· This is the 4315th original debut article with a word count of 2k+ ·
· Liu Yuanju | Wen Follow Qin Shuo Circle of Friends ID: qspyq2015·
Common prosperity is the focus of current policy and the hot spot of public opinion. According to authoritative interpretations, the meaning of common prosperity is that through hard work and mutual help, all people can universally achieve a prosperous life, spiritual self-confidence and self-improvement, livable environment, social harmony and harmony, universal public services, achieve all-round human development and social progress, and share the fruits of reform and development and a happy and beautiful life.
It can be seen that the popularization and universalization of public services is an important aspect of common prosperity, and education is one of the most important. Because education is not only about the present, but also about the future. It is not only about a person's fairness now, but also about his future development, and the development of the next generation of this person.
Professor Tian Guoqiang, dean of the Institute of Advanced Study of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, proposed that in the face of the goal of common prosperity, the government can do a lot more in the distribution of secondary income and the fairness of the starting point, such as the investment role of education in human capital, the regulatory role of taxation in income distribution, and the supporting role of social security in improving people's livelihood. These institutional arrangements, which guarantee equality of starting points through governments and achieve common prosperity through market efficiency, are essential. In particular, the realization of 12 years of compulsory education is urgent, and the 9-year compulsory education does not meet the needs of high-quality development, which is particularly detrimental to the realization of the goal of common prosperity.
Externally, about 110 countries and localities in the world have more than nine years of compulsory education, and internally, many low-income areas, especially rural adolescents, are unable to complete high school education, resulting in a large unfair starting point, which has led to a series of serious consequences, including the problem of insufficient social mobility.
High school education is very important for socio-economic development.
Scott Douglas Rozelle, 62, a professor at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies, has been engaged in rural China research for about 30 years, focusing on agricultural economics and rural development. For nearly a decade, a team of Rothgow and Chinese partners has conducted a series of studies on rural child development.
Rothgow believes that in high-income countries such as Canada, the United States, and Northern Europe, nearly 75 percent of their workforces are at least high school graduates. In some countries that cannot overcome the middle-income trap, only 1 in 3 people in the average 3 labor force is a high school graduate. From this point of view, China's high school education is still very insufficient.
Around 2007, I did a small study myself, and the results of the data processing showed that the most relevant factor for the speed of China's economic development at that time was not the number of college graduates, but the number of primary school graduates. At first, I did not understand this result very well, but then I understood that at that time, it had been 6 years since China's accession to the WTO, labor-intensive industries were in the ascendant, and the world's factories were booming, requiring a large number of qualified labor. This qualification only needs primary school: it is not enough to reach primary school, it cannot enter the assembly line; and those with better academic qualifications do not need so much in China's economic structure at that time.
Now, more than a decade later, China's economy has undergone profound changes. The sustainable development of the mainland economy requires people with higher academic qualifications.
The "Plan for popularizing education at the high school level (2017-2020)" proposes to popularize education at the high school stage nationwide by 2020. However, universality, compulsory and free are three different concepts, and universal high school education focuses on solving the problem of schooling, not on the inclusion of high school education in compulsory education or the implementation of free education.
Therefore, even if the time is not ripe, in some places, it is advisable to give sufficient subsidies first to promote more children to complete high school education.
The connotation of common prosperity includes the equalization of public services, and for the inequality of public services caused by the difference between the rich and the poor, it is not necessarily necessary to suppress it, but it can also be pulled up, pulling down the excessively high basic education in some areas, and putting this part of the resources and funds into high school education.
In fact, a very important way for China's class differentiation is to use funds to make up for talent through capital investment in primary and secondary education, and widen the gap at this stage, and when it comes to the stage of junior high school examinations, students with talent but no funds have been pulled down a large section and can no longer catch up.
Moreover, reducing the intensity of teaching content in primary schools is also a logical necessity of double subtraction. Reducing the difficulty of learning, reducing the content of learning, reducing the content from the syllabus, learning less, learning a little simpler, in order to truly reduce the burden.
Some people believe that in the process of implementing the "double reduction" reform, "reducing the academic burden" can never be reduced to "reducing academics". Reducing the excessive academic burden of primary and secondary school students is not to let children learn less and simpler, but to let children learn more, learn faster and learn better in a state of interest.
It's a very beautiful, but unrealistic state.
High-intensity thinking activities will consume a lot of oxygen and glucose, and this kind of consumptive activity will not be a pleasant thing for most people. What's more, class learning, not one-on-one teaching, is not possible to adjust to a certain student's level and maintain his "flow".
The so-called flow refers to a state that is not difficult and challenging, but does not feel bored. In this way, interest can be maintained. Learning is a hard thing for most people. What's more, the learning process of memorizing words is simply repetition.
In this sense, to learn happily is to fantasize that a donkey can still be happy when pulling a cart. The so-called burden reduction does not reduce the quality, just like to let the workers not be so tired, but do not reduce the intensity of work, do not reduce the content of the work, nor let people work less, but let the workers in the state of interest, do more, do faster, do better. People who work, as well as a monthly salary as a reward, have short-term goals to maintain, but primary school students actually do not have, all rely on parents to strongly supervise.
Basic education should be simplified together, but in fact, it is not a big problem. As we all know, basic education in the United States is lagging behind in the world, but even if the contribution of international students is excluded, its higher education is not bad. The part of the reduction in elementary school and junior high school can be made up in high school. With the improvement of the difficulty of high school learning, most students and parents have also accepted their true positioning, avoiding ineffective efforts in the educational arms race.
The popularization of high school education also needs the cooperation of parents.
Whether children can go to high school is a big problem that middle-class parents in the city are anxious about. In 2019, the number of applicants for the Henan Secondary School Entrance Examination was 1.41 million, the number of ordinary high school enrollment in the province was 730,000, the general high admission rate was about 51%, and 680,000 people could not attend ordinary high school.
But this is not realLy China, and not all parents are looking forward to high school. In fact, a large number of rural children will come out to work in the second year of junior high school. The second year of junior high school and the age of 14 are a watershed in the fate of young people in rural China. Children at this age are at a high incidence of committing all kinds of sins and mistakes.
This watershed is determined by education. At present, under the compulsory education system in the mainland, tuition and miscellaneous fees are free, which has greatly promoted the popularization rate of compulsory education, and parents are willing to keep their children in school. If the child's qualifications are insufficient, it is expected that they will not be admitted to college, and the parents' willingness to invest in their children's education will not be large, and they will give up high school education, and the third year of junior high school is prepared for the middle school examination, so they will drop out of school after the second year of junior high school and flow to the society.
What can a 14-year-old do without reading? Can't work, under the age of 16, child labor, no one dares to hire them. Losing the constraints of school, the body matures again. A world of temptation is completely open. And, they know, they don't have to take responsibility for their actions. As a result, all kinds of sins and mistakes are committed.
In fact, whether or not you can go to college is only a symptom, more essentially, it is the parents' investment in their children's human resources, which is related to the judgment based on the future fate of their children. If they can stay in the city where they work, they will definitely try their best to let the children have a basic life and the ability to take root in the city, and they will increase investment in education. But if the expectation is only to go their own way and repeat "part-time work - back to their hometown", then this investment willingness is insufficient.
Therefore, only more smooth urbanization can enhance the willingness of low-level families to invest in education, realize the popularization of high school education, and achieve more equitable education public services, so as to promote common prosperity and sustainable development of the country.
" Picture | Visual China"
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