Young teacher Jiang Yilin spent seven years interviewing and tracking 28 students from the top 10 middle schools in Beijing, and all of the interviewees were from elite families. These children have a similar growth trajectory: from top high schools to world-class universities, and after graduation, they work or start businesses in large multinational companies to become future world leaders.
On the basis of her research, Jiang Yilin published the book "Xueshen: A First-hand Observation of China's Elite Education", in which she found that education is a card competition for the future social position, and children from elite families are almost destined to win this game.
Genius base. There was a commotion in geography class. The teacher was talking about an exam question about "How the Xiamen-Shenzhen Railway Was Built", and she explained to the students that the reason why the railway tracks moved inland was because of military security concerns.
This explanation is too far-fetched," a boy with black-rimmed glasses in the front row of the classroom interrupted the teacher loudly: "It only moved a kilometer inside." ”
It should be like another railway, moving farther. The other girl chimed in.
The teacher wanted to say something, but before she could speak, Dapeng, a student sitting at the innermost part of the classroom, raised her head and interrupted her: "Let me come, I can explain more clearly." The teacher was stunned for a moment, a little overwhelmed, and then put down the chalk in his hand.
The students all stared at Dapeng quietly. He got up and walked over to the blackboard and unceremoniously erased what the geography teacher had written, like a teacher rejecting a student's wrong answer. Dapeng then drew a map of the coastline and lectured to the students: "This railway was designed a long time ago, but before construction began, other intersecting railways had already been built. In fact, it is the socio-economic reasons that lead to the changes in subway construction. ”
The geography teacher had a tense face, expressionless but looking a little nervous. She nodded helplessly and said thank you in English.
Figure |Inside a classroom at a middle school.
Jiang Yilin, a scholar sitting behind the seat of Dapeng, recorded the moment when the student challenged the teacher in her notebook. This happened in 2013 in a middle school in the western suburbs of Beijing. This is one of the top 10 well-known high schools in Beijing. Yilin Jiang is a professor of sociology at NYU Shanghai. From 2012 to 2019, Jiang Yilin spent seven years conducting a seven-year follow-up survey of 28 students. Like Dapeng, they come from five of Beijing's top 10 middle schools and come from wealthy families.
In her book Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition, Jiang Yilin documents their similar growth trajectories: from top high schools to world-class universities, and after graduation, they work or start businesses in large multinational companies to become future world elites.
How would you describe these students?Genius and smart are the words Jiang Yilin has heard most frequently.
A middle school teacher laughed and explained Dapeng's behavior to Jiang Yilin: "Our students are very smart, and they will prove you wrong in class. There's even a special saying called "hang the teacher on the blackboard." This kind of encouragement for students to challenge their teachers is rare in primary and secondary education, which is mainly exam-oriented education.
We are much better than others. ”
You can change the world in the future. ”
You all have the potential to be Prime Minister. ”
In school, teachers often tell students that this does not seem to be praise, but just a statement of facts. While doing research, a vice principal pointed to a passing student and told Jiang Yilin: "Other schools in the United States and Australia consider our students to be geniuses. ”
A teacher once said to the class, "The average score of our class should be a perfect score." When she heard this, only Jiang Yilin's eyes widened in surprise, she turned her head to glance at the other students, and found that all of them had no expressions on their faces, as if they were acquiescing to the teacher.
Several students once talked about the poor students who failed the college entrance examination at school, and one girl sighed: "It's sad, but it's also expected." Those "poor students" could not go to Peking University and Tsinghua University, nor could they go to famous foreign universities, and in the end "they could only be admitted to provincial key universities".
In this fieldwork, Jiang Yilin contacted 28 students, all of whom came from high-income families. The median household income is more than twice as high as that of the top 10 percent of urban earners and four times higher than that of civil servants in Beijing. Of course, this is only the income on the surface. Some wealthy families may have a higher "grey income" than their tax income. They have a hukou in Beijing and more than two properties. Many of the parents are highly educated, and many of them are alumni of Tsinghua University and Peking University. At least one of the couples is a business executive or a senior technician.
One of the five middle schools Jiang Yilin researched is located in Beijing's Haidian District, and every time school is over, the school gate is full of black luxury cars that pick up and drop off children. In the old days, these secondary schools were dedicated to the descendants of high-ranking and high-ranking military cadres, and a century later, although the selection method has changed to test scores, the vast majority of students still come from wealthy or powerful families. At first, Jiang Yilin wanted to study the differences between students from different family backgrounds in these middle schools, but later she found that there were almost no workers or peasant students.
This reminded Jiang Yilin of her experience as an exchange student at the University of Pennsylvania during her undergraduate years. Most of my classmates are wealthy Americans. Sometimes I'd hear someone mention that a classmate's family is a billionaire, a level of wealth that she has no idea about. She has lived in a luxurious home with an American roommate, and everyone in the roommate's family owns a sports car.
Jiang Yilin comes from a well-off family in Taiwan, China, and her parents are both staff members of a local research institute. After graduating from her bachelor's degree, she was admitted to a graduate school at the University of Chicago, which was a self-funded master's program, and she almost missed out on this school because of the cost of studying abroad. In the end, he emptied the savings of his parents and grandparents, and used his brother's scholarship to barely make up enough money to study abroad.
As a Ph.D. in sociology, Jiang Yilin has read many classic books on Western educational sociology. Her personal experience and knowledge system told her, "This is the case with many prestigious universities in the world, even if you look at the scores, [the admitted students] are definitely elite." "Western writings are all about elite foreign students. But the same story takes place in the East, where the education system seems to be fairer.
She wants to use her research to find the answer to the question of why most of the brightest "gifted students" come from wealthy familiesWhy do these schools, which occupy first-class resources, deviate from the traditional mission of bridging class disparities with education, and become a breeding vessel for elites to replicate the next generation of elites?
Parents who didn't do anything.
Long before doing social science research, Jiang Yilin had faintly felt the difference in class.
In high school, Ms. Jiang attended a public school in Taiwan, which included children from wealthy families as well as ordinary working families. Jiang Yilin, who comes from a dual-income family in Kochi, is in the middle level of school, stuck between the "rich people in Taiwan" and the low-level working families. At the parent-teacher meeting in the class, Jiang Yilin was the student in charge of registration, and the parent sign-in sheet and the column of parents of working families were often blank. "My mom and dad can come to the parent-teacher conference at any time, and their parents can't take time off at all. ”
Jiang Yilin grew up in a knowledge-based family, and learning is always the highest priority. Regardless of whether you earn money in the future or not, reading is fundamental. "Even if I didn't get good grades as a child, I never knew I could not study. ”
She inherited the cultural capital of her parents. The college volunteer form was filled out by my mother sitting on the sofa watching Jiang Yilin fill it out. She would tell her daughter what was the difference between this department and that department, and which department she had taught and which one was the most interesting to read. When Jiang Yilin encountered a subject problem that she didn't understand in college, she would discuss it directly with her mother.
Her parents' social circle is that of researchers, Jiang Yilin has been exposed to the academic community since she was a child, and she knows what is the most important topic in the academic world, and what research to do to get high scores. And these, it is difficult for children from other ordinary families to obtain. Jiang Yilin began to realize that everyone was standing on a different starting line.
Jiang Yilin's research subjects, these children from high-income elite families, do not seem to be aware of this problem, and most of the students come from similar classes. When asked if families were helping them, the students replied the same: "Parents don't do much." "It's your own business to get into college, and it's hard for others to help. ”
Parents cooperated, blaming themselves for "not doing anything". Like Claire's mother. Claire was a star student at the school and was later accepted into Yale University. Her father came to Beijing from a small village in Inner Mongolia, and she lived up to her family's expectations and went from Beijing to the world.
Claire's mother is a doctor with a Ph.D. who manages a team of assistants. Dr Chan describes herself as an outsider, "doing nothing for her" and "doing everything herself".
In the middle of the chat, Dr. Chen received the ** brought by his daughter, and Claire needed to make a big poster according to the school's requirements. Dr. Chen arranged for his PhD students, and several of them quickly printed a human-sized poster together. But afterwards, Jiang Yilin asked again, no one remembered, and no one thought it was worth saying.
Robert's father, Mr. Guo, quietly paved the way for his son to study abroad. He is an executive of a business and speaks softly. Just one income that Jiang Yilin learned about exceeded 1 million per year. Unlike Claire, Robert is a kid with a "scumbag temperament at a glance". He made a serious trade-off between reading and playing video games, "The advantage of reading is that your grades will be better, but playing video games will make your mood better", and he concluded that "it is more important to be in a good mood".
Mr. Guo discovered early on that the child did not look like him. Mr. Guo was a top student in the 80s of the last century, and he was ranked in the top 50 among the more than 400,000 college entrance examination candidates in Sichuan Province that year. But his son failed to inherit his advantages, and according to Robert's grades, he was very likely to be admitted to a lesser-known university.
Mr. Guo gave up the college entrance examination early, but he did not directly arrange for his son to study abroad. As a practitioner in the finance-related industry, he also included "buyer psychological expectations" in his plan. Considering the rebellious mentality of teenagers, children are very likely to deliberately turn against their parents. So, Mr. Guo only signed him up for a summer exchange trip to visit an American university, traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast, trying to arouse his son's interest. Sure enough, the 15-day trip ended, and the son "wanted to go to the United States" from then on.
In order to convince Robert that studying abroad was his own independent choice, Mr. Guo initially had to strategically disagree, pretending to be persuaded by his son, even though everything was going in his preconceived direction. Robert worked with an education agent hired by his father and finally applied to the University of Washington, which his father was happy with.
Robert was oblivious to his father's guidance. He sums up his father's influence on his university: "My dad and I discussed university and majors. "That's all," they didn't help at all. ”
Children announce to outsiders the withdrawal of the family, as if the wealth, status, and power of the family have not played a key role in education.
Figure |Parents waiting at the entrance of the middle school at the end of the school day.
Jiang Yilin calculated a detailed account in the book, if elite families are ready to send their children to study abroad, then their annual detailed expenses include: about 90,000 to 100,000 yuan per year for the tuition fee of the International Department, 20,000 or 30,000 yuan for cram schools, and 7800 yuan for each class of private tutors. Students are also required to travel to Hong Kong or Singapore to sit for the exam up to five times, and parents are responsible for airfare, hotel rooms and registration fees.
Some parents will help their children get some special identities, which can add 5 points to the college entrance examination. When applying to a foreign university, you need to increase your child's influence, and parents will ask the principal to write a letter of recommendation, even if the principal does not know the child. Or publish your child's essay into a book and have the principal write the preface.
It's also important to build a good relationship with your teachers. Some of the teachers in elite middle schools are the ones who wrote the questions of the college entrance examination in previous years. The quota of "three good students" is also in the hands of teachers, which can add 20 to 30 points for the college entrance examination. If you want to go abroad, you can also ask the teacher to write a letter of recommendation. Big-name skincare products and Apple watches are common gifts for teachers. There are even more precious teas in the teachers' offices. Students from elite families will not be worried about not being able to get decent gifts.
This is also what Jiang Yilin wants to show in the book: privilege never appears in the original form of privilege, and the cultivation method of elites makes these children believe that they have won everything by virtue of diligence and talent. And let the class differentiation that will arise in the future look so natural and reasonable.
Error-free handovers.
During the investigation, Jiang Yilin found an interesting phenomenon. In the eyes of many elite families in Beijing, only Tsinghua University and Peking University can be called "first-class", and "even Fudan is not looked down upon".
In the international department of the middle school in the western suburbs of Beijing, Jiang Yilin saw a huge map of the world, on which the students' goals were marked - 16 universities such as MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford.
Parents in these families have one thing in common, they will encourage their children to pursue the highest goals without distraction, and those who are at the bottom of the rankings will not be able to lead to downward mobility of status. Don't worry about anything other than your goals.
It's an elitist attitude. Jiang Yilin said. She remembered that when she was studying for a PhD abroad, a teacher from East Asia had asked her what she planned for her graduation. Jiang Yilin, like most people, prepared plans A, B, C, and D, which were the best, inferior, ordinary, and worst.
The teacher interrupted her: "You can't do this, first remove B, C, and D, and if A fails, we'll figure out a way." Jiang Yilin later realized that the Boban teacher adopted an elite training method.
How can it be possible, I'm so afraid of failure. Jiang Yilin said with a smile. For her, for the first time since she almost missed graduate school because of tuition fees, she realized that there was no "safety net" in her life. If you are not careful, you may get out of orbit at any time.
Figure |Jiang Yilin in the office.
In the elite students that Jiang Yilin came into contact with, he could not see this kind of conservatism of ordinary people. The difference between a regular player and a top player is that if they make a wrong move, the average player faces an outing, while the top player has a card that says "do it again".
In his junior year of high school, Liu Yulang, a high-achieving student, encountered ** annoyance. In 2014, two months before the start of the Olympiad, the policy was suddenly adjusted, and it was announced that the winners of the Olympiad would no longer be eligible for the college entrance examination. When he learned the news, Yu Lang had been preparing for this for two years, sacrificing the time to review for the college entrance examination. Under this blow, she lost the competition.
Yu Lang has done much more than that. When she was a sophomore in high school, her mother found out that the best gold medal Olympiad coaches in the city were in this middle school in the western suburbs of Beijing, so she asked her daughter to transfer to Tsinghua University to find a chance for her to be sent to Tsinghua University. Her mother, an alumnus of Tsinghua University and an editor of a newspaper, could not go wrong.
Yu Lang could only leave his familiar circle of friends and come to this strange middle school. At the beginning, when he lived in the school, Yu Lang was very unaccustomed to it, and he cried and went home every day. Until the second month, she complained as usual, but her mother's reprimand came from the other end: "Are you enough?".From that moment on, she knew that she couldn't cry anymore and had to figure it out on her own. She hadn't made any friends for nearly a year.
The news of the failure of the Olympiad was like a sharp alarm sound, prompting the mother to rise up and put herself on alert. For two weeks in a row, Yulang's Olympiad coach Mr. Sun received a call from the mother every day, asking him to help her daughter.
Teacher Sun did not have a good impression of the mother and daughter. Learning Olympiad mathematics is just to secure qualifications, and in Mr. Sun's opinion, this behavior is too utilitarian. But two weeks have passed, Yu Lang's mother's ** made him "completely unbearable, and he was really about to collapse". He had to reveal an important news: Peking University held a winter camp for the failed Olympiadists, and if they passed the final exam, they might be able to get extra points.
On the recommendation of Teacher Sun, Yu Lang participated in that winter camp, but failed the final exam. In desperation, Yu Lang's mother contacted Teacher Sun again. Teacher Sun gave her another inside information, and two weeks later, Tsinghua University held a similar winter camp. This time, Yu Lang signed up and passed the final exam, scoring 60 extra points for her college entrance examination.
Later, Yu Lang's college entrance examination score was lower than the score line of Tsinghua University, but after adding points, she was still admitted to Tsinghua University like her mother when she was young. The other students interviewed by Jiang Yilin had never heard of this special game rule, and even the other Olympiad coaches didn't seem to know about it. Yu Lang's mother played an unexpected card for her child.
A similar experience occurred in another student, Wen Bin. Wen Bin originally wanted to apply for a PhD abroad directly after graduating from his bachelor's degree, but he was unsuccessful. The father decided to step in and help his son plan a new round of application. In addition to the doctorate that his son wanted to study, he also applied for a master's degree from three additional schools as a back road. Later, Wen Bin's Shenbo failed again, but this time, he fell into the safety net that his father had woven in advance - he passed his master's degree. The two-year master's program cost the family seven or eight hundred thousand.
In this story, the most surprising thing is that Wen Bin's father has never studied abroad before, and he doesn't know how to apply for foreign schools. But when his son lost, he was able to quickly judge the situation and guide Wen Bin hand by hand.
Jiang Yilin explained that like Wen Bin and Yu Lang's parents, they are all members of the newspaper, and as professionally trained senior people, they have strong information acquisition and reading skills, and are good at rummaging through the most important part of the massive and complicated information.
Wen Bin's father has also found many colleagues, and their children have successful experience studying abroad. These connections became temporary think tanks. So, in a short period of time, Wen Bin's father figured out the preferences of the foreign admission committee in recruiting students.
And if ordinary people's children want to climb to the same position, "they really need the right time, place and people, and they can't make a single mistake." Jiang Yilin interviewed a student from an ordinary family in Jiangxi Province who went to the University of Chicago for a PhD after graduating from Fudan. Before his college entrance examination, his parents prepared the coal carts used to pull coal, and they either went to a prestigious school or went home to pull coal.
The birth of the next generation.
A few years have passed, and the students Jiang Yilin has come into contact with have all lived the life they expected.
A girl stayed in the UK after graduating from Oxford, and a few years ago she was earning in the top 5% of the UK. A graduate of Cambridge University, Ashley worked for one of the world's largest manufacturers in Switzerland with a starting salary of $100,000. After just a year of staying, she moved to a Japanese company, and her salary was much higher than before.
Another girl complained to Jiang Yilin that the starting salary of the job she was looking for was only 140,000 US dollars, "The boss is simply exploiting me!."”
What kind of student has $140,000 just after graduation, not including bonuses?Jiang Yilin jokingly said that if it was herself who had just graduated, "Give me a fraction and I'll go." ”
She met with another student, Xiang Zu, at a restaurant in Haidian, Beijing. Zu Xiang is a Ph.D. student in engineering who works part-time as a consultant for a U.S. automotive and energy companies. Although he had just graduated, he spoke in a mature and firm tone. The restaurant is near Xiang Zu's company, and people come and go, and Xiang Zu loudly criticizes his boss for being "very **" because he produces environmentally harmful products in developing countries, exacerbating inequality in the global society.
He didn't like the company's products, so he simply bought a car from a competitor's brand and drove it to work every day. Xiang Zu reported the situation to the company's top management. He felt that he could do better than his boss, and planned to start his own business, break down the company, and occupy the international market.
Like the student who "hung the teacher on the blackboard" at the beginning of the article, Xiang Zu was also accustomed to openly questioning authority and "hanging his superiors on the blackboard". In these students, there is obviously still a shadow left by the elite education on campus in the past.
Tracy, the girl who used to lean on Jiang Yilin to talk about her dreams, later became a trader at a well-known investment bank in Hong Kong. Jiang Yilin met her in a bustling business district in the center of Beijing when she returned to the mainland for a vacation. Wearing a pair of sunglasses, designer bags and shoes from abroad, Tracy wanders into a tea shop to pick out gifts for her bosses. It's like giving gifts to her teachers in middle school.
She told Jiang Yilin: "My bosses like me very much. Why don't they like me?I'm such a nice employee!"A few years ago, she also described her relationship with her teachers in the exact same words, "The teachers like me." What's not to like me?I'm such a good student. ”
At that middle school in the western suburbs of Beijing, once or twice a week there is a "principal's hour" where the principal invites students who have opinions about the school to chat and listen to their suggestions. From the hygiene of the toilet to the learning atmosphere of the school, to whether the circus can be invited to the school and rent a roller coaster equipment into the school, such a request will almost be adopted by the principal. Gaining the approval of authority figures and letting powerful adults meet their needs is part of elite education.
In this environment, students naturally have a stronger sense of self-confidence and entitlement. For example, enjoy the service of teachers on call. In her junior year of high school, Tracy wanted to apply to Johns Hopkins University, and she needed to submit paperwork. A few hours before the application deadline, Tracy suddenly felt anxious and decided to change the application for another one. At about ten o'clock in the evening, she called the counselor who was about to go to bed, and asked him to help in an hour and make another round of revisions. You know, it's the busiest application season for counselors. Many ordinary students who want to meet with a counselor for a consultation have to make an appointment several weeks in advance.
For these children at the top of the pyramid, the world is a backyard where I can move and gallop. In an interview, Jiang Yilin mentioned the sense of belief of elite students that "I am worthy": "They believe that I am worthy of being treated so well, and I am worthy of getting so many resources." ”
After graduating, Tony worked for a financial company in New York. On his birthday, he threw a party on the roof of a building in Queens. More than 20 friends and colleagues came to celebrate his birthday. A friend arrived by train from Boston that afternoon, and was in a hurry back to the office for a meeting the next morning. And his colleagues, who had just finished a two-week work camp the day before, were exhausted. But he never expected anyone to turn down his invitation.
If you look at employment alone, only one of the 28 students surveyed by Jiang Yilin seems to have deviated from the mainstream elite path. Shi Ying, a graduate of Cambridge University, works in wildlife conservation. Her income is far lower than that of her classmates who work in the financial industry.
Jiang Yilin quickly corrected this view. Shiying is married, and in terms of the coordinates of the status system, not only must she be considered personally, but also included in her family. Shiying's husband is a graduate student at Yale University and recently founded a technology company. If the future enterprise is strong enough, public welfare undertakings such as animal protection can be an elitist image PR.
Jiang Yilin's research was completed in 2019. Now, four years later, the children who would walk around the school holding her hand and calling her "sister" have become the world's elite who are almost 30 years old. Jiang Yilin clearly felt that campus life was a brief intersection of her life trajectory with these students. It would be very difficult for her to integrate into the lives of this group of people now.
One of the kids at a dinner party mentioned that he had a good job in Chicago. Just the name of the company, Jiang Yilin heard it six times, but she didn't understand it. Eventually, she went home, found a recording of the interview, searched it online based on the pronunciation, and finally asked the interviewee to spell out the entire company name.
I am a second-generation student, and they may be the second-generation businessman," Jiang Yilin said: "I don't understand a lot of things about them, and our understanding of each other's current lives is too lacking." ”
The relationship between Jiang Yilin and this group of students seems to be evidence of a certain social level estrangement. Two intersecting lines are speeding towards different tracks, and these children are running towards a future that she can't imagine.
end - Written by Chen Xiaoyan.