Justina's Writing Corner

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Recently, the Chinese government introduced a new education reform law. While the aims of the law are to help students’ mental and physical health, in reality, this has destabilized the growing industry of private tutors in China and has left many parents and students unhappy. When we first heard about the Education reform in China, the first idea that popped up was “here we go again.” It is very hard to believe that the Chinese government actually has good intentions for its people after all the nasty things they had done. 

China is presenting this law so kids get enough education in school and do not need to get outside tutors. The Education Reform bans companies that teach school curriculums from making profits, raising capital, or going public. It does not allow more tutoring related to the school syllabus on weekends or during vacations or any online or academic classes for children under the age of six.

The Chinese government said that the law was intended to cultivate people’s talents by focusing on the all-around development of morality, intelligence, and physical health. Mainly for students not to focus on studying all day long. They also wanted private education companies to decrease workloads for students and overhaul a sector it says has been “hijacked by capital”  since it had grown to $100 billion. 

If tutoring becomes an industry, it would not only be private companies but public companies. They are going to be omnipresent like McDonald’s. It will be more republic. With more public investment in it, it would cause the centers to need to make more money get more kids. For China’s interest, it might be a problem because the public companies would be out of control and not do everything the government says to do. 

Tutor centers are attracting more and more chinese individuals out of China, especially people who never thought about it. They are getting people who never thought about attending schools in other countries to go out there. They are not only advertising the middle class but also even the working class, who is already struggling. Tutors cost a lot of money and people who just can’t afford them are never going to make their way up. Before, poor kids can do “Gaokao”, a  national college entrance exam, to attend a prestigious school and do great in their life. However, it is hard to do this anymore since there is a change in the game. 

Another problem with having more students would cause no guarantee of quality. The bigger the class gets, the fewer the teachers they are going to have to teach. This means there is less face-to-face time, and less education value gets out of it. Students will not get the quality that they paid for. Individual’s are paying a lot for low quality teaching while the tutor centers earn billions each year. 

Last but not least, these tutor centers are trying to make students work seven days a day. For the “quality” they promised, they would have to give students more work to do as they say “practice makes perfect”. Since they do not have enough teachers to teach, all they could do is to give more work and force students to do them. A lot of students who already have stress over schoolwork and outside curriculums would have extra work to do which adds up to their stress.  They will not have time to exercise and alleviate their stress from school. 

 After the policy is out, we would see more evenness in the future. There would be less pressure and many poor kids do not have a chance to get up. Everyone would have the equal amount of teaching. 

This makes us think about people who can’t afford it. This game rule only benefits the rich people who could afford an expensive one-to-one tutor. For the poorer people, they could only attend big classes tutors where the quality is not promised. 

When we really think about it deeply, the Chinese government might actually be doing a good thing for the country. As we look, what the Chinese government is doing, which is educational justice is not extraordinary. It may seem very uncomfortable to many of us how they are enforcing the law but the policy behind it sounds pretty similar. This law could prevent the elites from taking over the whole country with all their wealth to get tutors.