The story the BBC documentary dared not tell: Western relaxed education is secretly stratifying society.

A while ago, a BBC documentary told the story of five Chinese teachers conducting a four-week experiment with Chinese-style teaching at a secondary school in Hampshire, southern England. Chinese-style teaching is characterized by its strictness and long duration. Chinese students consistently rank at the top in some well-known international exams. This has sparked curiosity in many Western countries about China's basic education system.

This documentary filmed this experimental process. It's very interesting, both in terms of the process and the result.

Judging from a few clips in the film, it seems that Western education and our education are quite different.

The video explains that physical education classes in British schools are opportunities to release stress and have fun. They also have health tests, but different classes are set up based on individual student needs, and there's no pressure from graded exams. In contrast, this Chinese physical education teacher starts the lesson by explaining that Chinese students must take a physical education exam in their middle school entrance exams. What was once a carefree playtime suddenly becomes a subject requiring rigorous testing, putting immense pressure on many students. They feel that such physical education classes are too demanding.

Unsurprisingly, teachers felt students couldn't keep up with the pace, and students felt the teachers were going too fast. The video shows a math teacher teaching trigonometric functions. It's a typical Chinese classroom: the teacher introduces the concept in 15 minutes, then jumps into formulas and examples. This is a British math teacher explaining a memorization method for trigonometric functions. The British teacher also mentioned that they spend an extra lesson per week teaching trigonometric functions.

However, some students with strong learning abilities felt that the teacher explained things very clearly and that classroom teaching made it easy for them to grasp the knowledge.

In summary, most students felt that the teacher's teaching pace was too fast, the lectures were boring, and the classroom activities consisted of simply copying the blackboard, which easily distracted them.

The students were indeed quite mischievous, but not as bad or rude as we imagined. Judging from their behavior in the video, they did not follow the Chinese teacher's classroom rules very well; they talked, ate, and played games, among other things.

The classroom depicted in this video seems to be the kind of free and tolerant classroom we always talk about in Western education. However, the arrival of five Chinese teachers makes this group of students feel as if they have encountered the end of the world.

Yet, this group of Chinese teachers, who brought about the apocalypse, ended up with the British students in an experimental class whose final exam scores in mathematics and natural sciences were 10% higher than those of the British students.

This seems both reasonable and somewhat unexpected.

It's reasonable, after all, Chinese students have consistently achieved top results in many major international competitions;

Surprisingly, while we are in China and have complained many times about the shortcomings of the domestic education system, more and more people are sending their children abroad or to international schools. However, the result of this documentary seems to be a blow to Western education.

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A friend mentioned that he knows an American colleague who works at the United Nations.

But this colleague really disliked life there; every day felt like torture, and he was counting down the days until he could go home for the holidays.

His friend asked him, "Then why don't you go back to China?"

The Americans told him that the most important reason he was staying here was that the United Nations would reimburse two-thirds of the education expenses for its employees' children, while he would be just an ordinary professor back home and would find it difficult to afford the tuition fees for his children to attend private high schools.

My friend then asked, "Then why not go to a free public school?" This colleague's smiling expression was exactly like that of parents in China who borrow money everywhere to buy school district housing.

It is not uncommon for Chinese and foreign education topics to be discussed together.

In China, we often admire the inclusive, relaxed, free, and respectful aspects of Western education. We feel that Chinese education suppresses children's natural instincts, stifles their creativity, and merely produces exam-taking machines.

Most Chinese people who have just arrived in developed countries in Europe and America are often impressed by the relaxed education system there—frequent holidays, schools that end at 3 p.m., classroom teaching that is almost like games, and teachers' considerate and patient encouragement. It seems that as long as a child doesn't behave too stupidly, they can easily gain the teacher's approval.

As a parent, you might find yourself thinking that studying in Europe and America is too easy, too simple, and too relaxed. Most parents who have spent a few years in Europe or America bring this impression back to China, making it a major topic of conversation when chatting with friends.

However, those who have truly lived in the United States for an extended period and genuinely understand American education will discover that while children in Western societies can indeed enjoy a happy and fulfilling primary and secondary school experience, "less studying, more playing, and more relaxed management" actually means that to become part of the social elite, you need greater self-discipline, more extracurricular tutoring, and more social resources beyond public education. Unlike Chinese education, which explicitly divides students into groups based on exams, Western education subtly achieves social stratification through a more relaxed process. Most ordinary people's children are naturally and gradually left behind in this gradual process of refinement.

For example, local elementary schools let out at 3 p.m., but only the Black neighborhood children run and jump home, while at that time, most white and Chinese children are carrying their schoolbags and musical instruments, heading to various tutoring classes.

This is not meant to be racially discriminatory, but rather to illustrate that in different contexts, Western education has chosen a more subtle approach to make social stratification appear less acute.

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After the documentary was released, a British educator commented as follows:

“If these five teachers had come to Eton College, they would have been very happy. The children here are very capable and would not have disappointed the Chinese teachers,” commented Oliver Kramer, who served as Eton College’s Dean of Studies from 1997 to 2008.

Eton College is a renowned private school in the UK. Kramer stated that secondary schools in the UK are divided into private and public schools, and the two differ greatly. In excellent private schools, classroom discipline is just as strict, and most private secondary schools are also boarding schools. The "elite" education in British private schools is no less demanding than Chinese education. As a result, private schools such as Eton College and Scott School, which gather 7% of all students in the UK, account for 50% of the students admitted to Oxford and Cambridge each year. In the future, they will become British prime ministers, members of parliament, and social elites.

However, to gain admission to private schools, children must begin preparing at age six and undergo a rigorous selection process (including assessments of family circumstances) before having a chance of entering top private secondary schools. In contrast, in public schools like those depicted in the BBC documentary, the academic pressure is lower, and the probability of students being admitted to prestigious universities is much lower. Three years later, their income and social standing will rapidly diverge from those of students from top universities.

Ultimately, whether in Britain or the United States, their elite education is not a carefree or laissez-faire approach, but rather, like in China, it adheres to a rigorous and arduous education based on diligent study.

Therefore, the differences between Chinese and Western education are determined by objective factors such as national conditions and population. They are not merely differences in methods, but rather in the functional positioning of education. Chinese education serves as a ladder for those from humble backgrounds to climb upwards; children from ordinary families must endure hardship and toil to become elites.

Western education, on the other hand, is a stratified system. Its mass education only provides basic and limited education. To become an elite, one must purchase education from the market, and those who cannot afford it are naturally eliminated.

Some so-called modern public education systems abroad, characterized by a relaxed and undisciplined approach, are in fact nothing more than the minimum standard of public goods provided by the government.

Given the different national conditions in different countries, it is impossible to simply accept this kind of education as our standard. Countries in the Confucian cultural sphere, such as China, Japan, and South Korea, often have public education systems that are more rigorous than those in Western societies. However, this also means that public education in these countries is more likely to enable children from ordinary families to achieve upward mobility.

At least, with the reforms of so-called quality education in recent years, we have seen the gap between regions widen further. Therefore, it has become inevitable to use more brutal education for ordinary people to fill the gap, which is precisely the fundamental reason for the emergence of super high schools.