Chinese Education: How Do Things Work?

Lifetime Penalty for Cheating, Family Debt and Frightening Gaokao

"We are learning, till we are alive. And we will learn until we die" - it’s not a figure of speech, but the slogan of a Chinese senior high school student. In a country with a population of 1.5 billion people, higher education is one of the few, if not the only social elevator for those who want something more than a daily bowl of rice. However, it is necessary to pay such a high price, which only the most outstanding children in the world can probably do.

Annually 5 million places are allocated for new first-year students, but this is not enough for a huge country like China. The competition for some universities can be up to 200 people for a place. And not only high school graduates of the current year aspire to enroll universities. Traditionally students who failed an examination continue to try again and again, proving that perseverance is also included in the number of Chinese virtues. Sometimes applicants-veterans really capture the imagination: a few years ago the whole Chinese press wrote about 81-year-old Wang Xia, who got lucky only with the anniversary tenth time.

No time to Breathe -

A typical daily routine of the Chinese student is monstrous, and in terms of sanitary standards, and just towards children.The rise is no later than five in the morning and after that self-learning exercises start immediately.From eight in the morning until four in the afternoon students have lessons, and then from four to nine in the evening they go to extra classes.Finally, at nine in the evening, you can dine ... and continue to study, until fatigue and sleepiness will fall you down completely.

Theoretically, there are two days off, but to use both of them is a bad tone. Such "sloppiness" will not be understood neither by teachers nor parents. Sunday morning - that's the allowed maximum for the rest for the decent student, but if you fill it with useful educational businesses, it will cause an unconditional approval of family and neighbors.

Chinese wisdom says: as long as you are taking a breath, you have been pushed back a few steps back.

Rest -

Summer vacations are often no more than ten days, and then a part of them usually is dedicated to the necessary self-preparation. A typical picture in shopping centers with good air conditioning in summer: hundreds of people, who are not interested in shopping, read books and make notes in halls.As a rule, they are high school students who are preparing to the main examination of their lives - Gaokao.

The Main Two Hours of Life -

Gaokao is the Chinese entrance exams.Every year in early June for three days all graduates of the country are experiencing not only their erudition and intellect but also psychological and physical endurance. Gaokao includes compulsory subjects (Chinese Language, literature, and mathematics), each of which takes two hours and elective subjects: foreign languages and so-called complex science. Here the timing of the test is reduced for half an hour. If a student runs out of time, the test is considered to be failed. If the student allows himself to talk during the test, which for obvious reasons is extremely rare, the result will be also canceled. But for cheating you will face a lifetime ban for National Higher Education Entrance Examination. It is clear that under such conditions the question of cribs is not even worth to talk about.

The Main Thing is The Result!

Enormous amounts of information that need to be processed, in addition to the obvious benefits of mastering the subject, lead to a tough prioritization, often at the expense of quality. Western teachers who work with Chinese students told that a terrible workload in most cases does not allow students to concentrate, think and analyze what they have learned and read.

"If I ask their opinion about a book, I often see only confusion in their eyes, - wrote in her blog American teacher René Forseth Williams. But everything changes if I clarify that it will be a test by this book. Some say so - if it is not for the test, I'm not interested in it. " In fact, only the subject that needs verification will be memorized. On the one hand, it allows you to really fully to master the program. Alternatively, it eliminates the creativity, for which students simply did not have enough time or strength.

Bio -

Thomas Sims is a teacher of Italian language and academic writer on EduBirdie, so he is deeply integrated with education system. He always tries to embed new techniques in the studying.