I fully believe China is the largest force for good in the world right now, so please don’t take this as bad faith. But they have a similar issue as several other nearby countries of school work being insane and far too competitive. They had to shut down private tutoring because nearly 90% of students were paying for private tutors because it was necessary to stay competitive.

To get into college you have to to take an exam that I personally believe the inventors of should be executed for child abuse. It’s 9 hours over 2 days, with security so tight you’d think it was a nuclear weapons facility. Kids work themselves to death studying in the months leading up to it. It’s unhinged and cruel, and personally I don’t even believe that colleges should have entrance exams, if you want to take college classes you should simply register for free, end of story.

Honestly, kids shouldn’t even have to study much at all outside of school. Teach the material properly in school, don’t expect students to miss out on their personal lives in order to keep up. It makes sense in college when you’re only in class like 15 hours a week at most, but high schoolers are in school 35+ hours a week, and you expect them to spend hours outside of school too? That’s insane.

Also to be clear this has nothing to do with socialism, as the other two best examples of this horrible overworking of students are Japan and Fake Korea

[–] v_krishna@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

India is in the same boat of kids working themselves to death and committing way too early to career tracks so they don't get left behind. Education imo shouldn't be about the destination (at least before later in university or post grad) but should be about developing the whole person. But kids in these places (and in the US) are rarely afforded that luxury. The idea of something like folkehøjskole would be outright ludicrous in China, India, or the US but IME would do us so much net social positive.

[–] juchenecromancer@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 year ago

NEET is brutal

[–] Beat_da_Rich@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, my friends who grew up in China talk about how horrible the work-life balance is for children when it comes to school. 12 hours a day plus tons of homework plus forced extracurricular activities all aimed towards acceptance in elite institutions... It sounds like a caged childhood in ways.

[–] Rasm635u@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 1 year ago

I legit am no longer able to take that sentence seriously