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arts | yin shenglin

edit | coral king

county schools cannot be without students from peking university and tsinghua university

before i started to focus on county education, i was mainly doing rural research and focusing on the reality of rural china. at that time, i also needed to interview some village primary school teachers, but i had not systematically thought about the issue of education. later, we began to study the governance of the county and township levels, and found that county education, as a basic public service, is very distinctive and very important. we wanted to approach it from a sociological research perspective and participated in organizing a special education research group within the research team.

around 2018, i started to join the research team. in the past few years, we have been to various counties for research almost every year. in the second half of last year, our small team visited more than a dozen provinces, more than 40 counties, and more than 60 middle schools. we talked with principals and front-line class teachers, and also interviewed relevant leaders of the local education bureau.

if you go there every year, you can clearly see how the county middle schools have declined step by step in the past six or seven years. a typical example is the no. 1 middle school of badong county, enshi prefecture, hubei province. for more than ten years, this county middle school has had students admitted to tsinghua university and peking university every year. in the most years, there are 11 or 12 students, and in the "small years", there can be seven or eight students. but this year, there is only one student, a cliff-like decline, and it is estimated that it will be difficult to rise again after this decline.

we investigated many other counties and cities in enshi prefecture, and the situation is even worse than that of badong no. 1 middle school. almost all high-quality students have left, and it is impossible to get into tsinghua university or peking university. even students from key universities are difficult to maintain. this is also the reality in most counties across the country.

there are occasional exceptions in some county-level cities. for example, tianmen city, qianjiang city, and xiantao city are county-level cities, but they are directly managed by the province and have relatively abundant finances. they have some extraordinary policies to retain top students. since there is no selection of top students by prefecture-level middle schools directly under the province, some high-quality students will remain after being selected by wuhan's "super middle schools". the situation faced by most county-level middle schools is that after being selected by super middle schools, the city-level middle schools will select them again, and basically there will be nothing left.

although there are policies to restrict cross-regional enrollment, they are not actually strictly enforced. provincial, municipal and county education departments have their own considerations, because in the end, the explicit standard for evaluating educational performance is still how many students from each region are admitted to tsinghua and peking university. the most active response to strictly prohibiting cross-regional enrollment has always been the county-level education departments, which are at the end of the entire chain.

the decline of county middle schools will bring many problems, such as vicious "involution", continuous strengthening of test-taking skills training, infinite compression and regularization of students' lives, and anxiety about the college entrance examination even spreading to primary school. but most importantly, it will further polarize educational resources, making it more difficult and impossible for children in county towns to go out.

it must be admitted that the unified college entrance examination is still the fairest education system. it should not be a system of "competing with parents", but a system of students' personal intelligence and physical strength, and their personal efforts. if children in county towns cannot even seize this opportunity, their opportunities in the future will become fewer and fewer.

the postgraduate entrance examination is also a unified recruitment, which could have given students with a weak first degree an opportunity to change. however, in the past five or six years, the "postgraduate recruitment" policies and systems of key universities have also changed. some postgraduate recruitment policies have begun to stipulate the proportion of graduates from 211 universities and above in the total enrollment. the number of students who are "recommended" is also increasing. in some universities, all professional and even academic master's degrees are recommended. the competition qualifications of ordinary undergraduate students are decreasing.

when it comes to doctoral selection, the system is more flexible. in recent years, some 985 universities have begun to change the doctoral admission examination into an application review system, canceling the school's unified examination and changing it to an inspection organized by the college and tutor. the basic requirements of the school are generally expert recommendation letters, english level and paper publication. it is difficult for students from ordinary families to reach this stage.

●a senior high school teacher in a certain county stood outside the classroom and talked with students.

from huanggang to hengzhong, the evolution of super high schools

i also went to a county middle school for high school. at the end of the 1990s, people believed that studying could change one's destiny. you had strong expectations. as long as you could go to the county's no. 1 middle school and your grades were not too bad, it was like having one foot in the door of a university. at that time, our county middle school had one or two students who passed the college entrance examination every year. the concepts of 985 and 211 were not very popular. we called them key undergraduates and general undergraduates. when i was admitted to a key undergraduate, almost all of my classmates came from county middle schools in various places.

but at the same time as i was studying, some county middle schools began to have the idea of ​​surpassing other county middle schools. when county middle schools in various places were still relatively lax, some middle schools began to militarize management, strengthen exam-oriented education and time management for students. the most representative one was huanggang middle school. when other county middle schools also began to involute, their advantages no longer existed.

around 2000, the super high schools that are familiar to everyone began to evolve into education groups that use cross-regional "picking the best" as a means.

as for the method of picking the best students, in addition to the usual basic benefits such as providing high-quality resources and free tuition to the families of top students, there are also some more hidden capital layouts. for example, some powerful education groups, after recruiting top students in their own province, can also use their capital strength to quickly build a new private middle school in other provinces, cities, or counties, and use this method to graft the brand. whether in teaching or in the management and motivation of teachers and students, private schools are much more flexible than public middle schools, and it is easy to achieve good results, which further caused the decline of local public county middle schools.

public county middle schools can also cooperate with super middle schools, but the form is not so in-depth, and they usually purchase cloud classrooms. it is difficult for county finances to afford to buy more resources from super middle schools. there is another way. some county middle schools will mobilize students with high rankings and the opportunity to impact tsinghua and peking university to cooperate with super middle schools such as hengshui middle school and pay tens of thousands of yuan to "borrow and study". there are more mature test-taking skills and teaching management models than county middle schools, which can help them stabilize and improve their scores. finally, if this student comes back for the college entrance examination and can go to tsinghua and peking university, it is equivalent to the best of both worlds - the student's academic record remains unchanged, and the student's grades are counted as county middle schools and county-level governments, and can also be counted as super middle school grades.

however, these methods cannot solve the plight of county middle schools, and have deepened the inequality in education. students who can now go out to study in super middle schools can be divided into several categories: one wave is pure top students, most of whom come from urban families, and some students come from rural families. such students do not need to pay for studying, and they will also be given benefits. the other part needs to pay, and the price varies according to different scores. the tuition fee for a semester in a county middle school is only 800 to 900 yuan, while private or super middle schools are very expensive. students from poor families do not have this ability and can only stay in the county middle school and receive a declining education.

when the top students in the county are taken away and there are relatively few excellent students, the entire source structure of students is destroyed, and the school loses its competitiveness in the province-wide competition. some people may wonder, if the top students in the county are gone, why can't the remaining excellent students be trained to become students who can compete for tsinghua and peking university? i also explained this issue in my book. the investment, accumulation, accumulation, atmosphere, and concepts of a county's education will affect the average quality of education in the county and create a complete source structure of students. after the top students reach the third year of junior high school, until the third year of high school, the ratio is almost fixed. some may fall behind, and some may catch up, but the ratio and number are relatively fixed. after these students are poached, the county has no ability to retrain them. in other words, the top students in the high school entrance examination are the product of the average quality of education in the county, not the product of the county.

the current education model in the whole country is the "hangshui model", including elementary school, junior high school, and high school. some places start recording test scores from the fourth grade of elementary school, and start to divide junior high school into key classes and rocket classes. the test-taking method is done to the extreme, and students' eating, sleeping, and commuting time are strictly quantified. for example, in a famous girls' high school, students get up at 5:30 in the morning, have five classes in the morning, three classes in the afternoon, and a one-hour lunch break in between; the evening is divided into three self-study sessions, each lasting 2 hours, and the lights are not turned off until between 11:30 and 12 o'clock. eating is not allowed to exceed 10 minutes, and you have to run back and forth. this is the case every day from monday to saturday.

one of our students described their high school life like this: go to class at 6:20 every day to start morning reading, all classes end at 12:15 noon, arrive at the dormitory before 12:45 after lunch and keep quiet, and finish homework in the dormitory before taking a nap. classes start at 2:20 in the afternoon and end at 5:40, with 25 minutes for dinner. after that, you need to go back to the classroom to start evening self-study. the first and second year students finish evening self-study at 10:00, while the third year students extend it to 10:30.

in fact, in addition to selecting the best students, polarized exam-oriented education, and huge resource investment, super high schools have no other advanced experience beyond county high schools. i think they are valued for two reasons. first, super high schools are the benchmark of a province, the embodiment of educational performance, and the "brand" of a province. in addition, it is important that they can use their capital advantages to obtain resources other than normal college entrance examination admissions.

there are two types of enrollment in ordinary colleges and universities. in addition to the unified national college entrance examination, there is another path for special enrollment based on students' specialties, which is commonly known as "recommended students". currently, the special enrollment students who can enter tsinghua and peking university mainly rely on winning gold medals in national competitions in five major subjects (mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and information technology) and entering the national training team to be eligible. this part does not occupy the quota of tsinghua and peking university in the provinces, and requires all provinces in the country to compete together.

super high schools have a lot of money invested in competitions. they can hire the best coaches and bring students from sichuan to zhejiang for training. they can also invite famous teachers to teach these students for several months or a year. these funds are millions of dollars. a super high school in a central province originally strictly prohibited cross-regional enrollment in 2021. soon, starting from this year, the province's competition results declined rapidly. in the end, there was no choice but to acquiesce to the super high schools' selection of top students in 2023.

the provincial-level education departments need to use super high schools to demonstrate their achievements in the college entrance examination and to highlight their results in the college entrance examination competitions, so they have to "let go" of the super high schools.

●an entrance ceremony for a county middle school in henan. most of the students in the school come from rural areas and see the college entrance examination as the greatest opportunity to change their lives.

after leaving the "silent" campus

the declining county middle schools are reflected in the empty rural schools. nowadays, the hardware facilities of rural primary and junior high schools are very good, with brand new running tracks, basketball courts, canteens and function rooms, but the number of students is decreasing, especially the high-quality students, who have all gone to the county town or better places, and the remaining students have more and more problems.

most of the students who stay in rural areas to study have no parents around, and are taken care of by their grandparents. the schools don't dare to intervene, and this change is very obvious. for example, when i was doing research in rural schools two or three years ago, some schools dared to corporally punish students, but now they don't care. parents' attitudes are also changing. in the past, parents thought that the school just needed to take good care of their children, and it was okay to hit them and scold them, as long as they didn't hit their heads. now they are very pampered.

but our rural education is special and different from that in cities. in cities, families are more involved in the education of students, but not in rural areas. parents are busy working to make money, so the children's education is blank, which requires the intervention of schools and the discipline of teachers.

when disciplinary measures were abandoned, rural primary and secondary schools went to the other extreme. schools did not dare to discipline some students who violated school rules and social ethics, such as those who were serious and frequent bullies. in the management of students in rural schools, the bureaucratic logic of "no trouble" began to prevail, and they chose to make a big deal out of a small matter.

this is related to the high-pressure stability maintenance in the entire grassroots governance. the "one-vote veto" on security and petition issues has brought great pressure to grassroots education administrators and schools. in addition, for some students who bully on campus, the school is also afraid that these people will do more outrageous things. in the several schools we investigated, students from the school have gathered outside forces to retaliate against the class teacher or subject teacher in recent years. some students will threaten to commit suicide, and the school is afraid that the matter will become a big deal, so it has to give in.

in rural areas, the treatment and status of frontline teachers are very low. a young junior high school teacher mentioned in an interview that students often joke with her: "teacher, your monthly salary is less than 2,000 yuan. i can earn more than that when i work outside. why are you so responsible? just take care of yourself." sometimes, teachers are in a weak position. some teachers said that they were very nervous after being threatened by students, fearing that they would be beaten or pushed into the river in a ravine, woods or river.

during the research, i had a strong feeling that today's students are so unhappy and the playground is so quiet. when we were in school, we liked to play football. classes ended at around 5pm and we studied at around 7pm. we could play a game of football in the hour or so between classes and sweating. today's students have their time clearly divided. it's all hengshui mode. the playground is quiet and there is no sound after class. most high schools only have 20 minutes from the end of the afternoon get out of class to the evening self-study. they have to run to eat dinner, so there is basically no time for exercise or rest.

to what extent is the school's management refined? if a student occasionally raises his head during self-study class or yawns inadvertently, he will be publicly criticized. there is even more management of scores. the class teacher will analyze each person and ask where the student's scores were deducted in several consecutive exams? why did he lose this 0.5 point? then carry out targeted rectification and training. think about it, this kind of discipline is basically more stringent than a factory. will this child still have motivation to study after the college entrance examination?

i teach at a university, and i found that students nowadays are taking gpas. i never understood why you need to take such neat notes at university? logically, you should have heated discussions at university, and what the teacher says may not be the standard (answer), so we can have arguments. now there is none of that, let alone arguments, not even discussions. students think that what the teacher says is the truth, and they should take notes first. of course, we cannot blame the students for this, this is a problem of the entire education.

what surprised me was that in every county i surveyed, there were 2 or 3 students in each class who had "registered" with the principal, that is, students known to the principal to have depression or other mental illnesses.

you asked me what my ideal county middle school should be like? i think it should be like what we were like when we were in high school in the late 1990s. at that time, county middle schools were very normal - the student source structure was normal, and the students also had a normal study and life rhythm. they played ball when they should play ball, and read novels when they should read extracurricular books. only in this way can we have "normal" students.