What’s the end game for China’s crackdown on private tutoring?

What’s the end game for China’s crackdown on private tutoring? News

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3146644/whats-end-game-chinas-crackdown-private-tutoring-beijing?module=lead_hero_story&pgtype=homepage

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u/TheInquisitiveRabbit 19d ago

It's no mystery China's birth rate has collapsed and a big part of that is the cost to raise a child.

Some parents are paying out large portions of their income for private tutoring. In a face saving society like China parents probably feel like they have to do this if other parents are.

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u/Shazamo333 18d ago

The problem I have with this approach is that it ignores the source of the problem: the gaokao exam.

Spending your entire formative years dedicated to memorizing content for a single life changing exam is simply the wrong approach and morphs incentives in the wrong way, leading to grotesque outcomes like parents forcing kids to spend hours a day at private tutoring classes.

Even if you take away private tutoring, you will not have discouraged parents from forcing their kids to spend most of their time studying. The problem will still persist.

I know it's a hard pill for their government to swallow. Revamping the gaokao system would imply that the ccp's education system was at fault, whereas this approach is able to pin blame on private tuition. But the ccp are smart enough to know they must strike at the root of the problem.

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u/EtadanikM 18d ago

The test acts as an IQ / merit screen in a country that is otherwise dominated by nepotism and connections. If you remove it and don’t replace it with a similar screen it will quickly destroy any semblance of meritocracy there.

So no, they can’t get rid of it, and that’s not the purpose of getting rid of private tutoring which is really about trying to lower that exact barrier between the haves and have nots.

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u/Mexicancandi 19d ago

Yep. And in making it illegal they just made it way harder for the middle class to get an education. China now has both a problem in funding proper public education and in helping keep their emerging middle class prosperous and they also have to stamp out the corruption that's now allowing upper classes to continue using private tutoring. It was a Gordian knot and they choose to just cut the fucker.

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u/TheInquisitiveRabbit 19d ago

You seem to be under the viewpoint that the tutoring was useful beyond University entrance exams. I think that is a dubious claim

u/Mexicancandi 19d ago

China's communist party desperately needs to upgrade it's education or it'll end up screwing their youth's and end up like s Korea or Japan. If your education system needs extensive private tutoring and after class hours it's being implemented incorrectly. Economically speaking this move was the right one. I can't imagine what motivates people to basically gamble with their money that privatized education in a communist country is here to stay. it's basically gambling on a state government not being overzealous in education enough. China's education committee will probably receive even more funding in the end.

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u/bioemerl 19d ago

China's communist party desperately needs to upgrade it's education or it'll end up screwing their youth's and end up like s Korea or Japan. If your education system needs extensive private tutoring and after class hours it's being implemented incorrectly

Seems like the answer to this is to fix the system, not to ban the solutions popping up thanks to those issues?

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u/Ultracrepidarianman 18d ago

This is China we're talking about here.

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u/bioemerl 18d ago

It is, but the person I'm responding to seems strangely supportive of arbitrary crackdown of systems that aren't doing harm beyond filling in gaps that the state could fill itself for free.

u/[deleted] 19d ago

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