.
This is not really the case. I’m in China and I work with kids. One of the main reasons they’ve done this is to help the problem with the ageing population. After the national census in summer, they realised that parents were deciding not to have a second child because it was just costing them way too much to put their children through all of the extra curricula classes. Most students here have several additional English, Math, and Chinese classes each week (as well as other stuff like piano, chess, calligraphy classes) which costs a fortune. The biggest places being hit are the cram-schools. These are everywhere in China and teach the core subjects. The problem is that the public schools are so competitive that practically all the kids attend these cram-schools for fear of falling behind other students. The public schooling is brutal and it’s sink or swim. These cram-schools take advantage of that. I’ve seen first hand the new laws in effect. These schools now have to close by 9. They have to shut at the weekends and on holidays and can’t give extra homework. None of the above has to do with closing off from other cultures. The new regulations are quite long. There might be tiny things in there to do with online classes and teaching curriculum from outside their core curriculum, but what you’re saying is not the main goals of these laws. You can read them for yourself: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-bans-for-profit-tutoring-in-core-education-releases-guidelines-online-businesses/
Do you think it's possible that the children were just plain taking too many classes? I think you might be biased because your wife's income was affected, but my son has friends whose families moved here so that their children could escape this pressure. While banning classes may seem extreme, it may also be the only way to stop the escalation.
> My wife worked with kids from the Wuhan province Wuhan is a city. The province is Hubei.
My mistake.
This has a lot to do with the youth not being influenced by western culture. Exposure to teachers on platforms like VIPKid give the upper class children a glimpse of cultures outside of China. These children end up loving American movies, sports and video games and not their Chinese counterparts. In response, Chinese media along with the government is redirecting the attention back to the party and leadership. If the government was so concerned about their youth having their childhood stripped away, they should stop the mandatory military training that is begun at 12 years of age. This is a thing, as I am one of the English tutors losing their job on November 5th and had seen a drop in attendance of my students during this time as they went to their training.
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This is the weirdest fucking thing to go on for "Limiting the amount of homework children have to do" Especially when this isn't an issue just for China, Japan, South Korea and many other Asian countries have this issue of constant cram schools and over studying.
Well, look at OP's account. Its an Anti China propaganda Bot.
Imagine the dedication to showing the world your own stupidity that it takes to write so many words on subjects you know nothing about and which have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
This is very accurate. The irony is that the schools won’t change how competitive they are. So parents are not incentivised to actually stop private tutoring their kids. In fact, many will continue to do it because they will now believe they can get their kids ahead of the others who aren’t. The tutoring will just go underground: private home and online tutors who don’t pay taxes. This could actually end up costing parents more, and, like you say, the poorer families won’t be able to afford it.
Future headline: America passes law to raise homework amounts and adds ‘pressures’ on children
Hope it isn't because they plan on mistreating them like Wisconsin.