Chinese Students Becoming Like Hong Kong Students

Students go to extra tutoring classes to learn how to take tests and cram

Hong Kong kids hate their childhood because it's all about studying from the moment they wake up to the moment their heads hit their pillows.

Right after school they are sent to some kind of extra-curricular classes from tutoring to ballet, piano, violin, kung-fu, football (soccer), painting... it's endless.

And now children in China are experiencing the same relentless schedule.

Parents spend over US$17,000 on extra tutoring a year

A national education association says Chinese parents spend an average of 120,000 yuan (US$17,400) a year on extra tutoring -- and some shell out as much as 300,000 yuan, as parents feel helpless and think this is the best for their children.

Typically students feel the heat in the last year of high school to prepare for gaokao, or the university entrance exams. But according to an annual report by the China Education 30 Forum, cramming is becoming more common among younger children.

In China, more than 60 percent of primary school students are tutored outside the classroom in subjects like English, literature and math. In Beijing and Shanghai, the percentage is as high as 70 percent.

The report said in general the older the student is, the higher the proportion of students taking extra classes, and by the sixth grade, more than 40 percent of students are being tutored in two subjects.

Classes include learning how to play the violin...

According to a 2015 survey by the China Youth and Children Research Centre, Chinese schoolchildren spend an average of 50 minutes per weekday and two hours on the weekend in after-school classes.

"External tutoring agencies often use high-intensity teaching and early education models to improve students' test-taking skills," says Tan Xiaoyu, an expert at the Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences.

"Parents are then swept along, trying their hardest to make sure their children are catching up."

It sounds exactly like Hong Kong -- parents here feel guilty or worried they are not doing enough to help their children get ahead or just even catch up to everyone else. It's a rat race and they know it's bad for their children but they worry that if they don't do it their children will fall behind.

It's a vicious cycle and the only ones benefiting are the tutoring schools. After-school tutoring is a fast-growing industry in China and is expected to double in size from 497 million yuan in 2016 to just over 1 billion yuan in 2021, according to a UBS report last year.

Cramming and learning test-taking skills aren't the best way for students to learn and it makes them resent school and education even more. What we need is to instill the love of learning in them and that will naturally motivate them to study.

... And playing football (soccer) on the weekends

We are raising generations of children who detest school, homework and tests, and want nothing to do with school. How are Hong Kong and China supposed to innovate when their kids are just cramming information in their heads for no good reason?