Am I missing something obvious? How does after school study have any connection with birth rates? Is it something along the lines of "a less educated population is more likely to have more children"?
It contributes to the perceived expense and pressure of having a kid. Having kids in Chinese cities is really expensive due to all the extras parents are supposed to provide them with, the government is trying to eliminate those extras.
It's crucial to mention the recent "lying flat" movement along with this idea.
"The “lying flat” movement was jumpstarted in April when a post on Baidu titled “Lying Flat Is Justice” went viral on the platform. A manifesto of renunciation, the post shared the author’s lessons from two years of joblessness. The extraordinary stresses of contemporary life, the author concluded, were unnecessary, the product of the old-fashioned mindset of the previous generation. It was possible, even desirable, he argued, to find independence in resignation: “I can be like Diogenes, who sleeps in his own barrel taking in the sun.” Discussions about “lying flat” picked up pace in May, as young Chinese, over-worked and over-stressed, weighed the merits of relinquishing ambition, spurning effort, and refusing to bear hardship."
The TLDR is that younger Chinese are burned out the with idea of working themselves to death at a chance for success, and as has happened with many first world countries, the cost of what is deemed success (homes, children) is too damn high.
Lying flat is a symptom, as is for profit tutoring and the Chinese government banning it. The root cause is the culture [1] [2] and socioeconomic conditions [3] [4].
Sure, among 10s of millions of students, you can find such instances. News reporting are always focus on outliers, exceptional, and plain attention grabbing cases.
I just talked to my friends back in China, they don't say anything about students being part of the movement.
What I’m saying is I don’t think it’s a “movement” as in some conspired extremist movement. If it was a movement the Chinese population is also suffering a “Mass Sleep Movement” every 8PM to 6AM.
Burnout from stressful non-physical office works is a well established concept, though not yet widely agreed to also happen on kids.
Basically if you keep a person in an office to attend meetings and conferences for 12 hours a day for 5-10 years, some functions of the brain ends its life and the person won’t be able to take on certain tasks. That’s what it is IMO.
It's about costs, it is very expensive to attend those private classes. And if other kids are doing it, some parents may have to do it as well. From the stories, the gov't may provide some mooc-like platform for students to learn more subjects.
Like many developed countries have done, birth rates boosting is often hard to achieve.
There is a limited amount of entries to top universities. This kind of tutoring is thus a zero sum game for competition for limited college spots.
Therefore, by cracking down on this industry, there is a chance to actually reduce the cost of raising a child, which is the main impediment to natality.
Sounds plausible. More educated people have less time for children, and they don't need children so much to take care of them later in life. But what this really sounds to me is that Chinese government is afraid of people getting smart and saying screw this totalitarianism.
How is it a zero-sum game? When one person learns more it does not mean others will learn less. The opposite is true, the person who learns can then teach others.
The government should be able to provide enough education to anyone who needs it. But to do that they need many teachers. Somebody must educate the teachers. More learning overall grows the intellectual capacity of the whole nation, it is not a zero-sum game.
I seriously think this is about Chinese Government not wanting its population to be educated in Western values.
I think you're still misunderstanding how the private tuition works.
The students at these "academies" are not being given a robust education in mathematics, science, philosophy or the languages - let alone Western values.
They are rote-learning an extremely narrow type of problem that appears on the gaokao (university entrance exam) - literally hundreds of the same type of exam questions over and over in order to gain an advantage over their peers (hence the "zero-sum" comment).
This comes at the expense of their mental health as well as other, more enriching (and idealogically dangerous!) activities such as socialising with their friends, helping their family with household duties or engaging in rich discussions online.
You could draw a long bow and argue that this stabilises the CCP's power by reducing the drive to protest of angry students who have not been accepted into the universities of their choice, but it has nothing to do with suppressing education or intellectual value.
> They are rote-learning an extremely narrow type of problem that appears on the gaokao (university entrance exam) - literally hundreds of the same type of exam questions over and over in order to gain an advantage over their peers (hence the "zero-sum" comment).
Sounds like the problem is with the gatekeeping exam and limited amount of good quality universities(aka money problem).
How does banning a practice reduce students stress? They still have to compete in order to get into these limited seat universities with the same exam that you say are easily game-able.
I highly doubt people will just ignore a path that exists that can get them there, so we will have to wait and see what happens with the parents' economic stress.
They have to compete, but competition will almost certainly be lower across the board if people can't go to cram schools. It's not going to fix anything, sure, but it should help.
Do you mean that Chinese education must involve Western values? For example, is logical reasoning a Western value, and the Chinese government cannot exist if their citizens think logically? Maybe freedom is something that is universally desired by all humans, and the Chinese don't know that.
I'd actually guess that a ban on for-profit tutoring is a larger risk for the CCP. Students spending their time unsupervised could lead to more "unwanted though" than students spending their time memorizing and reasoning around well-vetted facts about how governments work or about the history of Confucianism.
From what I gather, it's cramming, not learning, and at the expense of the learning that can happen fortuitously. As a kid, I learned music, electronics, and programming outside of school, and developed an interest in the creative side of math. I did no test prep yet still got into a good college.
You're not actually learning anything there. I assure you, repeating the same problem with a slight variation for the 372nd time isn't doing anything to your ability to actual solve problems, it's just helping you get a higher score on the standardized test.
Cram school is equivalent to memorizing every previous sat question ever that just a huge expense and time sink. Eliminating them will help propel China ahead while the USA falls further behind because kids and parents have to waste considerable effort cramming
The classes getting shut down are equivalent to SAT prep schools, they make billions of dollars of money by fearmongering parents into purchasing more classes because their peers are buying more classes and thus their kids will be left behind in the university application race because their kids don't get as much practice as other kids. Kids in China are then forced to these cram schools after school for 4-5 hours and it becomes a neverending vicious cycle. Most importantly the kids targeted are junior to middle schoolers so it becomes ridiculous after a while piling on the work.
I assure you, these kinds of schools where you repeat over and over the same math problems are not going to give you the perspective needed to consider a change of worldview which will make you reconsider your societal structure. They only grind you down and make you tired.