Like it's mainly just an excuse for parents to not expose their kids to political stuff they don't like?

  • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
    ·
    3 years ago

    gaokao

    am i missing something about this because this seems like a college entrance exam and the US has those. there's just multiple and it doesn't apply to the rich.

    • clover [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Not sure of the reasons but stuff like the SAT doesn’t have the same influence on admissions it did a decade ago. And in theory they’re kinda voluntary for everyone. I don’t remember needing anything like it for community college either. All my SAT score did was tell them I didn’t need precalc. The Chinese test sounds like a mandatory thing for anyone who wants to go to school at all.

      • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
        ·
        3 years ago

        this is a mega-complex topic and i just wanted to get the dissenting word in. US education is so byzantine and pregnant with every political and social issue that comparison to a functional system is almost absurdist comedy

        because our problems are very beyond the (true) assertion that parents treat schools like a business, that's not what precludes a national examination culture. because the US has a national examination culture and reducing them has been part of reducing racially conceived obstacles. Because the US is racist and vile. So reducing the importance of standardised tests, which so many children cannot afford is a band-aid on the systemic design to churn out poor people without qualifications & rich people with pieces of paper that they've 'earned' which justify their places on top of the poor.

        this kind of logic makes no fucking sense in so many countries because they just... fund education? and alot of them fund it nationally to even further reduce educational inequality. I'm sure China's not perfect and has its own issues with educational inequality and shit, but its very different from the US and for very different reasons, and one shouldn't boil the US system down to an entitled bourgeois mentality approaching education.

    • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      That's the point - the rich can't get their dumb kids into good colleges unless they can pass the entrance exam.

      • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
        ·
        3 years ago

        the rich are best situated to pass an entrance exam. its not some great equalising force that eliminates unfair advantage. China's still probably better off on that front but more due to funding public schools and not systematically denying education to huge swaths of their country on purpose