Professor Yao Yang of Peking University talked about the inner volume of education: the diversion of the middle school entrance examination is too early, and it is recommended that ten years of compulsory education be carried out

From first-tier cities to remote villages, educational anxiety has swept the country. How to get out of the inner volume and build an educational ecology that is truly conducive to the growth of innovative talents is a difficult problem that China's basic education must face.

The newly introduced "double reduction" new policy has opened the prelude to a new round of education reform, including strengthening the role of school education as the main front, deepening the governance of off-campus training institutions and a series of heavy reforms are being implemented in full swing.

Yao Yang, dean of the National Development Research Institute of Peking University, said in an interview with First Finance and Economics that the current education reform policy is not yet complete, and if China wants to fundamentally solve the internal volume of the examination society, it must carry out systematic reform of the education system as soon as possible, popularize high schools, and implement ten-year compulsory education.

He believes that the early diversion of children in the middle school entrance examination violates the path of China's industrial upgrading, and the level of initial Chinese is difficult to meet the requirements of intelligent manufacturing for senior blue-collar workers, and all children should be allowed to choose the vocational education route or the university route after reading the general high school.

It is recommended to introduce ten years of compulsory education

CBN: You have always been very concerned about the topic of compulsory education reform, and you have previously proposed to increase the compulsory education period to 12 years and popularize high school education in 15 years, and recently you have further proposed the implementation of ten-year compulsory education. What made you change your mind? What problems can this approach solve in reality?

Yao Yang: Recently, there has been a lot of discussion in the society about the inner volume, and the central government has also introduced a high-level "double reduction" policy, which has made some provisions on extracurricular tutoring and school selection, but the policy system is still incomplete, and the provisions for the non-compulsory education stage of high school are not clear.

The main problem of primary and secondary education in Our country is that students learn too much unnecessarily, which is the inner volume. Few people want to roll inside, but everyone is forced to roll inside. Because of the limited resources, further education can not only look at their own efforts, but also look at the efforts of others, and every parent is forced to put their children on the "treadmill" and run faster and faster.

A large number of meaningless brushing problems waste too much time on children and stifle children's creativity, and this education system is not conducive to building an innovative society.

For scientific creation, IQ is basic and effort is important, but rote education further stifles a child's creativity, resulting in some children with high IQs and low emotional intelligence being hit in the process and having difficulty reaching their potential.

Education has cultivated some children who have excellent talents into ordinary people who have done nothing, which is a problem that must be reflected at present. The first thing to cultivate innovative talents is to save students from these useless internal volumes and reduce the burden on children and parents. However, there is no way to reduce the burden by only cracking down on extracurricular classes, and extracurricular tutoring will soon be reduced to pieces and turned underground.

The key to reducing the burden is to carry out systematic reform of the education system, the implementation of ten-year compulsory education, the merger of junior high schools and high schools into a consistent secondary school, and strict regulations that schools cannot be selected, and there can be no more super middle schools.

The experiment of school choice in the United States is also a failure, in China's examination society is even more "cancerous", super middle school is a very bad system, they through the "pinch" of good students are "pinched" away, the pursuit of super high promotion rate, but also let those who have not entered the super middle school children feel that they are second-rate, affecting their motivation to learn.

CBN: Do you think the implementation of ten-year compulsory education can solve the current education volume?

Yao Yang: Yes. If China's financial resources cannot be reduced to 12 years, then we can consider reducing it to ten-year compulsory education, once the implementation of ten-year compulsory education, parents want to "volume" and "volume" can not become.

In terms of specific system design, ten-year compulsory education can be arranged in this way: five years of primary school, the implementation of the middle school consistent system, junior high school and high school merged into five years, junior high school random allocation of schools, fundamentally eliminate school selection. In this way, the distribution of students is also relatively even, and good students can drive latecomers. Children can add a preschool class before going to primary school, so that they start primary school at the age of seven, graduate from secondary school at the age of seventeen, and have no problem going to college. For the vast majority of colleges and universities, the knowledge reserve of ten years of compulsory education is sufficient. Some top colleges and universities can add a year of preparatory courses if they have additional requirements for students. Children who don't go to college can go to an intermediate college, two to three years, and then get employed. In this way, the internal volume of secondary schools, primary schools and kindergartens can be completely solved from the system.

It is not advisable to divert students prematurely

First Finance: Recently, the relevant departments have proposed to adhere to the "job-to-job ratio" of education at the high school level, believing that this measure can provide the necessary labor force for the society and enable the economy to maintain a reasonable growth trend. Parents understand this is that after passing the middle school entrance examination, half of the children will not be able to go to ordinary high schools, but further deepen the anxiety and inner volume of education.

Yao Yang: It is wrong to prematurely divert children and divide them into three, six, nine, and so on according to their academic performance. It should be admitted that every fourteen or fifteen-year-old child has the hope of self-development, not to hit them through diversion, but to give them hope, so that all children can finish ordinary high school, then their minds are more mature, and then choose to take the vocational and technical route or the university route.

In the future, China's industrial upgrading needs to open CNC machine tools, factories require a college diploma from a technical college, and enter vocational education after junior high school graduation, and the knowledge reserves of students are insufficient, and they cannot meet the requirements of senior blue-collar workers.

First Finance: German students have to decide whether to work as skilled workers or to enter universities at the primary school level. In contrast, why do you think it is too early for chinese students to be diverted to vocational high schools after graduating from junior high school?

Yao Yang: First of all, the German system itself has also been criticized a lot in china, and more importantly, the level of our vocational education is very different from that of Germany, and we cannot learn from Germany. The education of German technical schools is very good, and the students of technical schools spend five days a week, three days in general high school, and only two days in factories, so that the knowledge of ordinary high schools is also learned, and they really learn technology.

The situation in our country is that the level of education in technical schools is relatively low, sixty or seventy per cent of technical schools in rural areas cannot learn real technology, and there is a serious disconnect between the knowledge taught by technical schools and the skills required by factories. In Germany, the passage between skilled workers and university students is open, after becoming a worker, you can also go to technical universities, the proportion of German high school graduates admitted to universities is not as good as in China, only about 40% of students go to university, but in their 30s, sixty or seventy percent of people have received higher education. However, in our country this passage is closed, and the vast majority of people become workers for the rest of their lives.

It's okay to be an ordinary worker in Germany, you can go to a technical university in a few years, and you will be transformed into a senior blue-collar worker with social status and a good salary. We have learned about the German triage, but not the last half of the German system. Now there is no promotion channel for students to become blue-collar workers after being diverted, which is an unfair institutional arrangement for children whose academic performance is not very good at the junior high school stage, especially for children of peasant families.

I have always called for workers to also have ranks, and to open technical universities that are suitable for them, such as the half-day and half-time universities of the past, to give them the opportunity to receive another education.

CBN: How do you see the recent attempts to transform some of the three institutions into vocational education colleges? How can China change the dilemma of dislocation between academic education and vocational education?

Yao Yang: The direction is right, the key is how to do it. I went to Germany to see, Germany's technical universities must be one or two large companies to cooperate, large companies and these universities have close cooperation, not only to provide financial support, many of the company's laboratories are also located in the university.

Technical universities belong to engineering education, and the cost of running a technical university is much higher than that of an ordinary university. Running a technical university must have equipment and require a lot of financial support, which is not the condition of the three schools. When these institutions transform into technical universities, they must have the idea of jointly running schools with large enterprises, changing the disconnect between vocational education and enterprise needs.

The key to alleviating anxiety lies in the reform of the education system

First Finance: The "double reduction" document recently issued by the central government proposes to effectively alleviate parents' anxiety and promote the all-round development and healthy growth of students. Is regulating tutoring a cure for parents' anxiety?

Yao Yang: Educational anxiety is a very common situation in the current society, not only the anxiety of parents in big cities, but also the anxiety of poor households in remote areas who have just lifted themselves out of poverty, due to the unsatisfactory promotion rate of local public middle schools, some poverty alleviation households have done their best to send their children to private high schools with expensive tuition fees. Now the whole society attaches great importance to education, if we do not fundamentally solve the problem of educational anxiety, this will even drag the families who have just escaped poverty into poverty again.

Our educational reform can no longer only grasp the skin, but only adopt some policies that treat the symptoms rather than the root causes, but must solve the problem from the system. If some fundamental reforms in the education system are not promoted, but only strictly investigate the tutoring classes, then parents will choose to break up, ask for personal training, and push up the "one-to-one" price, some families are willing to pay this cost and can afford it, but families with a poor economy can't afford it.

From an international point of view, South Korea, Japan, etc. have banned tutoring classes, the effect is not good, and finally can only be released again. The ultimate solution to this problem is not the government's constraints, but the universities in these areas have become universal education, and after children can go to college, there are naturally fewer children going to cram schools, and only those who want to go to the best universities go to cram schools, and the scale of cram classes has been greatly reduced.

To reduce the burden, let the children play to their nature, so that each child has their own strengths and expertise. If the university is popularized, sixty or seventy percent of the children can go to college, the college entrance examination can be reformed, the general school not only looks at the college entrance examination score, the special students can also be found, and the gifted children can emerge, which is very important for china to build an innovative society.

CBN: You have always been very concerned about the balance of education in China, especially the development of rural education, what work do you think needs to do to improve the level of education in rural areas?

Yao Yang: Rural education is first and foremost facing the problem of insufficient teacher resources in rural areas, and more free teacher training students should be encouraged to go to rural areas, and financial investment should be increased to improve the treatment of teachers in rural areas.

Now teacher training students are free of tuition, but the tuition fee is originally very low, there is not much incentive for students, the next step should be to improve the treatment, the scholarship for students is a little higher, reduce the burden on the family, these students after graduation if they work in the countryside, in addition to the normal salary, the state can also give an additional part of the salary, so that students can work in rural areas for three or five years, alleviating the current situation of rural teacher shortage.

There are still many policies in the education system that are not friendly to rural children, and the more typical is the English test in the college entrance examination, which aggravates the unfairness of education between urban and rural areas.

Now higher education fees, the better the university fees, the lower the fees, Tsinghua Peking University only has a tuition fee of 5,000 yuan per year, while the three universities charge up to tens of thousands of yuan, most of them are rural children who go to these schools. One of the important reasons is that their English scores are not high, resulting in them being at a disadvantage in competition with children in the city, and it is difficult to enter one or two universities with low entrance fees, so that rural families who are not very economically well can afford high tuition fees. Therefore, the abolition of the College Entrance Examination English Test and the use of English scores as reference scores can play a positive role in promoting the balance of urban and rural education.