Hello everyone, I am Yang Dongping of the 21st Century Education Research Institute. Recently, the state has strongly introduced policies to rectify training and education, which is actually a major adjustment and change to the entire pattern of basic education in China.
Identifying "Shadow Education"
China's basic education can be roughly divided into two systems, namely public and private systems. In the last 20 years, a huge third system, the extracurricular training system, has grown. Its volume greatly exceeds that of public primary schools, and a number of powerful listed companies have emerged. Today, the pattern and interest relationship of China's basic education have undergone profound changes, and training and education has become the most important force to increase the burden of coursework and family economic burdens, and to promote test-oriented education. That's one aspect.
On the other hand, we should also see that training education is often called "shadow education" in foreign countries, which means that it is accompanied by public schools, in order to meet certain needs of public schools, and it is produced in a shadow. More often, it is a kind of remedial education - the latecomer cannot keep up with normal teaching and needs to be provided through extracurricular activities; public schools cannot all provide music and art education, which is provided through extracurriculars. So it's shadow education.
However, in the reality of China, training began to meet the needs of some students with academic difficulties, but later it gradually deviated from this direction and formed a strong motivation for self-development. Expand social impact through advanced education and competitive development models, and expand their market share by transmitting anxiety to parents and then satisfying anxiety. Finally, training education became a kind of anti-phagocytosis of public education, that is to say, it hijacked and changed public education to a large extent.
For example, when the vast majority of children have learned a lot of knowledge in the preschool, the teaching of primary schools cannot be organized, so the teaching of the last grade can only start from the starting point of training, although the state has banned the primary schooling of kindergartens and requires zero starting points for the first grade. Therefore, we say that training and education has indeed worsened the entire education ecology, resulting in a pattern of "rising tide". The scores of the exams and the intensity of the competition are getting higher and higher, and if you don't take it, you will be left behind. The concept behind it is an arms race of academic qualifications.
Now our governance of training institutions is also the same reason, that is, to lower the level of being raised to a very high level and down to the original initial position. That is to say, instead of all people going to tuition, it is better for all people not to make up, and everyone returns to a zero starting point and returns to the original appearance. This kind of governance is valuable, of course, the difficulty of governance is very high. But I believe that this is a process, and we have to face and solve various problems gradually.
After the abolition of extracurricular training, the contradiction will be transferred to public schools
The main issue I would like to discuss today is that when extracurricular training is gradually abolished, this contradiction will be transferred to public schools.
We have just talked about training education, which is shadow education and changes with the needs of public schools. If your public school doesn't choose a school, it doesn't have school selection training. If your public schools all require soccer, it all trains soccer, so it's a hands-on system. If the system of extracurricular training is gone, then naturally all the complaints, dissatisfactions, and problems about education will return to the interior of education and return to our public schools themselves. Therefore, we must see that it is precisely because of various problems in public schools that shadow education has been born.
Today we still have to return to the track of focusing on public schools and solving various educational problems.
First of all, we must ensure that preschool education is not bound by advanced education and early education. We see that China's training system continues to sink, getting younger and younger, sinking to 2 to 3-year-old children, doing all kinds of thinking training, not to mention violating the laws of education, it is simply a violation of basic principles of humanity. In this regard, we need to have more resolute and strong measures to avoid pre-school education being held hostage by training.
For example, legislation on pre-school education was passed. We see that in the Draft Amendment to the Remedial and Continuing Education Law passed in Taiwan in 2013, it is clearly stipulated that English, abacus, mental arithmetic, composition, speed reading and other types of tuition cannot enroll children under 6 years old, and violators can be fined up to NT$500,000. That is to say, there must be very clear rules to prevent the situation from deteriorating.
Secondly, it is necessary to improve the educational ecology of primary schools, which is the so-called problem of reducing burdens. How to really reduce the burden in primary schools, I think is to abolish the only score evaluation and super-syllabus tests in public schools.
I have a very good classmate whose descendants attend a very good school in Shanghai. He told me that in public schools, the last question in the exam was an Olympiad question. And it's an open secret that all schools do it, and it's a complete violation. Is it to help the training institution recruit or something else? We can't say this well, but this phenomenon must be completely overcome. We cannot say that we should do one thing at a time, that we should reduce our burdens, but we should still engage in this kind of advanced education, or that we should carry out education that is beyond the program and beyond the difficulty. It must be forbidden!
In addition, it is very important to stop paid make-up classes for teachers in public schools. This is also the biggest concern of many parents, that is, after the cancellation of extracurricular tutoring, will it lead to the transfer of training in training institutions to paid tutors for school teachers? Paid tutoring by school teachers is a violation of the law and is expressly prohibited by the state. But whether we can really ban it, everyone is worried about this. So if we don't do this thoroughly, we will make extracurricular training still survive in disguise.
challenge! There is no extracurricular training anymore, how to arrange students' holiday life
One of the challenges we also face is how our students' lives are arranged without extracurricular training. There is a top priority, how to arrange this year's summer vacation? Because in the past, parents had a relatively simple choice to send their children to the training class. After all, this can help parents to share some of the childcare problems. So in the absence of a training system, this problem is a new situation and a new problem that we are facing, and our government, schools and society have to take on greater responsibility, that is, to take on the service of students' extracurricular time.
Recently, Shanghai has established a love summer nursery class for primary school students in Shanghai, led by the Youth League Municipal Committee and the Municipal Education Commission, including the Health Commission, the Sports Bureau, the Federation of Trade Unions, the Municipal Women's Federation and other institutions, covering 16 districts, a total of 543 school-running locations, providing a place for most primary school students to carry out extracurricular activities and hosting.
Because this function has been replaced by training institutions in the past, we lack active construction, and this kind of community service should be the norm of society, a learning society, and the norm of a child-friendly society.
For example, in every community in Denmark, there are youth clubs, including children of all ages, including football, handball, tennis, swimming, shooting, horseback riding, gymnastics, and it is close to home, the tuition fee is not high, and usually every child will participate in a club during the holidays. This is a public-good, child-friendly, and community-based social support system. Social services like this are not yet widespread in China, so this could be a very important development direction in the future.
Our parents also need to realize that this transition may also be a very important opportunity for us to develop our students' ability to develop their autonomy. We know that the winter and summer vacations of students abroad are very long, almost three months or so, why is it designed so long? It is functional. It is to use this time to promote students' social cognition, natural cognition, and self-awareness, that is to say, to let him go out of school, to understand society, to understand all walks of life, to understand nature, and to develop his own interests.
Therefore, our families, schools, and social organizations all need to work together to help students arrange and design valuable and meaningful activities, help students enter nature, enter society, and enter professional life, coordinate students to enter various professional places to visit internships, do surveys, and so on. This is a very new aspect.
For middle school students, it allows him to learn self-management, determine the goals of a vacation, how many books to read, what to teach himself, how many exhibitions to visit, take part in a trip, and so on. At the same time, an individual research project can be identified, including theoretical or practical research. For example, I use my vacation to study my own family history, what my ancestors did in three generations, which I am afraid that most children do not know; or to do a community survey, a survey of our village.
Another aspect is to participate in public welfare activities, public welfare activities can participate in the activities of social public welfare organizations, but also can be self-designed some public welfare activities. For example, to help the elderly learn to use computers and master the APP of using mobile phones, such as helping parents to establish a mobile phone address book, etc., this can be designed. There is also a life experience in enterprises, shops, and rural areas to understand society. I believe that these are more important studies than brushing up on the problems, which will make this summer vacation more valuable.
