On Reform of the Gaokao Guaranteed Admission System and the Jiaozhou Road Fire

13,443 characters2010.11.22

China’s education system seems to be reforming ever more in the wrong direction; the cancellation of the Olympiad recommendation system is regrettable.

Of course, the Olympiad system really did have problems. A competition originally suitable only for a tiny number of top students in math and science ended up being forced by too many people crowding into it, and that is bad. As for the widespread imbalance in students’ strengths caused by the Olympiads, that is another issue, which I will discuss later.

Measures such as banning Olympiad competitions in primary school and competition classes in middle school seem insufficient to put an end to the craze for Olympiad math. Canceling gaokao recommendations may be a once-and-for-all solution. But even if these measures can dissolve the dilemma of Olympiad math for the whole population, they are still cases of cutting off the nose to spite the face.

In my view, there are not too many recommended students, but too few. The channels for recommendation should be expanded on a much larger scale, and universities should be given greater autonomy in admissions, with a broader scope. Meanwhile, gaokao bonus points should be drastically reduced, so that those with special talents or distinctive abilities go directly through the recommendation channel, while the gaokao itself should ruthlessly cut away the many and varied bonus-point policies, abolishing all institutional bonus points for sports, the arts, and ethnic minorities alike, and relying instead primarily on individualized bonus points in autonomous admissions.

Doing science Olympiad competitions is similar to doing Olympic sports: it requires specialized investment. This kind of training does not cultivate comprehensive ability, but rather specialized education. Of course, some people will say that Olympiad competitions produce one-sidedness, and that recommended students who are severely lopsided are very bad, and so on. But the first question here is: aren’t ordinary gaokao students one-sided too? Of course, in terms of exam-taking skills in subjects like Chinese, math, English, physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, gaokao students cannot be one-sided—but as for the so-called comprehensive quality? What a joke! The math, physics, and chemistry of high-school entrance exams are extremely basic; what students who are good at exams need is not a deep mastery of them or a genuine interest in knowledge, but the drilling of endless, dreary problem sets. The ability to do science gaokao questions reflects, at most, the most basic comprehension and a relatively strong capacity for hard work; it does not in itself count as any kind of comprehensive quality. Students who do specialized competition work may not be all-around in the sense of subject examinations, but in terms of their command of math and science disciplines, and their interest and enthusiasm, they are more comprehensive. The gaokao cultivates exam-oriented partial talents, whereas Olympiad math selects for comprehensive qualities in math and science: comprehension, creativity, thirst for knowledge, and also exam-solving ability. As for the so-called “liberal arts” side of things—what on earth are the so-called “liberal arts” in Chinese middle schools nowadays? Are history, philosophy, and politics textbooks written like that really humanistic disciplines? Does being good at those “reading comprehension” exercises that even the authors themselves cannot do well count as good Chinese-language literacy? What a joke! From my personal experience, because competition-recommended students are not under the pressure of the gaokao and are not bound by textbooks, they have more room to develop their own interests; in fact, they often have broader interests in history, literature, and philosophy, and are also in a better position to develop those interests.

Of course, we cannot rule out the existence of some people who are so lopsided that they neglect everything else, who can only do competitions and cannot even take care of their own lives; but there are also people who only know how to take exams and have extremely low abilities in everything else. Through the gaokao, such badly lopsided people are not easy to filter out; but through the competition recommendation route, since universities ultimately always need to conduct interviews, they can actually be identified and checked earlier. If a student is truly terrible, then even if he obtains recommendation eligibility, wouldn’t it be enough for the university simply not to admit him?

After the reform of the recommendation system, some universities hurriedly wagged their tails and echoed the move, saying that recommended students are of poor quality, that autonomous admissions rank first in quality, the gaokao second, and recommended students third. Then I was puzzled: if recommended students are of such poor quality, why don’t you just not admit them? Even if they have obtained recommendation eligibility, no one is forcing universities to admit them, right? If recommended students are worse than gaokao students, then just don’t admit them—why wait until the policy changes before saying this? When I looked closely, I found that the institution saying this was Fudan University, which is somewhat understandable, because Shanghai’s best recommendation resources have always been snatched away by Peking University and Tsinghua University. In other words, even the batch of recommended students left over after Peking University and Tsinghua University have taken their pick is still being taken by Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University—why is that? Of course, it is to compete for student supply. But if the quality of these students is even worse than that of ordinary gaokao entrants, then what are you competing for? What a joke!

This shows that practice has proved the quality of recommended students is not bad, and universities know this. If the requirement is for comprehensive qualities and the like, then the interview component for recommended students can be strengthened; there is no need to admit them solely on competition results. If the quality of the gaokao students admitted is worrying, then university admissions offices cannot be held responsible, because the rule is that once they pass the cutoff score, they must be admitted, and the university has no way to screen them. But if the quality of admitted recommended students is worrying, then that is the responsibility of the university’s admissions office itself. If you have not done a good job of recruitment and screening, how can you blame the recommended students?

Of course, if there are only a few recommendation channels such as the Olympiads, it is entirely predictable that too many people will crowd into them. The solution should be to expand the scope of recommendations, so that there are diverse recommendation channels beyond science competitions. In that way, the result of a nationwide craze for Olympiad math should not arise. Or if one insists on abolishing the recommended-student system, then the corresponding space should be shifted onto autonomous admissions, and various gaokao bonus points should be reduced, so that autonomous admissions can truly play the decisive role.

But the problem is that the direction of our education reform does not seem to be moving toward strengthening autonomous admissions. Instead, it is advertised as seeking to “maintain fairness.” Of course, both the recommended-student system and the autonomous-admissions or bonus-point systems contain many breeding grounds for corruption. Yet these unfairnesses are, in the end, problems of the bureaucratic system, not things that can be solved simply by reforming the education system.

In a society that lacks fairness in every respect, it is puzzling that education alone is so insistently made the object of fairness talk. But what truly deserves emphasis in education is equality of opportunity to receive compulsory education, and this is something we seem not to care about. Rural education conditions have remained impoverished, and investment in basic education remains worrisome. Apart from the absurd “Project Hope,” what real policies have actually been implemented for basic education in underdeveloped regions? “Project Hope” is a thing to be laughed at to the heavens, because since “compulsory education” is, in essence, an obligation—an obligation of society, an obligation of the government, an obligation of taxpayers—then the most basic educational conditions should originally have been built through government overall planning and allocation: establishing primary schools, hiring teachers, and so on. These should all have been things that fiscal funding ought to have guaranteed from the start. Yet China has used large amounts of tax money for fireworks displays and image-building projects, while what about the construction of compulsory education that ought to have been invested in? How much has the government put in? According to internet searches, the donations for Project Hope over 20 years amounted to only five or six billion yuan, whereas Beijing could spend several hundred billion yuan on hosting the Olympics. And how much effect did those five or six billion yuan actually have? Judging by the publicity and praise, it seems to have had an enormous effect. Then what if the government directly used fiscal appropriations to do the project? Even if it threw in another three or five hundred billion yuan? It is not as if that money could not be found. Couldn’t that greatly change the current state of China’s basic education? Even if the government were unwilling to spend that much, why should ordinary people have to pay extra? Good-hearted ordinary people first pay their taxes, and then must still voluntarily donate the sweat-and-blood money left over to Project Hope, even though that project itself should be the government’s obligation. This is the greatest unfairness in China’s education system: it does not properly implement the building of basic educational conditions and equal opportunities for education, but instead creates a counterfeit equality by depriving capable students of the opportunity to receive advanced specialized education. Equality of opportunity in basic education does not mean that all educational forms must be equal for everyone—just because some people have the opportunity to learn piano, should everyone have a piano? Or, since it is impossible for everyone to have a piano, does that mean it is unfair for only a small number of people to learn piano? According to differences in people’s interests and talents, education should be tailored to the individual and as much diverse educational environment as possible should be provided. That is what fairness is.

Of course, people will say that in recommendation and autonomous-admissions systems, the universities’ power becomes greater, which may lead to corruption. This is indeed true, but so what? Isn’t corruption already plentiful in China now? Corruption is not scary; what is fatal is backroom dealing and corruption for which no one is responsible. Rather than banning corruption, it is better to put the procedures out in the open. Who recommended a student, who interviewed him, who made the decision, who questioned and reviewed it—all of this should be out in the open. The issue is not whether bribes are taken, but whether one dares to take bribes openly and accept the accountability and questioning of one’s own actions.

One of the biggest problems in China’s current system is the lack of a “responsibility” mechanism. Before the rule of law, there must first be “freedom,” meaning that there must be responsible individual action before law can even be discussed. Otherwise, however sophisticated the legal system may be, it is nothing more than a tool for those in power to evade their own responsibility. Whenever something happens, everyone hides behind the system and lets the system shoulder legal and moral responsibility. What China lacks now is a system that allows “individuals” to take responsibility properly. In a free society, the responsibility a person bears is proportional to the power he possesses: the greater the power, the greater the responsibility. That is why in the West, once something major happens, even if it was not entirely caused by the fault of a particular official, that official still has to resign in disgrace, or at least offer a profound apology and thereby bear moral responsibility. In ancient China, although there was a “family-rule-of-the-state” system, because of traditional ritual and law, and the belief in resonance between Heaven and humanity, the patriarch still had to be responsible. Above the “master” stood the “ancestors,” and above the Son of Heaven stood the blue sky, so when something happened, there still had to be a “person” to take responsibility. In the case of serious natural disasters and man-made calamities, the emperor had to apologize and ministers had to resign. This was not merely stupidity, but a consciousness of responsibility—the emperor possessed the greatest power, therefore he was the one with the highest responsibility, and however enormous the matter, it had to be counted against him. Since the emperor had the power to command the world, he correspondingly bore the responsibility for peace under heaven; if all under heaven was not peaceful, then the emperor had to take responsibility. In this sense, the difference between ancient China and Western democratic societies was nothing more than a difference in the distribution of power, not in the distribution of responsibility: in both cases, “the greater the power, the greater the responsibility.” Yet in modern China, there is a lack of a mechanism for “taking responsibility,” or rather, “responsibility” has been dissipated into invisibility. Here there is a strange and subtle conspiracy at work, namely the concept of “the people.” In the People’s Republic of China, the state belongs to “the people,” and the highest power and all power belong to “the people.” The police are the people’s police, the courts are the people’s courts, the government is the people’s government… all coercive institutions belong to “the people” as well. The police exercise power, the courts exercise power, the government exercises power—but who is taking responsibility? Not the police, not the judges, and not the leaders, but “the people.” And in actual accountability, this “the people” either means the lowest kind of person, such as a few unlicensed welders, or it means the system itself, or the “they” in Heidegger’s sense, where there is “no such person.”

But when it comes to the great fire in Shanghai this time, I still overall felt hope. Judging from the civic awareness revealed by the people’s spontaneous memorial activities, and from the Shanghai municipal government’s emergency measures and the mayor and party secretary’s declaration that “we will take responsibility,” something of a new atmosphere seems to be emerging. By comparison, the central government’s control measures are still very rigid, but at least in Shanghai at the local level, hope can be seen.

November 22, 2010