To reduce the burden on primary school students, we should not regard schools and teachers as imaginary enemies.

After recently reading a few news articles about reducing the burden on primary and secondary schools, I feel like something is wrong. For example, some places stipulate that if homework cannot be completed by 10 o\’clock, parents can sign it off without doing it. Another place is even better. Each grade\’s extracurricular homework has a specific completion time. If a student always fails to complete it within the specified time, the teacher and principal can be impeached based on the report phone number in the file. According to regulations, if the violation is true, the principal will be dismissed! At first glance, it seems that the relevant departments have indeed taken serious measures to reduce the burden. But if you think about it carefully, it is far from the case. Because the logic here is that the student\’s burden comes from the homework left by the teacher. As long as the teacher leaves less homework, the student\’s burden can be reduced. It makes people feel that school is the source of students\’ heavy burden. The teacher who leaves homework is like Huang Shiren, and the students who do homework are like Yang Bailao. Leaving homework is the teacher oppressing the students, and reducing the burden is like the students resisting the oppression of the teacher. This is treating the school and teachers as imaginary enemies! Some parents also have this mentality. For example, after one of the author\’s articles, a reader left a message saying: If we do not reduce the burden, it will inevitably lead to the phenomenon of tens of thousands of people crossing the single-plank bridge, resulting in a waste of educational resources, causing too much meaningless and useless learning, and causing most ordinary children to become just… An unhappy student slave who dreams of being an elite. We are originally iron, but you must treat us as gold to forge. This is unscientific. It sounds like the teacher is making a mistake by treating every child as gold. I wonder if such a parent has ever thought about who allowed his \”iron\” child to enter the \”alchemy furnace\”? You know, today\’s high school is not compulsory education. Students go to high school just to get into college, which means they are gold by default. If parents really don’t want their children to cross a single-plank bridge with thousands of troops, parents can let their children go to a technical school after graduating from junior high school instead of high school. Even in the compulsory education stage, if a parent definitely tells the teacher that their child is not college material, I hope the teacher will not be strict. I believe that as long as the child does not influence others, the teacher will not interfere. In essence, the current heavy burden on students is due to the shortage of high-quality higher education resources. For most people, the college entrance examination is still the most important channel to achieve upward mobility in their own class. Therefore, students compete for key high schools in order to attend key universities, and compete for key junior high schools to attend key high schools. This is transmitted layer by layer, all the way to the \”starting line.\” The cake is so big, and there are only so many delicious parts. Whoever works harder may get a bigger cake and get a better share of the cake. Whoever stops may not get a share of the cake. It\’s that simple. From a profit perspective, parents benefit the most from letting their children work hard. Teachers in primary and secondary schools give more homework to their children, which is just to cater to the parents\’ requirements and does not bring much benefit to themselves. Teachers don’t want to go out early and come back late without seeing the sun. They don’t want to rack their brains to give students questions and work overtime to judge papers. Obviously, it is the parents, not the teachers, who really want their children to work hard. Now I am focusing on the little homework left by the teacher, and I have not grasped the key point at all. This is also after the school load has been reduced, extracurricular classes have become more popular.This is the reason why children have “reduced burdens in school and increased burdens outside school”. Of course, in any country and any society, high-quality educational resources are scarce. However, everyone competes in different ways. For example, many people have mentioned the difference between Chinese and American education: Chinese education uses explicit test-taking to divide student groups, while Western education actually secretly completes social stratification through a loose process. In the United States, public schools only provide limited basic education. If you want to become an elite, you must buy it from the market. Those who cannot afford it will naturally be eliminated. Western children can indeed have a happy primary and secondary school, but if they want to become a social elite in the future, they need more self-discipline, more extracurricular tutoring, and more social resources besides public education. We can imagine what kind of families are able to provide these resources for their children. So in the United States, generally the children of wealthy people go to good schools. The difference between Chinese and American education is that we rush every student to the college entrance examination, and the children are exhausted, while American education completes the classification in advance in an implicit way, and most children have a light life. Easy. In other words, we treat all children as gold, while the United States only treats the children of wealthy families as gold. I\’m afraid it\’s difficult to draw a conclusion on the pros and cons between the two. But it is obvious that our approach is actually fairer. In order to achieve such fairness, not only the children are tired, but the teachers are also tired. In terms of objective conditions, our population base is too large, there are too few high-quality colleges and universities, and the way out for the bottom class is too narrow. From the cultural, historical and social traditions, we have a strong demand for \”knowledge changes destiny\”. Therefore, the contradiction between people\’s strong demand for high-quality educational resources and the shortage of high-quality educational resources will exist for a long time. Burden reduction may always be correct, but it is difficult to completely solve it in the short term. This is the reason why the country has been calling for reducing the burden of primary school students for 30 years but has been unable to reduce it since 1988 when it issued the \”Several Decisions on Alleviating the Overburden of Primary School Students.\” It is true that children are under great pressure to study now, but this is a social problem and the problem does not lie at the primary and secondary school level. We cannot let teachers and schools act as scapegoats, suffering from both sides.