Students need real lives to aid growth

In 2020, I interviewed two online tutors who could each make more than 2 million yuan ($315,000) a year. At the time, I questioned my career choice because their salary was more than 10 times higher than mine. As someone with a master's in English interpretation, I thought I would also be qualified to tutor high school students in the language.

The same year, the annual China Central Television Spring Festival Gala, the country's most-watched TV program on Chinese New Year's Eve, was filled with ads for online tutoring companies. The ads were also online and on TV, at bus and subway stations and along elevators in residential areas.

"If you do not send your child to our tutoring courses, we will tutor your child's competitors," said one of the catchiest ads.

Education seemed a promising industry back then. After all, no parent wants their child to fall behind their peers, and as students still have to achieve high exam scores to gain entry to good schools, they remain motivated to attend tutoring courses.

Also, due to the COVID-19 epidemic, students were used to taking online courses, so internet-based education was one of the business opportunities most coveted by investors, domestic and foreign.

For example, online education provider Yuanfudao raised $3.5 billion in three rounds of funding in 2020, while rival Zuoyebang raised $2.35 billion in two rounds.

That year, the value of the online tutoring business in China grew rapidly as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. It reached 257 billion yuan, a year-on-year rise of 35.5 percent, according to iResearch, a market consultancy in Shanghai, which predicted that the figure would reach 490 billion yuan by 2024.

Everything looked perfect for tutoring companies and their investors. However, they underestimated the government's determination to provide high-quality education equally for all students, and the nonprofit nature of education in China.

The government has long attached great importance to children's education. Last year, the outlay on education totaled about 4.3 trillion yuan, up 7.2 percent year-on-year and equal to 4.2 percent of national GDP. It was the ninth consecutive year that the figure had exceeded 4 percent of GDP.

The exam-oriented academic tutoring industry, which has led to a rat race among parents and students and placed a heavy financial burden on families, was bound to face strong government scrutiny.

In July, the central authorities introduced the "double reduction" policy, aiming to reduce the burdens that excessive homework and tuition imposed on young students.

By December, more than 80 percent of tutoring companies had either closed or changed focus, the Ministry of Education said.

All the remaining players have become nonprofit entities who need to follow much lower guidance fee standards for tutoring courses.

It is sad that so many people have given up careers, and also to see the lives of tens of thousands of teachers and other employees upended by the policy. However, many former tutors I interviewed said they felt something was going wrong when too many students were motivated to take tutoring courses.

When all students take such courses, it just raises the bar of school enrollment higher, while some children are too exhausted from academic study to have hobbies or do physical exercise. Psychological problems can also arise from too much academic pressure.

As the old saying goes, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Young students need to free themselves from intense academic tuition and experience healthy growth, both mentally and physically.