Today's children have busy, tiring academic lives

As a reporter covering education news, I have written three long-form articles and several daily stories about how the government introduced fresh regulations related to after-school training institutions last year, as befits one of the hottest topics in the field of education.

Having interviewed students, teachers, parents, owners of institutions that provide extracurricular classes, and experts in education, I have come to the conclusion that today's primary and middle school students have a much busier and more tiring academic life than I did in the early part of the century.

That's not to say I didn't have to work hard in primary and middle school - competition to get into a good high school and university has always been fierce.

What has changed is that I did not have to attend extracurricular classes, because back then public schools had packed schedules. At primary school, I had lots of homework. Also, when I attended middle school, I had to get up at 6 am and didn't get home until 9 pm.

However, even though government measures have reduced the academic burden at public schools and classes finish at 3:30 pm, students do not have more leisure time.

Instead, they now attend a range of after-school classes, and these private training institutions have become their "second" schools.

Education has always been highly valued in China because people are taught from an early age that knowledge can change lives. In the absence of a social safety net, education remains the key way for parents to enrich the younger generation of their family.

No parent wants their child to receive a bad education, and with more parents sending their children to after-school classes, a weird, exhausting and endless competition has arisen. It is as if people believe that sending their child to a large number of extra classes will prove that they are the parents of the year.

Middle-class parents in big cities are able to send their children to (often expensive) after-school classes, but kids from less-privileged backgrounds often simply head home to play video games when school finishes.

Despite its stressful and sometimes controversial nature, the gaokao, or national college entrance exam, still provides the only chance for less-privileged students to make it to the top.

The gaokao presents a wealth of opportunities for children in both rural and urban areas. Without it, millions from rural backgrounds would have no hope of competing with their urban counterparts.

One owner of an after-school training institution told me that around 30 percent of an urban family's disposable income is spent on their child's education.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter how many after-school classes the government shuts down, because parents will always find new ones, even though they will become ever-more expensive due to the high cost of meeting the national standards.