Yao Yang: The Reflection on Chinese Education from Zhang Xue, Who Dropped Out of Middle School

Hello everyone. Today I want to talk with you about the story of Zhang Xue, who has recently become extremely popular.

Zhang Xue came from a poor background, but Zhang Xue’s motorcycle proved himself by winning the World Competition champion. As for his story, current discussions are mostly focused on two aspects:

This is a highly representative inspirational story. He came from a poor background, dropped out of junior high, and yet ultimately managed a successful comeback. In other words, he broke the fixed curse of “it’s hard for a child from a poor household to produce a noble successor.”

This is a discussion about progress in China’s industry and manufacturing. Zhang Xue once worked in Zhejiang, and later went to China’s “motorcycle capital” in Chongqing. This allows us to see that China’s manufacturing industry already has the capability to stand on top of the world.

Both of these angles are very good, but today I want to share a perspective that most people have overlooked—the education problems in China reflected behind the Zhang Xue phenomenon.

01

How the High School Entrance Exam Tracks Students and the Choices of Students at Top Schools

Before delving deeper into education issues, I want to first share my and my team’s preliminary results from two recent studies.

The first study focuses on the tracking created by the high school entrance exam. People who follow me may know that over the past few years I have been calling for reform of the high school entrance exam. We selected junior high students who graduated in 2007 and 2009 as our sample, and followed whether they went on to regular academic high schools or vocational high schools, as well as their income from their first job and their current job.

We found an interesting phenomenon: students who attended regular academic high schools had a clearly higher starting salary after graduation than those who attended vocational high schools; but now, the income gap between the two has shrunk noticeably.

What’s more interesting is that the current salary of students from regular academic high schools can be almost perfectly predicted by their high school entrance exam scores. Put the exam scores on the X-axis, and salary on the Y-axis—when you plot it, it basically forms a straight line.

By contrast, for students who did not go to regular academic high schools, their current salary gap is very large, and the exam scores have no way to predict their income at all. Zhang Xue obviously belongs to the group with extremely high income.

The second study looked at job choices of 985 and 211 university graduates versus graduates from regular universities. It can be clearly seen that graduates from top universities are more inclined to work in government institutions. They are not sensitive to the wage differences between working inside and outside the system, but they place great importance on the social status that comes with working within the system.

This study shows that those who went to good universities mostly ended up entering the system, and they pay less attention to income; whereas ordinary university students, in contrast, care much more about income and are less inclined to enter the system.

02

Intelligence Isn’t the Only Ticket to Success

Combining these two studies with Zhang Xue’s case, I want to raise two questions: what exactly has our exam-based selection system selected? What has our education taught young people?

Let’s look at the first question. The essence of an exam is to do problem after problem, striving for extreme mastery. There are two factors at work here: one is exam ability, and the other is effort. Exam ability is determined to a large extent by a person’s analytical ability, which is broadly associated with intelligence.

This exam-based system is actually quite disadvantageous for boys, especially in the junior high stage. When I watched a video, I noticed that Zhang Xue’s wife mentioned that when they were children they were classmates. Zhang Xue was very mischievous in class, and later she even joked that he used to tug at his wife’s hair. Such a child isn’t necessarily lacking intelligence—he was just playful and mischievous, not accepted by conventional education, and ultimately may be eliminated.

Most of those selected out are likely the so-called “high-IQ” group. But we must pay attention: whether a person succeeds is certainly important, but intelligence is by no means the only determining factor, and it might very possibly not be the most important one.

Now that I’m older, I can say it’s “I’ve lived long enough to see everything.” I’ve seen too many people with extremely high intelligence end up achieving nothing in society, or even failing miserably.

I even have a strange theory: intelligence multiplied by emotional intelligence equals a constant. What people call “emotional intelligence” is actually overall competence, and one very important part of it is the spirit of taking risks and the spirit of perseverance. Zhang Xue exactly has that kind of spirit.

Our entire culture doesn’t really like people like Zhang Xue. Not only was he able to survive, he also succeeded in the end—and that is highly related to his effort and intelligence.

I also have an observation about how genes are distributed: East Asians’ average intelligence may be higher, but the distribution is very concentrated; whereas Westerners’ average intelligence is slightly lower, but the distribution is very dispersed—there are very dull people and also very smart people.

In large part, so-called “smart people” are to a great degree rebellious against convention, but our culture doesn’t tolerate people like that very well. Over time, these people may not find a partner, may not have children, leading to that kind of genes becoming rarer and rarer, and the intelligence distribution becoming even more concentrated.

Therefore, Zhang Xue is especially important in our era. But our selection mechanism will not pick people like Zhang Xue, because our selection only selects the middle portion of people, leaving behind those who are especially smart but also especially rebellious against convention.

So, relying solely on exams to select talent is a big problem.

03

What Kind of Growth Environment Do We Need?

The second question is what is our education doing? In fact, our education is to put every person into the same mold, cast them once, and then throw them out.

The result is that even people with very different differences, through this casting process, end up becoming indistinguishable from one another. We select them through exams. Before that, they may be like Zhang Xue—intelligent, with a spirit of adventure, even rebellious against convention—but after the “casting” of a good university, they all become very similar. What remains is just one aspect of ability; other abilities are eroded away.

So, in the long run, their income ends up matching perfectly with the exam scores at the time they graduated from junior high.

On the other hand, those who didn’t go through the so-called education of good universities preserve their natural tendencies to a greater extent. Therefore, the difference in the jobs they can get and their income will be larger.

Then, in our era, do we need to throw everyone into a mold to be cast, or should we create a more relaxed environment that allows young people’s nature to be fully expressed? Without a doubt, it’s the latter.

Starting from Zhang Xue’s example, and talking about the challenges that education is facing today, I think Zhang Xue’s problem is at least something our educators and policymakers should reflect on seriously: where exactly does the problem in our education lie? Only by thinking carefully about these questions can we reform education so that it is better suited to the current direction of economic development with innovation as the focus.

(Editor: Cao Yanyan HA008)

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