Transcript
Speaker: If we abolish exams, we need to have other faithful rites of passage for them.
Speaker: And I think there's always this tension between the function of an education system to cultivate humanity and human creativity and goodness and the function of education systems to filter people by ability and sort them into different jobs and life paths.
Speaker: And I think that's a social problem to a large degree.
Speaker: I think it's a lot of change that can be done in a place like the U.S. from the bottom up.
Speaker: In a place like China, it's so huge and it's so centrally controlled, the education system.
Speaker: And so people in China just really feel that it's sort of like democracy, when people say that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
Speaker: They feel like the exam with all its flaws is the only way to fairly distribute resources in such a large country with so much competition.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 156 of the Human Restoration Project podcast.
Speaker: My name is Nick Covington.
Speaker: Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Peter Kratz, Alexander Gruber, and Lisa Wennerth.
Speaker: Thank you so much for your ongoing support.
Speaker: And we're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad-free conversations over the years.
Speaker: If you haven't yet, consider rating our podcast in your app to help us reach more listeners.
Speaker: And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
Speaker: I was not familiar at all with China's national college exam, the Gaokao, until reading about it in Susan Bloom's book, Schoolishness, and talking with her about it on a podcast episode we released in August.
Speaker: It's episode 152.
Speaker: You should definitely check it out.
Speaker: And I'm incredibly grateful to Susan for making the connection with my guest today.
Speaker: Zachary Howlett is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, joining me from Singapore, and the author of the book Meritocracy and Its Discontents, Anxiety and the National College Exam in China.
Speaker: I thought at first, sure, every country has its school gatekeepers and methods of rationing secondary and post-secondary education.
Speaker: The ACT and the SAT in the U.S. or the GCSEs in the U.K., for example.
Speaker: So how is this any different?
Speaker: But what I was not prepared for in Zachary's work was the sheer magnitude of the Gaokao as a deeply Chinese cultural, economic, political, and even a magical and religious phenomenon that touches every aspect of life and for which there really is no American equivalent.
Speaker: The blurb on the back of the book from Cary Cosell captures it so well.
Speaker: Zachary M. Howlett opens the black box of the Gaokao to reveal that it is not only a fateful rite of passage, but also a complex social phenomenon laid in with ritual, magic, dark horses, examination champions, latent potential, luck, character building, social inequity, and the possibility of changing one's fate.
Speaker: Thanks so much, Zachary, for joining me today.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: I just feel so privileged and honored to have this opportunity.
Speaker: Before we dive into all of those fascinating elements that I just had talked about in the intro, and that you, of course, tackle in turn in the book, what is the Gaokao?
Speaker: And how did it come to play such a central role in modern Chinese life?
Speaker: And maybe how did you come to study it in the first place?
Speaker: Well, the Gaokao is a high stakes examination.
Speaker: I think one way to describe it would be like the SAT on steroids.
Speaker: It takes place on the 7th and 8th of June every year.
Speaker: It's a really big deal in China.
Speaker: There's about 10 million students now who take it every year, 10 million high school seniors.
Speaker: The police stop the traffic and it's said that
Speaker: Airplanes are redirected to prevent noise and crowds of parents gather around the school gates and the examination warriors get on their buses and head off to the test sites.
Speaker: Reporters from newspapers and TV stations are there.
Speaker: And it really feels a lot like the kind of attention in the newspapers and the press that you would get to a democratic election in a democratic country or to a really big international sports event.
Speaker: I argue that the Gaokao is what I call a fateful rite of passage in which people personify cultural virtues, including diligence, composure, persistence, and even luck.
Speaker: And I can go into that more.
Speaker: It follows on from a long history of meritocracy in China.
Speaker: So China in the imperial age, in the centuries prior to the 20th, was ruled by mandarins who were elected through meritocratic examinations.
Speaker: And there's this sort of longstanding culture of meritocracy in China that influenced meritocracy and standardized examinations in the West.
Speaker: For me, I think I followed my personal faithful journey.
Speaker: What people say in China is that, especially for people from rural backgrounds, the Gaokao is the only fair way to change fate.
Speaker: And, you know, I went from a small high school in rural Northern California to an Ivy League college.
Speaker: It was kind of a hippie high school, which we could talk about.
Speaker: It was a it was a early charter school.
Speaker: And it was just a really big public school, but but an alternative school.
Speaker: And it was really a big transition.
Speaker: And I encountered for the first time, you know, these large gaps in educational inequality.
Speaker: I think later when I started working in China, I became fascinated with this exam and similar dynamics playing out in very culturally specific ways.
Speaker: And I went to China as a result of sort of a series of random occurrences.
Speaker: But in other ways, you know, I was there initially in the early 2000s and there was a whole
Speaker: flow of Western capital into China.
Speaker: And I kind of followed that in there and then became really engaged with the place and these questions.
Speaker: I would love to hear more if you'd be willing to speak to your journey from rural California high school to are there parallels with the experiences of rural China, its relationship to these large urban centers, that centrality really plays a large role in the book that you unpack.
Speaker: I wonder in what ways you saw parallels and distinct differences from your own experience to that you studied.
Speaker: Well, my research question became, you know, why do people remain committed to what I call an ideology and social practice of meritocracy, despite these really great disparities in test scores and educational resources between different socioeconomic classes and ethnicities and regions?
Speaker: And I think there's a lot of parallels in that to the U.S. I wouldn't want to overdo the comparison because there's huge differences as well.
Speaker: But certainly in the sense that these high-stakes examinations can make or break the academic career of students from rural backgrounds or from marginalized backgrounds.
Speaker: Of course, that's changing as the pendulum swings back and forth in terms of reforms.
Speaker: But there's just a whole lot of high-stakes educational competition
Speaker: that occurs even in the US multi-factor admission system that involves lots of different things beyond standardized exams.
Speaker: And we could talk about that comparison later on.
Speaker: But in other ways, it's very different.
Speaker: You are finding some
Speaker: Chinese parents searching for alternative and more humane forms of education, but that it's such a centralized system there.
Speaker: It really takes a great force of effort to pull kids out of it.
Speaker: It takes resources.
Speaker: So these are middle class parents who
Speaker: who try something different.
Speaker: And there are also migrants who are sort of gaokao refugees who are, you know, searching for education overseas and that kind of thing.
Speaker: But, you know, the kind of diversity, you know, even within limits that we have in the states in terms of the educational models out there, I don't think you'll find public information.
Speaker: public alternative high schools that, you know, employed a lot of the, even at that time, you know, sort of on grading or letting students grade themselves and project-based learning and these kinds of things.
Speaker: That was very unusual.
Speaker: So another kind of culture shock for me or a fascination was to see the SAT on steroids and that sort of standardized norm-based learning on steroids in China.
Speaker: What was your impression of it the first time?
Speaker: I mean, I don't know what kind of access exactly you got to the examination room, at least I don't recall from the book, but what was the vibe like the first time after reading, learning about it, and then going and seeing this thing in action?
Speaker: I worked for several years in China as an English teacher, first in a couple of universities and then joint venture companies.
Speaker: And so I met a lot of students who had taken the Gaokao and changed their fates.
Speaker: And so I heard those stories of my students and I
Speaker: Then when I turned to do a PhD in anthropology, starting in 2008, I then went to do fieldwork in 2011, 2013.
Speaker: And what I did is, I'd done so much teaching to pay back student loans.
Speaker: So I'd worked in Shanghai as an English teacher to earn a certain wage.
Speaker: And so when I was funded, I wanted to do something that got me closer to rural kids and kids from different backgrounds.
Speaker: Another big difference between the States and China is that kids from rural backgrounds have a piece of paper,
Speaker: Called a hukou and this is their household registration and and that limits their access to social services in cities So it's really this is this system is being reformed and dismantled to a certain degree But it still remains sort of a two-tier caste system and and these kids from rural backgrounds when they say the gaokao can change their fate a lot of what they're thinking is they can get into a middle-class Urban existence that includes access to health care welfare employment opportunities education opportunities for the children and
Speaker: And that all revolves around eventually getting an urban household registration or urban citizenship.
Speaker: So there I was teaching and I wanted to do something more close to the ground and close to these dynamics.
Speaker: So I volunteered to teach in three different high schools, one in a small town in a sort of peripheral county.
Speaker: and one in a what i call sort of a backwater city and then one in in the economic capital of the province i worked in which is fujan shaman and i worked in a low-ranking school in shaman and then high-ranking schools in the peripheral backwater city and the county and that gave me a sense of the range of dynamics now people are trying to move from the world to the urban areas and those journeys that they take
Speaker: But it was culture shock for sure to go into these highly regimented, I'd say it's sort of almost a military level regiment regimentation in the schools.
Speaker: I mean, they weren't that tense.
Speaker: There's a lot of friendship and harmonious and good vibes and caring teachers.
Speaker: And so on that level, it didn't feel, at least in the schools I was in, harsh in that way.
Speaker: But this certainly was it was a very serious place.
Speaker: And the people were doing serious work.
Speaker: And those gal-cal seniors, before they take the exam, they're pretty much at it seven days a week almost the whole year with very few breaks.
Speaker: And I was never allowed into an examination center.
Speaker: In fact, once I got close, the school had been set up as an exam center.
Speaker: I sort of unknowingly almost walked into a test center the day before the exam, and there was a whole bunch of people that descended and wanted to know who I was.
Speaker: And, oh, okay, it's that foreign teacher.
Speaker: It's all right.
Speaker: And then they sort of kicked me out.
Speaker: So it really is a sacred space in this sort of anthropological sense that, you know, it's separate from normal reality.
Speaker: And even the Gaokao seniors, you know, I did all this conversational English.
Speaker: I did teach in some of the normal English curriculum a little bit, but mostly I taught conversational English classes outside of the curriculum.
Speaker: And the third year students were mostly off limits because they were doing this serious work of preparing for multiple choice questions and they couldn't waste any time on anything else.
Speaker: you do mention how kind of guarded the whole experience is from outsiders, you know, and your methodology, your experience that became, you know, the book is just building up so much rapport and relationships that allow you that access and that experience in probably a way that you might not have had otherwise.
Speaker: And I was really fascinated just by how
Speaker: how much connection there are to like the the metaphors you had mentioned a couple of them the examination champions these fateful rights you know these are the ways that the chinese people view and speak and think about this event the people surrounding it of course we'll get into the magical and religious elements too
Speaker: I wonder if you could speak to more of the ways that like the Gaokao in America might be like the SAT on steroids, but what are some of those other ways that it's just like uniquely an expression of Chinese society and culture and ideologies?
Speaker: There are a lot of commonalities cross-culturally and a lot of specificities as well.
Speaker: The method of just, you know, sometimes anthropologists call it deep hanging out of participant observation.
Speaker: We participate and observe at the same time.
Speaker: Teacher is a classic participant observer role.
Speaker: And I certainly was open and continually reminding people what I was doing and why I was there.
Speaker: But at the same time,
Speaker: Because you're contributing and because you become an ordinary part of the everyday, I think you eventually sort of get insights into things that are covered up.
Speaker: And there's an awful lot of, I don't mean cover up necessarily in the sense of a conspiracy, although there is that, you know, we can get into that.
Speaker: But there's just a whole lot of things that occur in what sociologists call the backstage or sort of behind the scenes, as opposed to the front stage of how institutions present themselves.
Speaker: Part of the backstage, and we can talk about it more, is the religion.
Speaker: These schools, especially in the south of China, where there's an awful lot of Chinese popular religion, which is a diffused set of religious practices that don't really have an institutional location, but
Speaker: They are going to temples and going to fortune tellers and praying for luck and making deals with deities.
Speaker: And schools do that.
Speaker: They make organized pilgrimages for their students and pray for success on the Gaokao.
Speaker: And this has the approval and is done under the knowledge and approval of educational officials and the principals and so on.
Speaker: And this is all taking place in
Speaker: a very secular context under the agnostic communist Chinese party in China.
Speaker: But in terms of, you know, I think cross-culturally, whenever there's a fateful event where you have a lot of uncertainty, you get people praying for luck and, you know, trying to name all that uncertain and random stuff as fate and luck and trying to bring it into some kind of, you know, human control or relate with it in some way.
Speaker: And and also, you know, the what I term the ideology of meritocracy, that merit and hard work will be repaid with economic and political power success.
Speaker: This is also very cross cultural.
Speaker: It's shared between authoritarian and democratic societies.
Speaker: And I think in many ways this has been erased from history to some extent.
Speaker: But.
Speaker: The Chinese civil service exams in the imperial era really contributed a lot to the global conversation of meritocracy and inspired a lot of meritocratic thinking in Europe, in the West, in the US.
Speaker: And ironically, China abandoned those exams during modernization in the early 20th century.
Speaker: And they did so to modernize because they worried that it was going to individualize people a lot and turn them into competitive test takers who weren't going to build for the national good.
Speaker: And at the same time, the Western countries were saying, hey, this is great.
Speaker: We can have a meritocratic, bureaucratic selection mechanism.
Speaker: But the tables have turned.
Speaker: The Gaokao was reintroduced after the Communist Revolution in 1949, or a national revolution.
Speaker: Exam was reintroduced and under the under the Gaokao and that kind of coincided with the reconsolidation of national power under a single source of authority and has continued except for a 10 year break during the Cultural Revolution when they experiment with really radical stuff from 66 to 76.
Speaker: And then, you know, the Gaokao came back in the era of reform and opening after 1979.
Speaker: And it's really still the, as I said, the conducting baton of the whole education system.
Speaker: You know, as I was reading through the introduction of the book and then reflecting on the cover itself, which if people are going to look at the book, it actually shows parents praying at a temple to the god of examinations for their children's success on the Gaokao.
Speaker: And so I'll be honest, after I read through the intro and saw that, I immediately went to the magical religious chapter, which happens to be the last chapter, and started my journey through your book there.
Speaker: And the way that you explain, though, how it's this tradition of cosmic reciprocity,
Speaker: and how it's sort of at odds with this idea of individual merit as well, I found fascinating too.
Speaker: I mean, you experienced those rites and rituals firsthand.
Speaker: I believe some of the photos in the book of these magical artifacts are even your own photos.
Speaker: I wonder if you could speak to those practices, those experiences, the glyphs that mark the classroom doors, the pencil cases waved over burning incense.
Speaker: These are things that I think...
Speaker: are not necessarily found in an American or a European context or Western context.
Speaker: What is their relationship to the Gaokao, particularly in these rural areas, perhaps?
Speaker: You know, I was there, I was there for two years teaching for two academic years.
Speaker: And in the first year, I just, I sat in in classes.
Speaker: I did a lot of observation of pedagogy.
Speaker: I taught my own courses and so on.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: I think it was a long time, I was there for almost a year before I noticed these very, you know, at first very inconspicuous, but once you see them, you can't on-see them, these magical glyphs above the classroom doors of the senior students who are about to take the gaokao.
Speaker: And these glyphs were obtained with a small donation to, you know, very powerful local temples from visits that teachers were making there.
Speaker: And when I saw these, I was, oh my goodness, I hadn't seen those before.
Speaker: And so I started asking questions and began to, I think also, you know, teachers were becoming more familiar, were becoming friends with each other.
Speaker: And these were, this was a big part of their lives.
Speaker: In fact, you know, one teacher sort of mused, I don't know, because there's a lot of Christians in China.
Speaker: So I don't know if a Christian could be a head teacher, which is a big problem because it's supposed to be secular and agnostic and so on.
Speaker: Because, you know, we do these important trips every year to pray for examination success as a team of head teachers, head teachers being in that context, like sort of homeroom teachers, but they coordinate the work of all the subject teachers and work under a vice principal and a principal.
Speaker: And so, you know, then I was never able to accompany the teachers on one of these group trips.
Speaker: which were held under sort of the auspices or sort of the appearance of touristic outings, because none of it was, you know, totally official.
Speaker: So you sort of had to, even though,
Speaker: The parents were in on it and the kids knew it was happening.
Speaker: There couldn't be any too obvious sort of religious activity associated with school, I think, as in the States in many ways.
Speaker: So I did, though, with my teacher friends, go pray at temples a lot.
Speaker: And I went to the temple.
Speaker: You mentioned the temple to Wen Chang, or the god of examinations, who
Speaker: you know, similarly was a widely worshiped God in imperial times because meritocracy was open.
Speaker: The examination system was open to any adult man.
Speaker: Women were excluded.
Speaker: But, you know, there was a really wide coalition of people who could go and pray because anyone who could participate in the exams.
Speaker: And of course, it took a certain level of wealth and cultural capital.
Speaker: But it was really a lot of people who took part in the system.
Speaker: And similarly today, you know, there's a massive expansion of higher education in China in the early 2000s.
Speaker: The number of college students went from five to 20 million between 2000 and 2010.
Speaker: And since then, they've gone up above 30 million.
Speaker: So you just have a lot of people competing.
Speaker: You have a lot of popular religion in the background that's resurged into the foreground and the post Mao era.
Speaker: And, yeah, people do all kinds of things.
Speaker: So, you know, the students think it's a bit uncool to a lot of them, at least to kind of go and pray at temples.
Speaker: The parents like to do it.
Speaker: But they they'll do other things.
Speaker: They have a discourse of what they at least when I was teaching, they had something they call character, which they got from Diablo, a computer game.
Speaker: And so when you
Speaker: when you did good deeds like if you help someone on their examinations or if you got on a website and uploaded some answers to uh some you know foreign uh english exams or something like that then you you got merit you got sort of this idea of as you mentioned the karmic reciprocity which diffuses all these activities that you know there's sort of an invisible uh scale of merit that incorporates things from the past lives and from our ancestors and from this life and
Speaker: All that stuff helps to account for all the random things that can happen to someone on test day and a lot of the random events in life that aren't something that we can individually control.
Speaker: So whether or not you sit next to someone who's making a lot of noise or trying to cheat or, you know, what the weather is like because the exam being used aren't air conditioned or if you fall ill or something.
Speaker: you know, you have a mental health episode of some kind.
Speaker: All these things can be explained through the actions of ghosts, gods and ancestors, or just luck.
Speaker: And in even the secular version, you know, a young man who was entering the Communist Party told me, you know, there's nothing sort of superstitious about any of this.
Speaker: It's just the general principle that good things happen to good people.
Speaker: But again, there is that logic.
Speaker: that undergirds it, which is this sort of idea of reciprocity.
Speaker: So much of like the central tensions that you had then discussed throughout the book are sort of elaborated in that, right?
Speaker: There's like the rural-urban divide where the rural schools can kind of get away with more of this stuff.
Speaker: They're further away from the central authorities and again, the emphasis on popular religion, but then also
Speaker: The tension between meritocracy and cosmic reciprocity.
Speaker: I love that you brought up the students sharing the answers, thinking or believing, right, that they were like buying into the cosmic meritocracy while also helping the other students perhaps do better by cheating on their exams.
Speaker: I just, it's a wonderful experience.
Speaker: human tension to explore within all of those things.
Speaker: I think maybe then just turning to the meritocracy or that aspect itself, right?
Speaker: Like you had mentioned, the Gaokao is sort of an ancestor or a cousin of those imperial exams, the break during the cultural revolution, and then their reinstatement for a lot of reasons that you elaborate here too.
Speaker: So how does
Speaker: meritocracy come into the picture based on the book, then who's discontent with it?
Speaker: You write about how there are hundreds of thousands of middle-class Chinese parents sending their kids to schools in the West, primarily the United States and Europe, because they believe that they maybe don't
Speaker: Maybe not a better education, but kind of a break out of that system.
Speaker: And is it not the case then that this, this high stakes examination is entirely objective and shouldn't it be used to determine a test taker status and the trajectory of the rest of their life, right?
Speaker: Like, what's the beef that people have with, with the system?
Speaker: And why do they want out?
Speaker: I mean, the imperial exams, just to pick up on some of these points and bounce from the religion discussion, I mean, there's a lot of the same tensions and problems and opportunities and religious activities in the imperial exams.
Speaker: Which, you know, the Gaokao, starting in 1952 after the 1949 revolution, is an amalgam of Western educational practices, a lot of influence from the Soviet Union.
Speaker: But it does continue this logic of a national meritocratic ritual.
Speaker: And people in China certainly see it as a continuation of that imperial meritocracy.
Speaker: which makes it both very modern and very traditional at the same time.
Speaker: And in other words, that this sort of modernity of meritocratic exams is arguably a very traditional thing in China.
Speaker: And I think that's an important thing to emphasize with the religion discussion.
Speaker: I mean, these...
Speaker: These are, I think, very modern practices of people engaging with deities for good luck to achieve very meritocratic and bureaucratic ends.
Speaker: And the deities are powerful, you know, emblems of mobility.
Speaker: And a couple of the I should mention, you mentioned the low ranking schools and kind of in the countryside and rural schools that do these activities.
Speaker: But strangely and amazing, I thought it was very interesting that it was it was there.
Speaker: Then there's a lot of schools in between, especially in urban areas that didn't do them.
Speaker: But at the very high ranking schools, it was very important to, you know, it was so high stakes also for the administrators, because at low ranking urban schools, the story often was, well, a principal might say, you know, no one really expects our kids to do all that great.
Speaker: You know, if we can just exhibit, perform some, you know, success in what they call quality education, we're raising good citizens, you know,
Speaker: These are good, good kids.
Speaker: That's that's great.
Speaker: And that's what people want to see.
Speaker: They're not going to expect all of our kids to get into top tier colleges or any of them to get into Beijing or or Peking University or Tsinghua University, the two top ranking colleges in China.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: But for those high-ranking schools, it was so high stakes, both for the administrators, also for the students, also for the government, because a lot of the education ministers and so on, their career prospects have a lot to do with how well the education system is doing.
Speaker: And a big measure of that is promotion.
Speaker: It's like a fateful event for them as well.
Speaker: It is, yes.
Speaker: Yeah, fateful in the sense that it's both uncertain and highly consequential.
Speaker: So that's what a fateful event is.
Speaker: And
Speaker: You know, you can you can start seeing the picture of of meritocracy and who's discontent with it in this picture of rural to urban inequality, I think.
Speaker: And even within urban areas, the low ranking to high ranking schools, I think, you know, on any day, anyone can be discontent with the system.
Speaker: You know, I one of the education researchers I talked about the cow cow said it's like it's like like a balloon.
Speaker: You know, she does a lot of policy consultations and she has a lot of empathy, as do I, with the policymakers, because when you tweak the Gaokao policies, having this like this big balloon, you push on one side and something pops out the other side.
Speaker: So, you know, any year, depending on how the pendulum of reforms is swinging,
Speaker: You can have middle class parents out in the streets because more quotas are being given to rural and, you know, so-called backward areas or regions.
Speaker: When the test is recalibrated to include more so-called creativity and short answers and all these things, that really puts rural kids at a disadvantage because their big advantage comes from diligence.
Speaker: They don't.
Speaker: They get up in the morning earlier than anyone else.
Speaker: They work harder and they memorize those textbooks and they can change their fate.
Speaker: So it's this sort of tension in the system.
Speaker: People are painfully aware of the contradictions between fairness and merit cultivation.
Speaker: But I think broadly, they remain committed to the making of meritocracy as this personal and social ideal.
Speaker: Broadening that conversation out, you know, there's a deep irony that you mentioned, too, that a lot of Chinese observers of the American post-secondary admissions system perceive it perhaps as more meritocratic while recognizing that it might not work within the Chinese system.
Speaker: You had mentioned that multi-factor system of balancing GPAs with transcripts, narrative essays, test scores, the whole, you know, suite of data is kind of considered holistically for a lot of kids.
Speaker: and also the multiple pathways to success in American economic life.
Speaker: While I think at the same time, the most critical American perspectives see the Chinese educational and economic system as superior for its perceived rigor.
Speaker: And, you know, they hold up its performance on PISA and a lot of those other international assessments.
Speaker: So what, what do each of these idealized grass is always greener perspectives get right?
Speaker: And what is, what is each of those missing about the other?
Speaker: People in China say that the U.S. multi-factor system would be better at holistically assessing the quality of students as human beings, but that it would never work in China because of what they call personal relations or guanxi.
Speaker: They say in China this would be so easily corrupted that it would just want to be fair because students with connections, relationships with their teachers, with money could just pay for it.
Speaker: pay for that.
Speaker: They can pay to present themselves well to a college.
Speaker: They can buy their ways into good sporting activities and their parents may know, be friends with their teacher and so on and so on.
Speaker: I think the irony is that it doesn't work in the U.S. either.
Speaker: We have the 2019 Varsity Blues scandal and all kinds of funny business.
Speaker: And on the other hand, people in the U.S. see China's international assessment performance as this model, as you mentioned.
Speaker: But I think because of a lot of the
Speaker: front stage, backstage, or presentation versus reality dynamics that I mentioned earlier, they don't see the deep inequalities in the system.
Speaker: When you go to rural places in the countryside or to low-ranking urban schools or to ethnic minority areas in China, you're going to see a picture that just does not match up at all with that.
Speaker: international assessment picture.
Speaker: So it's a, you know, China's a massive country.
Speaker: It's amazing that it can be effectively governed as a whole, but it does mean that there are, you know, it's a country of countries and there's just so much social variation within that country.
Speaker: And it's amazing that this one exam can, you know, reach its tentacles over the whole nation.
Speaker: And, you know, I think to come back to the question of like,
Speaker: is the examination objective and should it be used to determine a test taker's status and trajectory?
Speaker: I think exams always contain social and cultural biases, but they're also this important faithful right of passage for kids.
Speaker: So I think that's one thing to keep in mind.
Speaker: If we abolish exams, we need to have other faithful rights of passage for them.
Speaker: And I think there's always this tension between the function of an education system to cultivate humanity and human creativity and goodness and the function of education systems to filter people by ability and sort them into different jobs and life paths.
Speaker: And I think that's a social problem to a large degree.
Speaker: I think it's a lot of change that can be done in a place like the U.S. from the bottom up.
Speaker: In a place like China, it's so huge and it's so centrally controlled, the education system.
Speaker: And so people in China just really feel that it's sort of like...
Speaker: Democracy, when people say democracy is the worst one of government, except all the others that have been tried.
Speaker: They feel like the exam with all its flaws is the only way to fairly distribute resources in such a large country with so much competition.
Speaker: Whether or not that's the case, that's a larger question, but that's certainly how people feel.
Speaker: And I'm just super curious, what are some of the popular reform movements to the Gaokao today?
Speaker: You had mentioned that there's some re-norming or maybe moving it towards an emphasis on creativity or assessing some of these other values and has its own champions and its protesters and conflicts that happen over what it assesses and how it sorts out.
Speaker: the kids who take it, what are some of the moves today that people are advocating for or pushing back against?
Speaker: Well, there was a big curriculum reform in the early 2000s implemented that tried to push for more creativity and what they call quality education, more space for innovation and testing that, which is maybe an oxymoron.
Speaker: But they introduced more short answers and that kind of thing.
Speaker: I think...
Speaker: What happens in China is that the central government sort of tasks provinces with rolling out different experiments.
Speaker: And so they can try out an experiment in one province.
Speaker: It's kind of a laboratory.
Speaker: And then depending on how it works, they can then roll it out nationwide.
Speaker: So there's just, you know, although there's this national unification, there's a great deal of local experimentation at the provincial level.
Speaker: And then there's a pendulum where things are more centralized and then more, you
Speaker: dispersed to the provinces in terms of authority.
Speaker: And the pendulum has now been swinging back after this sort of time of experimentation to centralize control.
Speaker: And under Xi Jinping, the current
Speaker: Communist Party chairperson, he's really trying to get rid of some of the things that people from more peripheral, rural, less privileged backgrounds felt really unfair, like bonus points for various extracurricular achievements.
Speaker: And he's trying to introduce more transparency and more quotas for kids from rural backgrounds and from ethnic minority backgrounds, that kind of thing.
Speaker: There's also, picking up on some of the provincial experiments, a push towards trying to give students more autonomy.
Speaker: And just before, there were three mandatory subjects, Chinese, math, and English.
Speaker: And then you had to choose either humanities or sciences comprehensive exams.
Speaker: You would take
Speaker: four exams over two days, the three mandatory ones, and you would take one humanities or sciences depending on your stream.
Speaker: And kids would choose their humanities or sciences stream in their second year.
Speaker: And also, I would add that in many high school students are streamed, especially in rural areas, streamed very heavily into classes by so-called ability level.
Speaker: And there's competition.
Speaker: They rise up and down that hierarchy.
Speaker: They take exams all the time.
Speaker: They're really exam athletes.
Speaker: They are taking exams every month.
Speaker: And now the new system is Chinese, math, and usually English or another foreign language.
Speaker: They have to take physics or history because they found that people, if they're left to their own devices, they don't want to take physics because it's too hard and they don't want to take history because maybe they think it's useless or something.
Speaker: And it's mostly memorization.
Speaker: So it's not the kind of fun history that we might encourage our kids to fall in love with.
Speaker: And then they choose between several other electives like ethics, history, physics, science.
Speaker: geography, chemistry, bio.
Speaker: So that's the new picture.
Speaker: But I think the big takeaway point really is when you talk to teachers, what they'll say is this is the same medicine in different soup.
Speaker: They've changed a lot of things.
Speaker: They did sort of, you know, because what people say is like, you know, one ring of the bell determines a tone for your whole life.
Speaker: You know, this is a big deal.
Speaker: It's hard to retake the exam, especially if you don't have a lot of money.
Speaker: You got to pay for the, you know, to retake the exam because you have to
Speaker: send your kid back to high school for a year and then you need to pay that tuition, which is going to be extra tuition because high school is only three years and it's often charged more for.
Speaker: And it's just a lot of resources for a poor family or for a family of modest means.
Speaker: So they've done some things to try to take the faithfulness out of the exam a little bit.
Speaker: Like they have allowed people to, and when I say there's new reforms, there's still a very various picture with
Speaker: different provinces having pursued these reforms at different speeds.
Speaker: But this is the tendency that you can take English, at least the English exam, you can take multiple times over your three years of high school.
Speaker: But the thing is, you know, that on the one hand turns the gaokao into kind of a gaokao marathon where you're always taking tests.
Speaker: And on the other hand, you know, the basic shape of the system, as teachers say, hasn't changed.
Speaker: It's still a very high stakes exam.
Speaker: It still determines your fate.
Speaker: People are still trying to game the system in any way they can, get any advantage they can.
Speaker: It's still a faithful rite of passage that requires diligence, persistence, composure, and luck.
Speaker: And, you know, they come back to the question about objectivity.
Speaker: I mean, on the one hand, it's unfair because there are people who, because of their life circumstances, will not be able to display those characteristics like other people can.
Speaker: On the other hand, a lot of people in China will say, but this exam has trained people in these virtues.
Speaker: And, you know, you become a certain kind of person.
Speaker: And don't we want people like that?
Speaker: Let's say even if it's unfair that these are people who are got it unfair.
Speaker: They say not everyone starts on the same starting line.
Speaker: But don't we want don't we want people of this kind of merit to rule society?
Speaker: So there's that debate.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I was trying to find the phrase that they use for the post-examination emptiness, right?
Speaker: Or the, it's not necessarily an exhaustion.
Speaker: It's like a existential crisis that the examination champion students have when they get done with this.
Speaker: And really then college is sort of a conveyor belt, right?
Speaker: It's not necessarily super important what your grades or your performance are.
Speaker: It's just like all of this.
Speaker: I couldn't find the dang page in there, but
Speaker: I was wondering, too, in that responsiveness to the exam, if there's been like any response socially, culturally, policy to like that post-examination period, because it really is like this.
Speaker: As you mentioned, there are these marathon runners, but then they hit the marathon and well, then they still have the college experience, but they've now they have nothing to do.
Speaker: You know, they're bored.
Speaker: They pick up hobbies for the first time.
Speaker: It does remind you a bit of if you talk to someone who's been a high, you know, elite athlete.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Then they retire and they look at their bodies are coupled with muscle and, you know, they've been training all the time for this.
Speaker: And they're like, okay, what do I do now?
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And so I think the term is, they call it memong or lost and confused.
Speaker: Oh, that's it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or there's also the post-gao-cow syndrome, which is sort of like,
Speaker: postpartum depression or something is sort of a widespread, not to make light of it, it's a widespread mental health problem.
Speaker: The thing is that the Gaokao was designed for an era when people went from secondary school into some kind of tertiary school and then they were assigned to jobs.
Speaker: And so now there's this disconnect because in the 1990s,
Speaker: China shifted to this market-based job assignment where kids compete for their jobs on the free capitalist market.
Speaker: And so when you go into colleges, that's still sort of the old system in many ways.
Speaker: There's quotas, there's people trying to tinker with the system.
Speaker: We want more of these majors, more of those majors.
Speaker: And in many ways, the four years of college is not faithful for kids in China.
Speaker: The faithful moment is what kind of college they get into, what kind of major they're able to get into.
Speaker: They bid for these things based on their score.
Speaker: And so for kids in college, those four years are, well, you know, if you don't want to go to graduate school in a foreign country where grades are important, your college grades, then, you know, you can just sort of coast through that time.
Speaker: Things are changing now because China's experiencing economic stagnation or at least slowing growth after decades of rapid growth.
Speaker: So, you know, now there's a whole lot of anxiety in what they call the involution era, which is this idea of increasing competition for decreasing gains.
Speaker: And there's really hyper competition for all kinds of opportunities.
Speaker: And a lot of kids from elite,
Speaker: backgrounds will say, even if they go to a top, top college, you know, maybe from their high school class, when that class graduates from college, maybe one of them will get a job and everyone else has to go get master's degrees.
Speaker: The official unemployment rate for youth is not even being reported anymore, but it was, you know, in the low 20 percents, but unofficially academics, you know, what's an academic in Beijing, an economist who thinks it's around 45 percent.
Speaker: So it is really a crisis.
Speaker: And so what you're seeing is, I think this sort of questioning of the normative life course that, you know, you should follow this sort of conventional idea of success because it's getting harder and harder for people to achieve that middle class job, house, marriage, kids.
Speaker: and the economic security, take care of the parents, all that's getting really difficult to achieve.
Speaker: And there's just a tremendous amount of competition.
Speaker: And also people, there's a new movement to sort of what they call lie flat, which is to sort of quietly quit.
Speaker: And then there's another movement to let it rot, which is just really give up on the rat race altogether.
Speaker: That's the old Timothy Leary idea, right?
Speaker: But among the students I interview, I'm doing interviews with students, Chinese student migrants in Singapore who are using Singapore as a hub.
Speaker: And I'm still talking with people from my previous research project.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I think among the people who are competing as people are around the world to kind of hold on to middle class status or break into it, there's not a lot of quiet quitting.
Speaker: But for them, what lying flat means when they use this term, they mean that, you know, you do your best and you got to leave the rest up to heaven.
Speaker: You have to leave the rest up to God or to fate or luck.
Speaker: And so, you know, that religious component, whether it's overtly religious or more implicitly so, maybe it's still very important, maybe increasingly so.
Speaker: Yeah, it seems like the, you know, economic social challenges are very similar, you know, between the two countries.
Speaker: If we were to compare the United States and China in terms of the precarity of the middle class, more difficult to achieve ways of life that were more common for your parents or grandparents.
Speaker: And I think that's a perfect place to sort of begin to close the conversation, which is just like, you know, you've experienced this, you've studied it, you've stayed in touch with the students and teachers that, you know, you worked with and you were friends with.
Speaker: Are there any transferable lessons or analogies?
Speaker: Should we understand the Gaokao as a cautionary tale, a unique cultural artifact, something else entirely?
Speaker: Well, maybe I'll start with a story, another popular religion story from the book, which is the lottery.
Speaker: You know, when I was teaching in the midsize city, I worked with a homeroom teacher who had a couple of naughty boys in her class who decided to, what they did is they'd go out and buy a bunch of lottery tickets.
Speaker: And the idea was that
Speaker: If you do badly on the lottery, you lose money, which is normally the case, you're accruing some kind of karmic merit because bad luck will be followed by good luck.
Speaker: And so they would paste the lottery tickets on the classroom door and it became sort of like a shrine to the lottery tickets and other students started doing it.
Speaker: And everyone was losing so much money on the lottery that they decided it was like really good luck for the whole class.
Speaker: And then a vice principal came by one day and saw this and said, oh, no, you can't have this.
Speaker: This is really bad.
Speaker: Take this all down and put something up about Xi Jinping or something.
Speaker: So the students, the teacher told the students, you got to clean this up.
Speaker: And they knew that in the attic, there was a bunch of unused classroom doors that had been swapped out for some reason.
Speaker: So they grabbed the door with all the lottery tickets and they moved it up to the attic and they replaced it with a clean door.
Speaker: And then they continued to go up on breaks and surreptitiously smoke cigarettes and worship the lottery shrine.
Speaker: I like this anecdote because it shows those front stage backstage dynamics and I think it gives a human touch.
Speaker: But it sort of reminds me also that, you know, what...
Speaker: What would be a fairer system?
Speaker: I mean, I think, you know, whether it's in the States or in China, one lesson from the Gaokao is that maybe one lesson could be that standardized tests aren't always necessarily bad.
Speaker: You know, we, from that point of view, you would say we need well-funded education to help people have opportunities at all levels.
Speaker: You know, no test is perfect.
Speaker: They're all going to contain biases, but we can work to, you know, reduce biases for minoritized or, you know,
Speaker: racialized groups and well-designed tests could potentially support social mobility rather than working against it.
Speaker: And certainly in China in the 1980s, there was a lot more social mobility scholars think than there was in the United States at the same time.
Speaker: So that's a complex question for quantitative scholars to work out.
Speaker: But in general, that would be one tack to take.
Speaker: But I think, you know, these norm reference exams like the Gaokao, by which I mean they're all about ranking people, they're largely like ranking people by meaningless ability differences.
Speaker: And, you know, you like guess wrongly on one question or your hand slips a little bit, people saying you fall like a thousand places in the ranking, your whole fate changes.
Speaker: That seems really meaningless.
Speaker: So criterion reference exams that are testing people by ability level or group or project based.
Speaker: activities that test different kinds of ability without ranking people, those seem more meaningful.
Speaker: But again, you ask, what would a fair alternative be in a big society with a lot of competition?
Speaker: In terms of radical reform in China, they tried it for the 10 years in the Cultural Revolution.
Speaker: People were promoted to college for being, you know, good working class workers and for being the right kind of national committed person who really cares about the country and that kind of thing.
Speaker: Fervent communists, right?
Speaker: Advancement through the party.
Speaker: But, you know, the Cultural Revolution has given kind of a bad rap because there was a tremendous time of building schools.
Speaker: Rural communities were building schools in the countryside.
Speaker: Literacy rates went up.
Speaker: Teachers motivated their kids through achieving common goals as a community and for the community rather than through competing on a meritocratic exam.
Speaker: And all these elites who were sent down to the countryside to learn, but also, you know, sort of brutally struggled against.
Speaker: So there's that very dark side.
Speaker: You know, when when the reform and opening period started, the first thing that happened was reinstate the Gaokao in 1977.
Speaker: Even before any economic reforms, this was the first thing that happened.
Speaker: Reinstate the ladder of success.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: the literacy rates dropped in China until the 2000s.
Speaker: That's sort of an untold story.
Speaker: I mean, not dramatically, but there was this rapidly rising inequality and the sort of era of students, you know, saying, oh, you know, taking exams as an individualist capitalist ideology, ripping up their papers.
Speaker: We want to do it in groups.
Speaker: You know, there was this sort of radical moment.
Speaker: It totally disappeared.
Speaker: So it really is like the story of either or rather than trying to figure out some kind of in-between.
Speaker: But then, you know, there's some philosophers like Michael Sandel in his recent book, Tyranny of Merit, coming back to the lottery.
Speaker: You know, if you ask, because it seems like often, unless you get to a cultural revolution sort of situation or you get into, you know, relatively marginalized views, people may argue about how meritocracy should be implemented, you know, but the principle that hard work and merit should be rewarded with success, that goes mostly unquestioned.
Speaker: whether it's China or the U.S. or most other modern education systems.
Speaker: So there is sort of a larger philosophical question.
Speaker: I mean, is that really a fair and just way to run a society, to create social communities, to undergird and support humanity?
Speaker: What can we do?
Speaker: Maybe we could elect people by lottery.
Speaker: If you can stay in Harvard or Yale because you're a legacy admit, no matter what kind of grades you get, no matter if you show up for classes or not, they can't kick you out.
Speaker: What would happen if we, you know, just got people into top universities by a random lottery and or at least a certain number of them, you know, instead of having to do an interview to get from the inner city to Harvard?
Speaker: What if you just got selected at random and we just graduated you and see what you do with that degree?
Speaker: And I think you would see people do amazing things, you know, because I think the meritocracy leaves out and sort of censors out a lot of human potential that's out there.
Speaker: I do think that at the end of the day, probably there's just really big systemic changes that need to take place.
Speaker: And maybe from the grassroots, we can work for systemic change in a place like the U.S. It's really difficult in China.
Speaker: It takes a revolution.
Speaker: It takes a social revolution for big change to happen.
Speaker: And then throughout time, throughout for the past several hundreds of years, since at least the Song Dynasty in 960, every time there's a revolution in China, one of the first things the new revolutionary leader does is reinstate examination systems.
Speaker: The book is Meritocracy and Its Discontents, Anxiety and the National College Entrics Exam in China.
Speaker: If you have any interest at all in this topic, I have not had so much fun and learned so much from a single book on this topic.
Speaker: So my goodness, highly recommended for me.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Zach Hallett, for joining me on your Friday morning here there in Singapore.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker: And just one last word.
Speaker: You know, this is a time when we have automation, AI, climate change, demographic crisis in many parts of the world with the few and fewer people having kids, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a time of radical change.
Speaker: Climate change is bad, the climate catastrophe.
Speaker: And I think that this is a time when the old system may just not really be a political, economic, sustainable reality anymore.
Speaker: Now, we need to redefine work and redefine what we mean by merit and redefine what a meaningful life is.
Speaker: Is it chasing this capitalist stream of success or is it contributing in other ways?
Speaker: Maybe we need to start paying universal basic income to people when so much wealth is being accumulated at the very, very top and societies around the world are becoming more unequal inside their societies, even as countries become more equal in
Speaker: outside, you know, but whatever happens, I think it's, it's a humanly common experience to desire that faithful, that chancy and consequential rite of passage of some kind.
Speaker: And, and I think we'll have to redefine what that means and in a new era, and it's up for the youth to, to do that.
Speaker: So it's a very exciting possibility, but also fraught with dangers.
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
Speaker: If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
Speaker: Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
Speaker: Thank you.
