The most brutal truth about Chinese education

The cruelest truth about education is that it never cultivates people; it only screens, labels, and stratifies.

Hengshui High School, a nationally renowned "super high school," had 275 students admitted to Tsinghua and Peking Universities in 2019 (including branch campuses). The total enrollment quota for Tsinghua and Peking Universities in Hebei Province that year was 279, meaning Hengshui accounted for 98.5% of the province's quota.

After 2021, China began implementing the "Double Reduction" policy nationwide, accelerating and intensifying the crackdown on schools' practice of "cherry-picking" top students.

With the elimination of cross-district cherry-picking admissions, the myth of Hengshui High School immediately collapsed. In 2025, Hengshui High School had only 45 students admitted to Tsinghua and Peking Universities, a mere 20% of the figure from six years prior. The Hengshui myth was completely shattered. And this wasn't even its lower limit; the data for Hengshui High School in the coming years will clearly be even lower.

Many people hear the word "screening" and immediately think it's a derogatory term, believing education has been alienated, become utilitarian, and lost its original purpose of nurturing.

This is like someone who just entered a casino complaining, "Why do they use chips here instead of cash directly? It's so impure!" In fact, education didn't "become" utilitarian; from the very first day it entered the public eye, its core function has been to efficiently screen and allocate parts for the complex social machine.

What is "nurturing"? It's Confucius traveling through various states with a few close disciples, teaching according to their aptitude. When students had questions, the teacher answered them promptly. Today, they'd discuss music; tomorrow, archery; the day after, how to govern a state. That's nurturing.

A top-tier teacher, paired with a few exceptionally talented students, investing all the teacher's time and energy. This model is astronomically expensive. In today's terms, that's private tutoring costing millions per year, and the kind that's hard to come by.

What is our current education? One teacher stands at a podium, facing fifty or sixty students. These fifty or sixty children come from vastly different family backgrounds, intelligence levels, interests, and personalities. Who do you expect the teacher to "nurture"?

Just managing the most disruptive few, maintaining classroom discipline, and ensuring most students grasp the gist already exhausts all their mental energy.

What tools do they have? A standardized textbook, a unified curriculum, and a uniform exam standard. This system was never designed to cultivate every child into a unique work of art. Its sole purpose is to establish a relatively fair and lowest-cost "measurement standard." Using this ruler to measure these fifty or sixty, or even the millions of children nationwide, to see who is more "suitable" to enter the next round of the game.

Therefore, the so-called "education" we experience is essentially a massive stress test lasting twelve, or even sixteen years. It doesn't fundamentally test how smart or creative you are.

It tests some more fundamental qualities.

First, your obedience.

Can you follow a set of rules you may not understand at all, or even disagree with? Like when I copied those new characters a hundred times back in the day. Did I understand it? No. Did I agree with it? No. But did I copy them? Yes. That's obedience.

Does a modern enterprise, a social institution, need employees with this quality? Absolutely. Without obedience, any organization would be a pile of loose sand.

Second, your endurance. Can you, for over a decade, continuously endure a dull, repetitive learning process with no clear short-term rewards? Getting up at 6 a.m. every day, going to bed at 11 p.m. Endless practice problems, endless text memorization, endless exams.

Is this life fun? Not at all. But if you can stick it out, it proves your "endurance" is extremely strong. You can endure. This is an incredibly valuable quality in the future workplace.

Because the core of the vast majority of jobs, stripped of their fancy titles, is dullness and repetition.

Someone who survived the hellish mode of the final year of high school, if you ask them to sit in an office and work on an Excel spreadsheet all day, will they find it painful? They'll think, "This is fucking heaven."

Third, your execution under pressure. Exams, especially life-determining ones like the high school entrance exam and the college entrance exam (Gaokao), are classic high-pressure scenarios. Limited time, difficult questions, people around you scribbling furiously, the invigilator's eyes scanning like searchlights.

In such a high-pressure environment, can you mobilize all your knowledge, think clearly, answer methodically, and stably perform what you "know"?

That's execution.

Someone who scores 140 on small quizzes but gets so nervous during major exams that their hands shake and ends up with only 110 is "unqualified" in the screening system. Because they are unstable. And any system hates "unstable" components.

So, do you see? Obedience, endurance, execution under pressure. How much do these three things have to do with "knowledge" itself? Not much.

But how much do they have to do with whether a person can become a useful, durable, and stable screw in the great machine of society? Immensely.

Three years after the Gaokao, you'll forget 80% of the ancient poems you memorized, the equations you solved, and the periodic table of elements you learned.

But the mark left on you by this screening process—that ability to obey, endure, and complete tasks under high pressure—will stay with you for life.

A 985 university diploma doesn't truly prove to society how much knowledge you've mastered; it proves you successfully passed this brutal twelve-year screening. You are a quality product.

When an HR person sees this diploma, it's like a procurement officer seeing a "Quality Inspection Passed" stamp on a product. They don't know exactly what's good about the product, but they know it's at least usable, unlikely to cause major problems, and easy to manage.

This is the truth of education. It is a meticulously designed, large-scale social functional screening conducted in the name of "nurturing."

Its purpose is to stratify people. To divide them into: those suitable for research, those for management, those for execution, those for basic labor. Then to precisely place them in different positions within society. Is it cruel? Very. But is it efficient? Extremely efficient.