Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  China’s leadership had intended to fashion a school system to create well-rounded, moral, athletic, hardworking contributors to society. Instead, what they got is a population of “test-taking machines” without social and emotional abilities, as many a media report put it.

  It was clear where the blame should lie for creating generations of professional students: China’s test-based education system, or yingshi jiaoyu, say experts and government officials alike. Government documents themselves condemn the system with harsh words: It’s a radical departure from the basic needs of learners. It buries students under mountains of homework. It makes scores the only measure of worth of a child. It hurts student’s initiative and creativity. It violates the original tenets of the Education Act itself. Amanda, my friend in Shanghai high school, told me, “I’ve never been allowed the time to learn how to deal with people. I know books, but I hate human contact.”

  The bodies of schoolchildren are wasting away under the weight of their books. The eye doctors of China would tell you that children have vision problems like never before; four out of ten elementary school kids are nearsighted, a doubling of myopia in China over the past decade. Middle school kids fare even worse. Genetics, perhaps, but the media and commentators seized on what they saw as proof that change was desperately needed. And while students’ brains are growing fatter with knowledge, so are their bodies: One in five school-age girls is considered obese, and for boys it’s one in three (although changing diets are partly to blame).

  “China has paid a very high price for focusing on tests,” Guan Yi, a teacher at Suzhou High School, told me. “Learning something and taking a test on something are two completely different things,” said Xu Jiandong, a former government official in Jiangsu province.

  China’s highest education officials haven’t sat by idly; in fact, for decades, they’ve tried to move the system away from testing. Let’s usher in a more “holistic” approach to education, the ministry decreed in the 1980s, adopting a concept called suzhi jiaoyu, or “Quality Education.” This was part of a government campaign to lift the quality of the entire Chinese population. (The one-child policy was part of this effort.)

  This “quality education” umbrella effort gave rise to dozens of policies. When officials found that toddlers were learning content appropriate for much older children, they declared, “Let us de-elementarize preschool!” That became the title of a policy document. When research showed preschool games helped lighten the academic load for young children, “Games and Play” became the name of another. The decrees came fast and furious, and they addressed the education of preschoolers all the way through college. Altogether, hundreds of directives came out of the central ministry, with fancy names such as “Kinder, Gentler,” and they attempted a variety of changes: They prohibited elementary school entrance exams; shortened the school day; slapped a time limit on homework for grade-schoolers; banned numerical grades; and prohibited makeup classes after school, on weekends, or during holidays, just to name a few.

  All were aimed at lightening the academic pressure on China’s compulsory student population—roughly two hundred million strong—and indeed “Lessen the Burden” became the title of another policy. Education bureaus at provincial and local levels attempted their own initiatives. Shanghai’s education ministry, for example, recently required that middle and high schools employ full-time psychological counselors to help students cope with academic pressure.

  Entrance exams are also getting a hard look, as the government attempts to diminish their importance for high school and college admissions. In Shanghai, the most recent reform considers calling for students to have two chances to pass parts of the gaokao—with the idea that the chance for a do-over makes the first time less of a nail-biter. In 2017, Shanghai universities will also consider outside-of-school activities such as volunteering, as well as the scores of regular, routine high school tests. I get the trend: More and more, universities are being asked to consider the whole student—instead of only that single gaokao score.

  As I studied these reform efforts, which seemed to point one way and then reverse course to try something altogether different, one thing became achingly clear: The Chinese government’s long-standing dissatisfaction with its school system, as well as a paralysis when it came to fixing it once and for all.

  * * *

  Intentions to change are well and good, but this parent has a horse in the game. I wanted to know about outcomes. What did these reform efforts mean for a student’s daily life? What did they mean for Rainey?

  I discovered that the Education Ministry and reform advocates had been taking the pulse of its patients—the country’s school system and all those involved—in the form of surveys. Most recently, it surveyed nearly five thousand primary and middle school students, principals, and parents all over China. But the results, released in 2013 after several generations of reform had come to pass, were disheartening.

  Only one in four students felt their workload had lessened. Students were still buried under homework. Most kids were still taking outside prep classes, despite an outright ban on extracurricular study. More than three-quarters of students suffered from yanxue, or a hatred of study. The results hadn’t changed much since 2005, when a wide-ranging survey found most students had no time for housework or exercise, and indicators of study fatigue dotted the report with words such as “depression,” “boredom,” and “anxiety.” Today, one in three students say they actually have an even heavier workload than before.

  Despite decades of work, educators had measured no significant progress in reducing academic pressure. The culprit was clear: All those tests were making it impossible for students to do anything other than bend their heads over books, and entrance exams for high school and college—still firmly in place—only intensified the pressure.

  I spoke with a Shanghai psychologist who had been installed at a middle school as part of a reform effort. “My office is often empty. I’m trying to cure yanxue, a hatred of study, but the students are often too busy taking tests to come talk to me,” said Yang Lingqiong.

  The former education chief of Yunnan province, Luo Chongmin, gave a biting assessment in a speech. “Any policies are completely ‘empty and unfeasible because gaokao is still there,’” he ranted. “The only way to really relieve the burden of study is to change the current evaluation system, which is exam-oriented. Middle schools and high schools don’t dare slow down their pace, the Ministry of Education has no real power to punish schools, and officials and civil servants never carry out any supervision. Lessen the Burden has been going on for more than half a century, but the burden on students has in fact increased greatly.”

  Looking carefully, I saw that this burden was actually revealed in the same PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test that placed Shanghai students tops in the world in math, reading, and science. That exam had also surveyed students’ quality of life, creative thinking skills, and time spent in study, and in these areas, the Chinese saw only slashing red marks all over their test papers.

  In fact, the man commonly dubbed the grandfather of Chinese education reform looked with jealousy across the straits to Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. “Those countries scored right after Shanghai—second, third, and fourth—but they spend a third to a half the time Shanghai students do in study,” Yang told me in Beijing in 2015.

  He’s right: On the amount of time kids spent poring over books, Shanghai, too, was also the world’s No. 1.

  There’s one more important thing: American kids may score lower on paper tests, but those who excel in math love the subject from their heart. “Chinese students have better scores but their interest in math is not sustainable,” said Liu Jian, a mathematician who works on China’s national curriculum. He cited research that shows Chinese students’ interest in a subject is more externally driven, by exams, attention from teachers, rewards, and the announcement of scores. Once those external rewards are taken away, Liu told me,
their interest and motivation to learn wane. “If a student is not interested in learning, it will be difficult for him to achieve great things in the future,” as Beijing professor Gu Mingyuan put it.

  Instead of celebrating their top-ranking perch, Chinese educators had questions: How did Finland achieve their results in half the homework time? And how can we get our children to love learning for the sake of learning itself?

  * * *

  Here’s the conundrum facing the Chinese Ministry of Education.

  When entrance exams are less important, students would certainly feel the pressure lift away. But then, educators must come up with another way to select kids for high school and college. That would mean introducing such things as essays, interviews, and teacher references.

  “That requires human graders, and they’re prone to making all sorts of mistakes,” said Andreas Schleicher, the architect of the PISA exam. “Once you introduce human graders in a high-stakes environment, you raise all sorts of questions. You can imagine what happens.”

  The system simply isn’t ready for gray areas: China must process millions of students each year from thirty-four provinces and municipalities all over China, and filter them into one of nearly three thousand higher education institutions. And there aren’t enough spots for everyone.

  “So, for a hundred percent reliability,” Schleicher concluded, “you always go back to a multiple-choice test.” This is the black-and-white option, which theoretically leaves no room for corruption and mayhem. In principle, then, gaokao is as close to giving everyone a fair shake as you’ll possibly get.

  Chinese culture also prevents change; the country suffers from a societal loyalty to testing, which grants social status based on scores. A hard habit to break, all right. “China is a nation of test addicts,” says educational consultant Jiang Xueqin. “Video games are addictive, and tests are addictive for the same reason. You do a math test, next day you find out you get a 99, ‘I’m a great person, right?’ It’s an instant feedback loop.”

  I understood this sentiment well. More than fifty years after my father took the National College Entrance Exam in Taiwan, he can recite his total score and the individual tally for each of the six subjects of math, chemistry, physics, Chinese, English, and Chinese constitution. You can still see that pride in his seventy-year-old shoulders, as well as the joy of having been admitted to Taiwan’s top university. Identification by number extends to the community; as an adult, I accompanied my father to his college reunion and marveled that, over dinner, he and his classmates could still cite each other’s entrance exam scores and subsequent rankings in college four decades after the fact.

  When it came my turn to sit for what you might call America’s equivalent—the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test)—my father liked the result so much, he locked the score in his memory. Fifteen years later, as he toasted Rob and me to a lifetime of happiness at our wedding, he quoted the number before two hundred guests over filet mignon. “My daughter was a National Merit Finalist,” he’d announced, as I shrank into my seat at the head table.

  The message: That number was a measure of my worth as a human being.

  Long after a person’s formal education is complete, China still likes to test—as if the country itself were an addict. Qualifications exams exist for all sorts of professions including doctors, therapists, lawyers, and judges; and the civil service exam sits at the gateway to a government job. There’s also a test for standard Mandarin speaking. “America doesn’t have one for spoken English?” my Chinese friend Meredith asked, stunned when I shook my head. “In China it’s very important.” The standard for cops is a score of 80, for teachers it’s 87, and for actresses it’s 93. For some professions, the score is only a recommendation. For broadcasters like Meredith, whose voices radiate over national airwaves, a minimum score of 97 is mandatory.

  “I got a 98,” she said, proudly. “You’re supposed to take it every five years. It’s very important to have standard Mandarin.”

  I discovered something else, which turns out to be the Chinese school system’s straitjacket. Tests in China are actually used to assess teachers and schools. Generally, teachers are evaluated on their students’ test scores, and schools are ranked on measures such as how well they graduate students into the next level of schooling (which is often determined by entrance exams). As much as everyone hates testing, teachers need their kids to focus on it. (This was becoming more and more true in the United States, too.)

  In fact, in China, a high school teacher’s salary can be boosted up to 20 to 40 percent if his students’ gaokao scores are high, estimated Wei Yong, a teacher at Beijing National Day School. Schools win and lose reputations based on their students’ collective gaokao scores; high scores are a gift that keeps giving, as administrators can justify charging more for school incidentals, and it’s not uncommon for government funding decisions to be based on performance. Results are collated and ranked by class, school, city- and province-wide, like a public scorecard.

  “No one truly wants to reform,” the former headmaster Kang Jian told me. “As long as gaokao is an evaluation for education, the pressure will always be there.”

  He added ominously, “And gaokao has only gotten more important.”

  * * *

  The Chinese proverb jin ri shi, jin ri bi means “Don’t put off for tomorrow what you could do today.” Another Ming dynasty poem ponders if you “delay something until tomorrow, how many tomorrows can you have?”

  Don’t procrastinate, as the proverbs go, since there’s always a task to be tackled or a chore to complete. This lesson is ingrained in my own muscle memory—as much as I’ve tried to fight it—and for every Chinese member of my immediate family, unfortunately, relaxation is a learned skill. Even today I struggle with guilt when I kick back with a glass of wine after a long day’s work. Shouldn’t I be rebalancing my retirement portfolio? Cleaning the kitchen? Exercising?

  One day Teacher Song tapped into this sentiment over WeChat: “The school will host a distinguished panel who will speak about elementary school readiness and admissions,” she wrote, the ultimate in jin ri shi, jin ri bi, given that elementary school was nearly two years down the road.

  “Rainey’s finally adjusted,” I cried to Rob, wishing I could kick back and relax on this one. “Can’t we coast for just a little bit?”

  “We’re probably already late in thinking about it,” he replied, shaking his head.

  As always, Teacher Song insisted on an immediate reply: “Please let me know if you’d like to reserve a seat.” So many RSVPs flooded in that the school was compelled to plan for a second session.

  I once had a glimpse at a test for one of Shanghai’s top three elementary schools. Three pages long, it was full of problems written in Chinese characters, with multiple-choice answers. For example:

  There are two glasses of juice. The child drinks half a glass, and Mama pours it full again. The child drinks another half a glass, and Mama pours it full again. Then the child drinks everything up. How many glasses of juice has the child had to drink?

  This is intended for five-year-olds? I’d thought to myself.

  “Buhaoyisi—let me bother you for a moment.” I pulled Rainey’s teacher aside one day. “Aren’t primary school entrance exams supposed to be banned? I thought the system was trying to lighten the testing. Why should we prepare for them?”

  “Yes, but prestigious schools still have entrance exams,” Teacher Song said, glancing my way with surprise. “It’s important, because some of the best high schools are part of a system, and acceptance to the right track starts with primary school.” This was the same reasoning uttered by Gregory Yao, the extracurricular-obsessed father who’d put his daughter in “early MBA” classes as a toddler.

  I looked at Teacher Song, processing my first inkling that her classroom might deviate from the White Bible words she’d championed in that first parent meeting. How could it, inside of this culture and system?

  Son
g and I had developed an easy rapport. Teacher Chen, Rainey’s teacher last year, saw a foreigner needing reeducation, but Song was more likely to see the nuance of my existence in China. “You look like ‘us Chinese,’” she’d said to me once, quizzically, giving a nod to my Mandarin-with-a-foreign-accent.

  “I am like ‘you Chinese,’ except I’m American,” I’d assured her. “My parents are Chinese but emigrated to America when they were young.”

  “Zhidaole—I understand,” Song had said, nodding her acceptance.

  On Teacher Appreciation Day, I decided to deliver a Coach wristlet, determined to get our relationship off to a healthy start. Rainey traced out a dinosaur onto cardstock, and I slipped his handiwork inside. Teacher Song surveyed my offering—small enough to nestle in my palm, discreetly wrapped in white tissue—and decided to accept.

  Overnight, she changed her mind. “This is expensive,” she said the next morning, pulling the package from a hiding place inside a bin of markers. She quickly pressed it into my hand. “Sorry, I cannot take this.”

  “It’s just a small token of our appreciation. I hand-carried it from America. No import taxes! It’s not that expensive,” I said. It was textbook “politeness strategy.”

  “Can you give it to your friend or your mother?” she said firmly, indicating that the conversation was over. For now.

  She was playing her part in the “reoffer-decline exchange,” and I nodded.

  Even though she’d refused my gift, she noted my gesture, and according to the protocol of Chinese gift-giving, I was slowly working my way into the club.