Chinese culture places heavy value on one’s academic successes, stemming partly from the country’s long history around education, and this is one of the underlying factors that makes Gaokao (the college entrance exam) so notoriously difficult. Similar situations can be seen across different societies with affinities to Chinese culture. In South Korea, students are trapped in a lifetime of study and stress never ends. The Singaporean education system excels in global rankings but its students are struggling to cope under relentless pressure and stress. Seeing examples outside China, thus, it is hardly surprising that students in China from a young age has been pushed towards various types of tutoring or extracurricular classes, in order to better their grades or explore their ‘passion’.

What really ends up happening, is the even though these extracurricular activities might indeed help the child to explore their passion, more often than not, it is what the parent wants for themselves as a bragging right, rather than genuine care for their child. In China, face (roughly the equivalent of honor) is taken with the highest regard. For your child to stay behind in schools, in their education, combines the two all-important elements of face with academic successes, thus, not acceptable.

Do the tutoring classes and extracurricular classes such as piano lessons, and as a growing trend, competitions such as math competition, robotics competition etc., really benefit one’s overall education and life?

Let’s begin on exploring the impacts of extracurricular classes. There are many stories that an ethnic Chinese parent forces their child to do piano or violin lessons and the child ends up hating it, so I will not elaborate on those. Instead, let’s look at the competitions. A robotics competition aimed at teens and pre-teens that I went to recently went to is a perfect example of this. Do primary school students in the lower grade have the mental capacity to develop a program? Sure there are exceptions but for the majority of the population, no. Children around this age also often lack other crucial capacities such as having enough patience and determination to pursue a complex project thoroughly. One reason for this is because biologically, the human brain takes an awful amount of time to fully develop. Whatever benefits (when these benefits are actual and not just perceived) that these classes offer, even when retained later in life, are not always useful. What usually ends up happening, is that the children are fed knowledge, instructed by their teachers to perform tasks that often they themselves have no idea, no interest, in the task itself or the meaning behind it.

Now I sound like against all sorts of extracurricular classes and tutoring classes, but this is not the case. They do offer some benefits, at the very least many extracurricular activities are things a child would enjoy, tutoring classes can help a child understand knowledge that they were not able to grasp during school time. What is happening in China, however, is on . As most parents do not sign their children up for these classes as a result of them wanting their child to enjoy the classes or understand what they couldn’t in class, but rather a desire for their children to come up on top compared to others of the same age.

This fierce competition can sometimes lead to bizarre outcomes. This might have been a parody, but is not far stretched from the reality. The Chinese state television network has produced a documentary series on Gaokao that is also uploaded to YouTube, and you can have a more in-depth view of how pierce the competition is.

The true picture in China involves parents that are desperate to get their kids more ‘education’ in order to have a competitive edge, children often overloaded and tired, and the ‘educational agencies’ that are racking up in cash.

These agencies promise to teach your child knowledge, life skills and more. Of course all they want is some handsome amount of cash, but you would do everything for your child’s future, so you would pay for whatever that betters your child’s future, no matter how ridiculous the class sounds. All an agency need is a syllabus that involves words that the parents cannot understand, teachers working there that promises you that the knowledge that they are teaching there is invaluable for your child’s future, and if a foreign teacher (preferably white) is there, it would have been even better.

Thus, begins the enslavement.

You have become a slave that needs to pay those invoices sent by the ‘educational agency’, and your child has their time and childhood taken away from them. The slave master is not worried about a parent or two that decides to escape this slavery, there will almost certainly be more parents ready to sign the voluntary slavery contract.

Chinese parents believe that the ‘slavery’ is freedom, freedom for their children to choose in the future, but in reality, they hardly even have the freedom to not choose the option of voluntary slavery. From primary school and even kindergarten (and in Hong Kong, even before kindergarten), parents around you have been signing their kids’ childhood away form them in droves, and teachers are encouraging you to do so as well, with sayings such as ‘the summer vocation is the best time to catch up and surpass other students’ going around, how can you be so defiant of the system that is not beneficial to you?

After all, while your life is bound by endless responsibilities, your child is just starting out in life, and have an infinite number of possibilities and unlimited growth potential. How can someone be so cruel to not give them that tiny amount of money and rod your child of their infinitely bright future?

Shut up, and pay up.

With the pandemic, the world is shifting into a changing new reality that we are experiencing, and seeing in front of our eyes. One of the biggest change for me personally, is attending Zoom University.

My college is located in New York City, but I am currently residing in China. 16 hours of flight and 14 days of quarantine away from where my school is physically located. This is possible because of the transition to online classes only, meaning I only need internet connection (including some, illegal softwares, to get pass the Chinese internet censorship to access things like Gmail) to get my education.

Aside from not being limited to geographic location, I also save a ton of time. Many classes that I take are taught in an ‘asynchronous’ format, meaning that I get to learn on my own pace, and for me, that means much more efficiently. An accounting class that I am taking would have taken up 4 hours per week of class time if taught in person, in addition to homework assignments, but instead I get to only spend 1 hour for that class in total, and still managing an A. I wouldn’t have paid attention during class anyways, I am constantly on my laptop doing some other stuff, like coding, reading, or just researching on my own on certain topics that I happened to want to research on.

To me, school is not the same as education. In fact, schools can stand in way of my education, for example, a teacher took away a book I was reading during her class in middle school, hindering my education, because I understood everything in her class already. To most teachers, I have never been a good student, but that does not mean I am not a good learner.

I would never spend 80% of my effort to get an A, because to me, that is not cost efficient. I am much happier when spending 20% of the effort to get a B in a course, because that means I was much more efficient in my education. Instead of remembering every single detail needed to get an A in the exam, I get to have time to educate myself in other ways. By reading, by experiencing, by conferencing, by going to seminars.

The ‘education’ system believes in the superior quality of the knowledge acquired through it, because the system taught it in schools, and the system measured it through exams. This is evident on the non-acceptance of home schooling or other types of non-standard education, and also to students that study in different education systems, which often do not recognize some parts of their education (such as educational level, grades, courses taken etc.) taught in another education system, where some have to revert back a year or two when transferring between education systems that disagree with each other too much.

What these systems are for, how they are built and executed, however, is extremely backwards.

Imagine a single professor teaching the same course at different universities. Are the students in those universities getting vastly different education in regards to that course? No. Yet they can be paying vastly different tuition. There has been a joke that the only difference between students in expensive private colleges and public colleges nowadays is the tuition they pay, the Zoom is all the same.

If universities keep on issuing degrees and count coursework during online learning towards graduation, then what is the point in going back to in person teaching after the pandemic ends? It has been proven that online education works for a wide range of classes, why not keep it this way?

Instead of worrying about the seating plan for the students and whether a big lecture hall is needed to accommodate the extra students this year, all colleges need is to distribute laptops to every student. In fact, it might provide better education. A snow storm, traffic jams, even a pandemic, cannot stop a virtual classroom from functioning.

Schools nowadays act more as gateways to get to the next step instead of providing meaningful education. If you are presented with a choice of obtaining the same education at half the prize as you would in undergraduate studies, but you would not be issued with a degree, most people would not have taken that offer.

That offer has always been possible, because of the internet, and consequently, mass availability of knowledge. Colleges existed because only the intellectuals had access to knowledge, and they were made professors that teach their students knowledge otherwise unavailable. Some knowledge still exists only in the heads of the few, but most knowledge can be found using a simple Google search available to everyone with access to the world wide web.

The reason why people seek to attend prestigious institutions is because those institutions are prestigious, that give out degrees branded with the highly sough after names. Does the employer care what courses or what professors that you said ‘attracted you’ to that specific university? The courses taught at those institutions have no content that is otherwise inaccessible, what is otherwise inaccessible, is the resources and social circle. That is the reason those institutions are highly sought after, and learning of knowledge comes as an after thought.

Memorable speeches on TEDx were memorable because of their content, regardless whether you listened to it in person or watched it on YouTube. Your favorite music do not suddenly become unattractive when you get out of the concert. So why does acquiring knowledge have to be any different? It is not like the quality of the knowledge is always better when you acquire it through the formal system, countless college graduates fail at their new jobs because lack of work experience, but somehow they are considered (and paid) more highly in many cases than someone who started working and gaining experience earlier but did not attend college.

Is college an investment in education? No, because those knowledge are taught for free on the internet. Are grades a reliable measure of your understanding in a certain topic? No, just because it is the only quantifiable data out there does not mean it is good data or grade inflation would not have been a thing.

But will the system stay?

Yes, because it is too big, and people are too committed, from companies who hire the people who went through the system to students paying tuition and taking on debts, as their commitment fee towards the system.

Such a big system is reluctant to change, as it refused to in the past. The basic teaching methods have remained largely the same for hundreds of years. Students are still learning in much of the same format, despite the advancement of nearly everything else.

An arbitrary syllabus teaching knowledge in an arbitrary pace that some arbitrary person deemed suitable for that particular course, in order to allow for some arbitrary evaluating method to come up with an arbitrary value, that will be forever printed on a certain piece of paper called a transcript, then transformed in an arbitrary way into another piece of paper called the degree, that somehow confirms your understanding and the school’s endorsement attesting to that fact, however arbitrary it is.

And yet this system is one of life’s most certain certainties.

How arbitrary.