The coming class society

This article is a study note compiled by the author based on the 185th episode of "Luoji Siwei" "The Coming Class Society". Due to limited comprehension and writing skills, there are many places in it that may not correctly and completely present the author's original intention when expressing and retelling. I hope readers will forgive me.

text:

The topic we are going to talk about today is "educational equity". Many people get easily excited when this topic is mentioned, so Luo Zhenyu would like to state in advance: every word I am going to say below is not a value judgment - that is to say, it is not my personal opinion, not what I want to see, but it is just a factual judgment and my prediction for the future.

Question: "Will there be an era of extreme educational inequality in China in the future?" If the answer is "yes", then whether we like it or not, happy or not, we can only accept it first and then look for solutions.

Luo Zhenyu concluded that during the lifetime of our generation, we will see an irreversible trend, a situation that the Chinese have never seen in thousands of years, that is: educational stratification.

Before understanding this sentence, we must first understand the role that education has played in China for thousands of years, especially the imperial examination education, which has a special core mission: to prevent social stratification. In the feudal monarchy, the emperor was most afraid of bureaucrats and tyrants, so any imperial power would strike against bureaucrats and tyrants, because they posed the greatest threat to imperial power. The invention and implementation of the imperial examination system was largely to solve this problem. For example: a person born at the bottom of society, even if his family has been farming for generations, as long as his family has a little spare money to train his children to study, he may be able to train a scholar, and a few generations later, he may be a juren, and a few generations later, he may be a jinshi. At this point, the whole family will be glorious and completely turned over. But for the families of bureaucrats, landlords, and tyrants, there will definitely be prodigals among their generations, so they are often rich for no more than three generations. Therefore, in the imperial society of ancient China, even if there are thousands of bad things, there is one good thing - because of the existence of the imperial examination system, the whole society presents an open pattern, and the upper and lower classes are mobile. Therefore, one characteristic of Chinese education has always been "teaching without distinction". Poor students in the mountain villages and children of the royal family use the same textbooks, take the same exams, and are taught in almost the same way. In other words, China's education over the past thousands of years has not been stratified in terms of "content" and "methods", although there may be a large gap in educational resources and a certain degree of inequality.

The "educational stratification" we are going to talk about today is stratification in the Western sense, specifically the type of stratification in American education. To understand this, we must first establish a background knowledge - what is a class society? The real class society is the caste society we see in India, or the aristocratic society we see in Britain. In other words, a person's class is determined by his or her bloodline, not by wealth or social status. Although with the progress of society, the infiltration of democracy and freedom, the aristocracy based on bloodline in Europe and the United States has begun to disappear, the stratified structure of society has continued to this day.

Let's take the example of housing prices to illustrate this phenomenon: Although housing prices in many cities in China are already very high, the distribution trend of housing prices in China is basically a slow decline from the city center to the urban-rural junction, from the first ring, the second ring, the third ring... one level after another. But in the United States, it is a cliff-like decline. The poor area and the rich area may be separated by only a road, but the housing prices are worlds apart. For example, Palo Alto, the core area of ​​Silicon Valley (the city where Stanford University is located), has a city called East Palo Alto to its east. The two cities are adjacent to each other, separated by only a river of about 15 meters in width, but the housing prices in the two cities are worlds apart, and the people living in them are also different. Palo Alto is basically inhabited by wealthy people, such as Apple's Steve Jobs, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, etc., while East Palo Alto is basically inhabited by the lowest level of society. What is the core difference between these two cities? The people are different! Especially the resources for cultivating the next generation are different.

The allocation of educational resources in the United States is basically autonomous by local communities. Even public schools in the United States only receive funding from local city property taxes and property taxes. In this way, schools in cities with rich areas have sufficient funding, and students receive a good educational environment, forming a virtuous cycle; while schools in cities with poor areas have limited funding, and students receive a poor educational environment, forming a vicious cycle (I will not explain the details, and those who are interested can check the relevant materials and information on their own). So what are the results of this educational stratification? Wan Weigang answered this question in two sentences:

First, if you don’t know much about American education, you will be surprised at the differences between education in China and the United States;

Second, if you understand American education, you will be surprised at the similarities between education in the two countries.

How to understand the latter sentence?

Wan Weigang gave an example. For example, there are two children from China and the United States, one is Xiao Ming and the other is David. Xiao Ming passed the exams, from elementary school, junior high school, high school, and studied hard step by step to Tsinghua University. After going to college in Beijing, he began to realize that his knowledge horizon was very narrow. He had basically never read extracurricular books, was very rustic, didn't know how to dress or talk, and blushed when he saw a girl... He was a typical product of exam-oriented education. David, on the other hand, came from a good family and grew up in a much better environment. He may not be as good as Xiao Ming in doing the most difficult math problems, but David has a wide range of knowledge. Whether it is sports such as swimming, fencing, and golf, or talents such as painting, singing, and playing musical instruments, or social activities such as speech competitions, community activities, and student union competitions, he is very good. He is a typical representative of quality education. In our opinion, do we think that Xiao Ming is very miserable and hard-working, while David is very happy and can freely express his temperament and talents?

Teacher Wan Weigang said, don't be fooled, in fact, they are the same thing, both are exam-oriented education. It's just that Xiao Ming has only one way to go, and he can only go for the exam; and David does so many things just to meet the admission standards of those elite universities in the United States. Therefore, fundamentally speaking, they are both exam-oriented education. Then Wan Weigang pushed the question forward: In fact, David's situation is not as good as Xiao Ming's. Because Xiao Ming is facing a certainty, that is, as long as he gets high scores, he can go to a good university. But David is different. No matter how many credits he gets, it is uncertain what kind of university he can enter.

For example, in 2013, there was a news report that Michelle Wang, a Chinese American student, sued Harvard University in anger, arguing that Harvard was unfair. Michelle Wang's SAT scores (American college entrance exam scores) were very good, almost surpassing 99% of the candidates, and she also won many awards in various social activities, and even participated in the choir at Obama's inauguration ceremony. She was very outstanding, which also showed that the mainstream American society accepted her. However, apart from the University of Pennsylvania, no other Ivy League school was willing to admit her. This phenomenon is very common among the Chinese community in the United States, and those students even built a website called "Harvard is unfair".

Luo Zhenyu asked Wan Weigang, is this considered racial discrimination? The answer is: It is hard to say clearly.

Why?

Because these Ivy League schools are almost all private universities, they have never said they want to be fair, even the admissions rules are uncertain, and they never publish their specific admissions rules. Even the admissions staff of these schools who retire and become admissions consultants cannot clearly explain what the admissions rules of these schools are, because there are no clear rules, so what is fairness?

However, Wan Weigang also said another reason, saying that this is because Chinese students use their own traditional concepts to understand American schools, which leads to misunderstandings. To illustrate this point, let's first look at how the admission standards of these American colleges and universities are formed. The United States is an immigrant country, but it has a national main body after all, which is WASP-white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These people think that they are the elite of this country and we are the mainstream class. This consciousness has risen even more after the 19th century. They think that Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League schools want to cultivate our children, and the future leaders of this country should also be our descendants, so we can't let children from other ethnic groups easily enter these Ivy League schools, but we can't openly declare that these schools are so unfair. Therefore, they began to set up thresholds. For example, schools such as Harvard and Yale require Greek and Latin to be taken. Since public schools for other ethnic groups do not teach these two languages, students from other ethnic groups are naturally excluded from the Ivy League.

However, this rule was abolished after being implemented for a period of time. The reason is of course very simple, because this rule artificially excludes the elites of other ethnic groups, while the descendants of their own ethnic group can enter these prestigious schools without much competition. If this continues, the country will be in crisis. So around the time of World War I, this rule was abolished, and other ethnic groups began to prosper, and the most obvious rise was the Jews. Their enrollment rate in the Ivy League schools rose from the initial 7% to more than 20% later. Even at Columbia University, the enrollment rate of Jews once reached more than 40%. So the WASPs were not happy again, because their children's opportunities were robbed, so they came up with a set of standards. For example, they required you to have good social skills and good sports qualities... and the proportion of Jewish students was reduced again. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that this proportion began to rise again. The reason was that during that period, the United States and the Soviet Union were competing for hegemony. Of course, Americans knew very well that they must not lose this battle to the Soviet Union. Therefore, during that period, the Ivy League schools in the United States opened their doors to everyone. As long as you have good test scores, you can go to a prestigious school. For example, former US President Bill Clinton seized this good opportunity, but after this stage passed, American schools began to return to their old ways and began to emphasize those messy quality-oriented education requirements.

At this point you should understand that the Ivy League schools in the United States are wavering between two extremes. On the one hand, they want to exclude other ethnic groups, and on the other hand, they want to select elites from other ethnic groups to renew the blood of their own ethnic group. The essence of the admissions rules is to exclude dissidents.

So what are the options for American high school students to get into the Ivy League? There are three options.

The first way is that you have to have special skills, especially sports skills, and they must meet the WASP requirements, such as fencing, skating, golf... This requirement has another side effect, which is that it can pick out wealthy families. Wan Weigang said a golden sentence: Whether you can enter these schools does not depend on how much tuition you will spend when you go to school, but on how much money you can spend on these special training before going to school. Because the training of these special projects is based on mountains of gold and silver, this naturally distinguishes poor families from wealthy families.

The second way is that the parents must be alumni. There is a saying in these famous schools in the United States: "One generation of Ivy League schools, one generation of Ivy League schools." The threshold set by these schools is that new students must go through the "alumni interview" when they enter the school, so you understand it. Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States (also the former president of Harvard), once said: "We recruit children of alumni, which is part of our construction of our own community culture." The meaning is very clear, right? That is to say, we are a community, we are our own people, we want to pass down these famous schools from generation to generation, we just want to take care of our own people, what's wrong with that?

The third way is to donate money. In private schools with many white people, alumni and their children have a close relationship with the school itself and keep in touch with it for life, so alumni donations are one of the important financial sources of these private schools. However, this is not the case in the minds of Chinese people. They often think that university is just a tool and it has nothing to do with them after graduation, so they are naturally unwilling to donate money. Then you understand, the more Chinese children a school enrolls, the weaker the school's future financial foundation will be, which is absolutely not feasible. From the perspective of donations, American schools are still more disciplined. For example, Hong Kong philanthropist Chan Lok-chung donated $350 million to Stanford University at one time (this is the largest single donation in the history of Stanford University). The result was immediate. The following year, the proportion of Chinese students enrolled in the Silicon Valley area at Stanford doubled.

At this point, readers should understand what educational stratification is, right? The educational stratification in the United States is really an iron threshold, and it is much more difficult to cross than the educational stratification in China.

Educational stratification is only one aspect of social stratification. If you understand American social stratification, you will understand that the challenges faced by ordinary Americans in crossing social classes are much greater than those faced by ordinary Chinese people. Because Chinese society has not yet formed a stratified structure like that of American society, there are still many channels for the poor to rise. For example, in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, even if you come from a poor rural area, as long as you are willing to work hard, even if you are a nanny, you can earn a lot of money and will never fall to the bottom of society.

But it is very difficult for the poor in the United States to get out of poverty. In theory, they only need to get married, have children, graduate from high school, and have a full-time job to avoid falling below the poverty line (annual income less than $20,000). In fact, it is very difficult for them to do these three things. Don't think it's incredible, just read on.

Regarding the first point, "having children after getting married": The self-control of the poor in the United States is often very poor. Most people just can't control themselves and have children at the age of about 16. After giving birth, the father of the child is generally irresponsible and will run away directly. Therefore, most of the poor children in the United States are born and live in single-parent families. Naturally, such children basically cannot receive a good education. There is a statistic in the United States that compared with children from poor families, children from rich families have heard about 30 million more words when they are 4 years old (I didn't make a typo). This is because parents in rich families have a lot of time to spend with their children and will have a lot of communication, which is crucial for the intellectual development and rational thinking of children. However, children from poor families have extremely scarce communication with their parents. Since childhood, their intellectual development has been locked at a level and they will never get ahead.

Regarding the second point, “high school graduation”: children from poor families often forget to go to class because in their community culture they think that it is good for everyone to take drugs and visit brothels together all day long. They don’t want to become like white people, so they are further locked below a certain level.

The third point is "having a full-time job": Based on the above two reasons, these poor children are severely limited by their intelligence and social cognition, and basically cannot find a full-time job. They often just find a job and quit immediately when they encounter the slightest problem. Their lives are completely erratic and have no destination.

Barbara, a female writer in the United States, conducted a social experiment to find out whether the poor at the bottom of the society can escape their fate through hard work. She personally experienced the life of the poor at the bottom of the society, doing the same job and earning the same money. Later, she wrote a book called "My Life at the Bottom" based on her research results. The conclusion of this book is: it is almost impossible. It is not because the United States does not give these people at the bottom a chance, but because their cognitive ability restricts them to that class and they cannot escape. There is a very eye-catching sentence in this book - poverty itself is a kind of despotism.

For example, when Barbara was doing social experiments, she had a female colleague who could earn 40 to 50 dollars a day, but she lived in a motel, and the rent was 40 dollars a day and was paid daily, which means that the money left after paying the rent every day was barely enough to make ends meet. Barbara was very curious why she didn't rent a cheaper apartment, so that she could save a lot of money every month and improve her financial situation over time. The female colleague rolled her eyes and said: I have to pay a deposit of one month to rent an apartment, at least 1,000 dollars, where can I get so much money? This is limited by her own cognitive level. She thinks that the money left after paying the rent every day can fill her stomach, and she can get by like this for a day. In order to gain a sense of security, she will not think about things further away, is unwilling to work in a farther place, and cannot accept the grievances and pressure at work... All these are limitations caused by her cognitive level, not persecution by society.

What determines the level of cognition? In addition to the level of education received in childhood, there is also the environment in which one lives, and the relatives and friends that one interacts with every day. This is the difference between the poor in China and the poor in the United States in terms of crossing social classes. The poor in China can at least blame the unfairness of society and the government, while the poor in the United States can only blame the community in which they live, the relatives and friends around them, and the backward way of thinking in their brains. If the poor in China are angry about their situation, then the poor in the United States can only feel despair about their situation (in fact, I personally think that the poor in China also feel powerless and desperate).

This situation exists in any social class in any country. It is very difficult for people in any class to break through the limitations of their own cognitive level and reach a higher class. It is like a cage that locks you in, unable to see how people in a higher class think about problems or how they view the world.

Once we understand social stratification, we can look at educational stratification and it will be a completely different picture.

教 育的内容、目标、使命……各个阶层是完全不一样的。我们还是拿美国来说，美国底层人民的教育的目标说白了就是为了让他们能够得着一个饭碗，为了把他们培养 成一个对社会有用的工具。比如说，美国有一个公立学校叫KIPP（实实在在的高考集中营），它基本上都是办在那些底层人民聚集的地方。其办学方法和我们所 谓的中国的高考工厂一模一样——应试教育！因此其效果很显著，很多底层出身的孩子都考上大学。这算是底层出身的孩子能享受到的最好的教育了——只有应试教 育，素质教育就是奢望。

In fact, for children from the lower classes, the most suitable thing is exam-oriented education (whether you like it or not, this is the fact, and anyone who doesn’t admit it is not objective.)

Quality education is carried out in middle-class schools. These schools mainly cultivate children's sports, talents, independent thinking ability, oral expression ability, social interaction ability, and the ability to organize people... However, such quality education is still not to cultivate the top elites of society, but to cultivate a middle-class personality. In the words of Wan Weigang, quality education cultivates handicrafts - things of the same grade are the same and are used to be selected by others.

The top elite education is often provided by private schools, which have only one principle for training students: to cultivate children's decision-making ability. Their concept is that students are the masters of their own ships, and others cannot make any decisions for you. Everything is up to you. For example, in their history class, they will let students discuss what mistakes Pericles made in the Peloponnesian War and what mistakes the citizens of Athens made. Such a discussion may last a whole day. The core mission of this kind of education is to teach children how to appreciate, choose and change the world. This is the top elite education.

So now you should understand how big the role of education is - the biggest role is to change the fate of the lower class. For people from the lower class, the role of family intervention is already negligible. What they have to do is actually to send their children to college entrance examination factories like Maotanchang Middle School and KIPP. The school will naturally turn them into useful people for society. This is also one of the few shortcuts for the lower class to change their own fate. But for the middle class, the role of education is not so great. For children's education, the biggest influence is the family. Only when the family and the school work together can children be trained to become better people, waiting to be selected by the people at the top of society. For people at the top of society, the role of school is even more negligible. At most, it provides a basic environment. The most important thing is the family's own ideas, social class and wealth status.

What about Chinese society?

At present, wealth stratification has just emerged in Chinese society, social stratification has not yet taken shape, and educational stratification has not even sprouted. However, will such stratification begin in the future?

Luo Zhenyu’s answer is: Yes!

Reason 1: Economic reason: Wealth stratification has already taken shape in Chinese society, and the polarization between the rich and the poor is an undeniable fact. This polarization was not as terrible in ancient China as it is now, because the role of the ancient imperial examination was to break the stratification, while the role of modern education is to consolidate the stratification (think about the American education stratification introduced earlier and you will understand).

Reason 2, social reasons. Now society is becoming more and more complicated. For example, the production of a pencil involves the division of labor of millions of people around the world. Everyone only knows their own division of labor and knows very little about the outside world. Although industrial society is already so complicated, they can at least control this society through factors such as price. But now this society is much more complicated (I don't understand this paragraph, so I won't describe it).

Reason three, technical reasons. The most typical example is artificial intelligence. Remember what Dr. Wu Jun said in "Artificial Intelligence" that only 2% of people can grasp the era opportunity of artificial intelligence technology.

In the Middle Ages, the entire society began to enter a period of drastic social stratification, and educational stratification would intensify and consolidate this stratification.

However, wealth stratification has just emerged in Chinese society, social stratification has not yet taken shape, and educational stratification has not even sprouted. Everyone still has the opportunity to change their destiny by improving their cognition.

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