Will summer vacation be cram schools’ winter?

Summer vacation has started, but cram schools may be feeling the chill because since last month, 15 cram schools have been fined for issuing misleading advertisements, manipulating prices and using deceptive clauses in their documents. And on Friday, the Ministry of Education issued an official document encouraging public schools to take care of children during summer vacation, which apparently would further cool down the market for cram schools.

The measures taken by the authorities reflect China’s resolve to prevent the inflow of hot money into the cram school sector, especially those “catering” to kindergarten, primary school and junior high school students. One of the prime goals of such a move is to ease the academic pressure on students, particularly because the incidence of myopia and obesity, due to academic pressure and lack of physical activity, is very high among Chinese students. Not to mention the lack of sleep has severely damaged many students’ mental and physical health.

For years, the government has been taking measures to ease the academic pressure on students. For instance, the government has banned homework for children below the third grade and directed teachers to not assign homework to junior high school students which they need more than 90 minutes to complete.

Yet the academic pressure on students did not ease, because they were still forced by parents to attend cram schools. To ensure their children perform well in the college entrance exam, or gaokao, many parents get them admitted to one or more cram schools for which they pay huge amounts of money.

And to take advantage of some parents’ anxieties, cram schools have mushroomed across the country. Worse, many of them even offer “special” coaching for kids seeking admission to a kindergarten, in order to expand their business and make more profits.

“Involution”, of late, has become a buzzword in China. Opposite to “evolution”, the term was first used by anthropologists to describe an agrarian society that becomes more complex in character without undergoing any significant changes on the technology or political front, forcing people to work harder to get even a fair amount of return on their labor or capital.

The term mirrors some of the problems plaguing basic education in China. With an increasing number of students attending cram schools, the average test score increased, prompting the education authorities to raise the difficulty level of the questions in the exams, in order to limit the number of qualifiers because of the limited number of seats in universities.

This led to the formation of a vicious circle: the questions becoming more difficult and an increasing number of students joining cram schools to ensure they can answer those questions and pass the exams.

Undoubtedly, it’s an important move to regulate cram schools and reduce the academic burden on students. But it should be noted that given the exam-focused education system, the demand exists. Students may seek other kinds of special classes or training.

Therefore, it is also necessary to improve the quality of basic education.