What is the general focus of Chinese education? We see and hear a lot of these criticisms about cramming teaching, focus on scores, lack of innovation, and excessive pressure on students, and they do exist. However, what I want to say is that these points actually don't matter. It doesn’t even matter what Chinese education teaches. It doesn't matter whether you teach calculus or eight-part essay, teach programming or teach King of Glory, teach the laws of physics or teach the rules of Landlords - it all doesn't matter. As long as it teaches something that has a certain technical content, requires thinking, and has a clear and fair scoring mechanism, it can complete its core mission: to sift out the children who "can learn" from the vast sea of people like gold mining. 

  The essence of Chinese education has never been "educating", but rather "screening". It is a huge, sophisticated and ruthless social diversion machine. Its course content is just the test medium for this machine; its test scores are the specifications on the assembly line. It doesn't care what you love, it only measures your execution accuracy, stress endurance and problem-solving speed under established rules.

  Many people have a huge misunderstanding. They believe that those "students" who win in the system are just "question-answering machines" and will malfunction when they enter society. This is exactly wrong. The real top "students" may look silly, but the core nutrient they draw from this harsh system is not knowledge itself at all, but a terrifying basic ability: the meta-learning ability to quickly dismantle goals, find patterns, optimize paths, and maximize their own potential to achieve results in a highly complex and stressful rule system.

  When these people walked out of campus and entered the larger and more complex world of society, they instantly understood: This is just another exam with a different set of rules and a different question bank. Shopping malls are like examination rooms, projects are like examination questions, and competition is like rankings. They have already built themselves into efficient learning and problem-solving machines through more than ten years of intense mental training. In the past, I was solving math final questions, but now I am solving market problems, management dilemmas, and technical bottlenecks. The kernel methods are exactly the same.

  This is the most successful and ruthlessly practical aspect of Chinese education. It doesn’t promise you happiness, it doesn’t promise you wisdom, it doesn’t even promise that what you learn will be useful in the future. It only promises you one thing: if you can survive in this cruel mental competition with limited time, limited rules, and infinite involution, you will get not only a ticket, but also a forged steel head and nerves that can cope with most difficult challenges in the world.

  So to complain that it is rigid and stifles creativity is to some extent ignorant of its power. Just like ordinary people complain that the training of special forces is "inhumane" and "only teaches killing" - that training is not designed to cultivate gardeners. Its only goal is to refine the top survival and winning instincts in the harshest environment.

  Its ruthlessness is its justice. Its monotony is precisely its efficiency. It compresses the complex and diverse potential of human beings into the "score" dimensional battlefield for extreme stress testing. Although this is crude, it is also a cruel and efficient balancing technique to maintain the vitality and class mobility of a super-large society in fierce competition.

  Therefore, when understanding Chinese education, don’t use the ruler of “ideal education” to measure it. We should look at it from the perspective of "social game". It is a standardized survival competition that involves the participation of all people and lasts for more than ten years. The content can be replaced and the form can be adjusted, but as long as the essence of "screening" and "forging" remains unchanged, as long as society's desire for "absolute fairness" and the need for "higher-order capabilities" still exist, its core will not change.

  All employers, especially those at the top of the pyramid, care most about their first academic qualifications. Why? What they look at is not how many papers you published during your master's and doctoral studies, but your ability to stand out on the college entrance examination battlefield when you were eighteen years old.

  This is the ultimate verdict based on social consensus: No matter how you later gild, how you study abroad, how you overtake in corners, the quality you were forged in that Chinese-style furnace when you were a boy is the true yardstick for measuring the basic value of your life.

This is reality. You can be dissatisfied and criticize, but you cannot bypass it.