Yang Xiong on Educational Involution

Yang Xiong, “The Roots of and Solution to ‘Education Involution’ in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”[1]
 
Introduction by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Yang Xiong (b. 1957) is Director of the Youth Research Institute at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences 上海社会科学院青少年研究所.  The topic addressed in his text is that of “education involution,” the idea that, like an overworked plot of land in an overpopulated country, Chinese education requires ever increasing amounts of “labor,” while yielding ever diminishing “returns on investment,” at least for students and parents. 
 
“Involution” in a broader sense has been much discussed in China over the past few years (see Xiang Biao’s useful discussion here), connected particularly to the “urban rat race” and those who have entered the workplace in the 21st century.  The idea is that the easy money has all been made, and that all this generation can expect is endless work and grinding competition, allowing them to eke out a modest version of a “moderately prosperous” lifestyle.  This grim perspective obviously has an impact on China’s educational institutions and practices?  When parents face “involution” in their work lives, what do they expect of their children and their children’s schools? 
 
One obvious response is to double down:  if life is a rat race, you want to be the fastest, meanest rat.  Freya Ge describes the immense pressure this produces: 
 
“Students today are under significantly greater academic pressure than in the past. There is constant pressure to do more, to get ahead of the competition.  A boy I know just finished his high school entrance exam, but he found that many of his classmates had already taken high school physics during the summer tutoring session. I knew a girl in primary school whose weekends were full of make-up classes to make her more competitive. I have a high school friend who completed the basic university-level calculus class in her first year of junior high school. None of this is unusual, but the pressure on students is overwhelming.
 
For parents, access to key learning resources for their children has become an obsession. They set up WeChat groups to share information about famous teachers and high-achieving children, but how to get this kind of "information" has become mysterious.  Joining the chat group requires an introduction from a member, and the groups keep tabs on the grades of members’ children, screening out the ‘non-competitive.’
 
This is for those who choose ‘elite education’—i.e., the standard progression leading to the university examination—but the situation is not much better for those who choose “niche education,” i.e., the international education system. One challenge is that Asian students are scoring increasingly higher on standardized tests. For example, highly ranked foreign universities that a decade ago required a TOEFL score of around 90 will no longer look at a student whose score is less than 110. Even students with excellent English wind up practicing endlessly and taking the test many times to improve their grade.
 
In such an environment, students get depressed. In my parents' generation, school almost never led to depression, but several of my friends have experienced it. In my junior high school, a school that is part of the elite education system, there were about 50 students in my class, and at least four had mental health problems. In my best friend's class, which was the highest scoring high school class in the city, two students committed suicide. In the senior high school I am currently attending, which follows the niche education model, there are about 200 students, and I already know more than 10 students who have dropped out because of mental health problems. The situation is quite severe and causes stress and harm to many families.”
 
Yang Xiong describes similar pressures in his text, and adds the kicker that artificial intelligence is on the point of transforming both the world of work and the world of education.  The “robots” being produced by the current Chinese educational system will soon be replaced by genuine robots…so what is the point of teaching and learning? 

Yang calls for an embrace of a broader, gentler humanism—which is surely appealing, in China and elsewhere—but the “rat race” is part of capitalism, and the educational system has been built largely to cater to the needs of the rat race—which most Chinese parents embrace, whether they want to or not.  Anyone who has ever been a teacher or a parent (surely almost anywhere) has come up against immense institutional inertia of educational systems, which by their very nature are huge, unwieldly, and hence inherently conservative and difficult to change.
 
In response to complaints about pressures in the educational system during this spring’s “Two Sessions,” Xi Jinping attacked the ubiquitous tutoring industry, which obviously preys on the anxiety of parents and students.  In the following weeks, authorities in Beijing and Shanghai cracked down, and the share price of leading tutoring companies fell on Chinese stock markets.  But tutoring companies did not cause the problem of educational involution, and even a total ban would not fix the problem.  Chinese parents would likely simply invest their extra money in some other ray of hope.   
 
Readers who enjoy this text might also appreciate Liu Yu’s “My Daughter is Inexorably Becoming an Ordinary Person,” which tells a similar story from a mother’s perspective.
            
Translation by Freya Ge
 
The Roots of “Education Involution” and Family Anxiety 
 
The concept of "involution" first appeared in anthropologist Clifford Geertz's Agriculture Involution:  The Processes of Agricultural Change in Indonesia (1969), which describes a model that is "labor-intensive but very uneconomical."  At present, the phenomenon of “involution” has also appeared in Chinese children's education—“the majority of families, parents, and children are trying hard to do better than other families,” but in the end, everyone is exhausted, and the overall educational results have not improved significantly. 
 
In a larger context, families and parents are becoming increasingly anxious, which may be related to China’s overly rapid development. In the past, economic development was slower, social competition was not so great, the pace of society was less rapid, the custom of posting school rankings[2] was not so widespread, and above all the link between educational achievements and income was not as tight as it is now, so parents were more relaxed. 
 
Currently, the anxiety of families and parents is also related to the rapid popularization of new technologies.  Research has found that the "chicken baby phenomenon 鸡娃现象"[3] [North Americans would say “helicopter parenting”] found in many families is positively related to the popularization of WeChat groups on smart phones. For example, when parents join WeChat parenting groups, the flood of information they receive only increases their anxiety. It used to be that every family's information was a closed loop, but now everyone exchanges their parenting experience in a WeChat group.  

At first glance, the information seems to be symmetrical, but in fact all you see is what wonderful “chicken babies” other people’s kids have become, and how hard other people's children work. As a result, more and more families lose their calm and are forced into competition, which makes "education involution" all the more intense, to the point that parents’ former anxiety about their children’s grades has now become their worry about where their children stand in their class ranking.  
 
According to “focus theory 焦点理论,” as children grow older, parents' focus on their children generally evolves, which produces different kinds of anxieties:
 
(1) In the pre-school stage, most parents pay too much attention to their child’s learning of various skills and to their physical nutrition.  They often ignore the cultivation of their children’s behavioral habits, and generally pay less attention to their mental health. “The transition from kindergarten to primary school" is the main source of parental anxiety at this stage.
 
(2) Once the child has entered primary school, learning problems occupy a larger space in parents' anxieties—the focus of parental attention comes to be their children’s lack of learning goals and plans, lack of confidence in their learning, and their refusal to take homework seriously. Research has shown that 70% of students are expected to do extra work, assigned by their parents, on top of school work, and 90% of parents rely on exam results as the main source of information as to how their children are doing.  Of course, the habits of elementary school students are still problematic, and their ability to take care of themselves does not necessarily improve, which is closely related to parental pampering and parental concern about taking time away from their studies. Some 35% of problems with students' living habits are caused by their addiction to TV and the internet.
 
(3) In high school, especially in senior high school, parental anxieties due to academic performance begin to decline, and their focus turns to parent-child communication, interaction, and getting along.  About 50% of high school students rarely communicate with their parents, if they communicate at all, and the number of conflicts between parents and children increases significantly. The frequency and quality of communication between most parents and their children decreases significantly, and some families see the deterioration of parent-child relationship. Nearly 50% of children say they do not think spending time with their parents is a happy time. Nine out of ten parents admit that the biggest difficulty in communicating with their children is not knowing how. 
 
At the same time, the focus theory of traditional pedagogy is also being challenged by the younger generations and by new technology. Especially with the arrival of the Internet, the previous educational model, based on the “V formation” of flying geese, has evolved to become an "overlapping model." In the past, the classic socialization process was :  the child would be nurtured in the family, then receive formal education by going to kindergarten, primary school, junior high school and senior high school, and once they graduated from university, society would train them to its needs.

In the Internet age, however, children did online classes at home during the pandemic, with parents playing the role of supervisor and urging their children to study.  At the same time, children need to integrate all sorts of information coming from the school and from society, which is a challenge to traditional school education, and to family education, which makes families, parents, and children anxious. This highlights the importance and urgency of collaborative education in the future, involving both schools and families,.
 
"Elite education" and "niche education 小众教育" both have their uncertainties and risks
 
Once per capita GDP reached $25,000 USD, big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen basically escaped the "middle income trap."  When families have solved the problems of "basic livelihood," people will naturally move on to questions of "quality livelihood."  When this occurs, "educational livelihood" naturally becomes a top family priority. Parents in big cities no longer worry about whether their children can "go to school," but rather about whether their children can get into good schools. At first glance, this looks like a competition among children, but it actually reflects the competition and anxiety of middle-income families in China. One might even say that the choice of different education models actually reflects the judgment of different Chinese families concerning the talents needed by society in the future. 
 
In general, most families will continue to choose the traditional "elite education," which is to have the children follow the prescribed order, study hard, and compete against thousands of other students to cross the crowded bridge of high school and college entrance examinations. Some parents, however, have abandoned that model and choose "niche education," sending their children to international schools, choosing an educational model that will cultivate their child’s personality, freedom, and creativity.  They have no plans for their children to take the college entrance examination, and hope to send their children abroad to study.  Some families hesitate between the two. Objectively speaking, it is difficult to say which one is better. The key is to see which education model is more suitable for the child in question. However, no matter which model is chosen, uncertainties and risks exist. 
 
Beginning with "elite education," scholars have tracked the development of special classes for young and gifted students at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) over the past 30 years. The results of this research indicate that the outcomes were not as good as expected.  The goal of these classes at the USTC, for example, was to produce a group of scientists committed to basic disciplines. However, a long-term study of 3,162 gifted students found that only 8% of those who graduated wound up in scientific research or university teaching, while others chose to become monks or delivery men, or earned degrees in psychology and engage in social work.
 
Taken as a whole, less than 20% of university graduates are working in the area they studied.  Not long ago, a research team at the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a Report on the Development of China's National Mental Health (2019-2020), in which they asked graduate students about the degree of stress they experienced.  60.8% of students reported that they were under considerable pressure, and 22.7% reported that they were under severe pressure, which indicates that stress is widespread and serious among graduate students.
 
Looking at "niche education" oriented to studying abroad, it is clear that as this idea becomes more popular, the return on investment diminishes.  As the threshold for studying abroad has declined, it is no longer an option available only to the rich, and instead is a possibility for almost anyone.  According to the 2019 “Report on the Intentions of Chinese Who Studied Abroad,” setting aside the 28.82% who did not know their family’s annual income, 23.45% of them had an annual family income of "110,000 (17,000 US$) to 200,000 RMB (31,000 US$)", and 6.82% had an annual family income of less than 100,000 RMB (15,500$ US$). After returning to China, some 72% of the students worked in private business, 5 % started their own businesses, and 16% are still looking for jobs.

According to a Center for China and Globalization survey, 61% of students who studied abroad returned to their hometowns, 13% to Beijing, 8% to Shanghai, and 7% to Guangdong. As about one million people have returned to China every year in recent years, the return on investment from studying abroad continues to diminish, the jobs students find do not measure up to their dreams, and the salary is far from level they expected. For these reasons, each family's choice of education model and the trade-off between education investment and the return on that investment has also become a cause of anxiety. 
 
In response to this, some people have suggested that, as opposed to the current system where the “university examination determines the rest of your life,” there should be more examinations if society is to be fair.  In fact, perfection is out of reach in any system and all we can do is reduce a system’s flaws. In the future, with the continuous emergence of new technologies and new forms of business, a system in which the “university examination determines the rest of your life” will meet individual needs less and less.  This also illustrates that education is inherently uncertain and risky.  
 
Gert Biesta (b. 1957), the Dutch scholar of education, calls this "the beautiful risk of education," meaning that the education process involves risk, and that education is beautiful because of that risk. The educational uncertainty families are facing necessarily becomes the objective basis for parental anxiety. The education problem in China is not only a problem of education, but also a problem of the orientation of society as a whole. Education anxiety is just a reflection of social anxiety in ordinary families and in every child. Without institutional reforms to address these problems, education anxiety and family costs will remain high. 
 
In the era of AI, all governing bodies must make concerted efforts to solve the problem of "education involution" 
 
In the era of AI, new technologies are being applied everywhere at an "accelerated" rate. The most prominent manifestation of the accelerated state of Chinese society at present is its rapid change from a relatively stable and static state to a state of instability and accelerated evolution.  In a sense, the acceleration of society is deconstructing the original social order and shaping something new. As a result, it is now difficult to deal with complexity with one single method. The same is true of school education, including family education. We must construct a system of cooperative education involving families, schools, and communities to solve the above-mentioned problems.
 
1. Regarding in-school education, academic evaluations should put an end to the utilitarian "five unique points of emphasis 五唯."
 
The impact of this utilitarian focus on academic evaluation is seen in the “chronic disease” of uniquely emphasizing grades, promotions, diplomas, essays, and titles.  In the new era, we should dispense with these and establish a system of evaluation grounded in scientific process, added value, and comprehensiveness.

In October of 2020, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the Overall Plan for Deepening the Reform of Educational Evaluation in the New Era, which requires "innovative evaluation tools, which would use artificial intelligence, big data and other modern information technologies to explore and carry out the full-process longitudinal evaluation of students' learning in each grade, and a horizontal evaluation of aspects such as morality, intelligence, physical education, art, and work.” 
 
First, we must change the practice of labeling students solely according to their grades, strengthen process evaluation, and integrate the study and practice of on-the-job training, arriving at a more comprehensive quality evaluation. We must integrate process evaluation with the evaluation of final outcomes, and emphasize the multiple evaluation of students, combining evaluation through grades with comprehensive performance evaluation, classroom performance with subject tests, and daily scores with key tests.
 
Second, the evaluation method must be empirically focused, with special emphasis on value-added evaluation, i.e., in the process of school education and students' learning and growth, the focus must be on the degree of improvement and enhancement of school effectiveness, on tendencies toward development and change, as well as on the achievement of the development goals set by the school and the improvement of students' performance, with emphasis on the continuous improvement of school quality. 
 
Third, teacher evaluation should not only summarize students' past learning, but also provide a direction and strategic guidance for students' future learning. Evaluation should be seen as the intrinsic motive force driving the realization of the goal of moral education.
 
Fourth, students are concrete people, whose growth is a continuous and dynamic process, so it is necessary to further strengthen process evaluation, improve outcome evaluation, and pay more attention to how students are maturing. Every concrete student is a unique individual, whose starting point, process, and outcomes in terms of learning and development are very different, so the evaluation must respect these differences as well as the richness of student development.
 
2.  Teachers must not allow children's brains to compete with computers. 
 
In the era of AI, the algorithm of artificial intelligence, especially its underlying algorithm, has surpassed the human brain. According to statistics, a top human Go player can play up to 200,000 games in a lifetime, while artificial intelligence can play a million games in a night, without getting tired. This is the characteristic of the data brain, which does what an artificial or human brain can't do. The capacity of the human brain is limited, and the development of the child’s brain also goes through stages. The ability to store knowledge is greater than the ability to extract it, so children's attention is limited. This is why classes last 40 minutes and the school day includes breaks; the child's neural circuits fill up and need rest.


By contrast, machines learn like ants search for food, which is a process of trial and error. One ant ultimately finds the food, and it passes the information on to the ants behind it, forming a loop. Through constant trial and error, the ants reach an optimal path, which is what we usually call "the underlying algorithm." The machine will continue to learn and replicate itself, and eventually become a very smart robot. The human brain has limited capacity, so it's impossible to engage in trial and error like an ant colony. In the future, human brains will be replaced in professions where human labor and intelligence can be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence. Some people say that 70% of the subjects that college students study today will be completely replaced by computers in 10 years.

So, what's the point of learning now? What should we study in the future? How do we learn now? How to help our students learn more intelligently is the problem facing our in-school education, and family education. In short, the era of AI is forcing a revolution in the way people learn, and our evaluation of education will change with it.
 
3. For extra-curricular education, the social purpose is "to enlighten children's minds, not to stuff their brains."
 
Many of today’s training institutions turn children's brains into test machines, subjecting them to continual testing beginning in kindergarten and continuing through the end of high school. Standardized testing is quite efficient, but has little to do with the original purpose of education. Recently, the central government has begun to emphasize the "five types of education to grasp together五育并举,"[4] hoping to address the problem that people pay too much attention to their children’s entrance exams, which means that everything revolves around their grades.
 
On the surface, we talk about the importance of quality education素质教育,[5] but when high school or college entrance exams roll around, grades are what finally count. The relationship between "quality education" and "exam-oriented education" has been vexing the educational arena for a long time. To express it in a new way, we will need to address the problem of “educating for the grade” and “educating for the person.” 
 
Social education in the era of AI should vigorously advocate the "ACE" learning strategies (that is, those based aesthetics, creativity, empathy). The ACE learning strategy has been recognized internationally because it conforms to the original idea of human education——"enlightening children's minds, not stuffing their brains." Mathematics, physics, and chemistry are of course important, but in an era when computers have surpassed human brains, using multiple-choice exams and standardized tests is clearly obsolete.  Deep machine learning has solved "algorithmic" problems so well that the "brain" should no longer need to compete with the "computer."  

Yet the reason that computers can't surpass human brains is that human beings have "aesthetics, creativity and empathy."  ACE learning strategies can enable children to have richer and more profound life experiences than computers in terms aesthetics and innovation. The ideal education should realize the balance between "high technology" and "high emotion;" school education, family education and social education should strengthen the cooperation between them, and advocate the sharing and integration of education. In the era of AI, people's emotional and social relations may become increasingly straightforward, but people may become more passive in their relations with machines.

At present, many children born in the 2010s find themselves stuck at home, seeing the world only through electronic devices, with the result that they see a world that is one-sided and that has been "transformed."  Therefore, it is necessary to exercise children's brains comprehensively through parent-child interaction, school culture, and social practice, so as to enrich their minds.
 
Parents should teach their children to "respect life, learn how to live, and be grateful for life." 
 
For children, respecting life first means to respect and cherish their own lives, and then to revere animals and nature. A child who respects life will naturally cherish it. By “learning how to live,” I mean to teach children to learn to make a living but not to be not too utilitarian. They should understand the "discontinuity" of life and learn the difference between goals and strategies. There are a lot of "type-A students" on campus these days. The "type-A students" are the traditional "good students" who always get "As.” On the other hand, "type-X students" are different. They may not be the top students in academic performance, but they are willing to take innovative risks and dare to try new things. In the future, society will need more "type-X students." 
 
Of course, the market economy will emphasize competition and efficiency, but entering the competitive society too early will affect the development of children’s mental health. Therefore, I advocate "organic education," in other words, allowing each child to develop according to their own natural rhythm, allowing for the time it takes, respecting the psychology of the child, not rushing maturity, not creating "chicken babies."

Every child has their own pace of growth, some faster, some slower, but most eventually "blossom." Parents don’t need to be anxious, they should calm down and accompany their children, locate their child's interest in the process of companionship, and then to provide support according to what the situation demands. Parents especially need to teach children to be grateful for life, to learn to share, to learn to be kind, to learn to cooperate, so their children will grow to be more confident, peaceful, and kind-hearted.

Notes

[1]杨雄, “上海社会科学院社会学研究所研究员,” originally published in Exploration and Free Views/探索与争鸣, 2021.5, published online on Guancha on June 10, 2021.

[2]Translator’s note: The reference here is to the Chinese practice of publicly posting the results of exams and other evaluations, as well as class rankings, which can obviously make school fiercely competitive.

[3]Translator’s note: A “chicken baby” is a child whose parents are constantly engaged in efforts to “improve” him or her through supervising homework and finding extracurricular courses and activities.  The Chinese term derives from a Chinese “health fad” of uncertain vintage:  the idea that injecting chicken (rooster) blood into the human body will make the person stronger and more aggressive.  See here for more information.  The term presumably combines humor with exasperation; when you google the term in Chinese, the first response that pops up includes the sentence “It is said that the typical Chinese family is made up of a burnt out father, and anxious mother, and a broken child.”

[4]Translator’s note:  This concept originated with Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), who was Minister of Education in the early years of the Republic.  The five types of education to be pursued were “military/citizenship, utilitarian, moral, world view, and aesthetic education.”

[5]Translator’s note:  Quality/suzhi education aims at something like “well-roundedness,” and has different meanings in different contexts.  In academic literature in the West, it most often refers to teaching rural children the skills they will need to cope with modern, urban life (i.e., raising their “quality”), and thus has a strong taint of elitism (see here for an example).