She Only Cares About Cultivation

Today is the reporting day, requiring arrival at school by nine in the morning. She came early to familiarize herself with the environment and clean up a bit.

The old man was taken aback when he saw her appearing with a child: "Wow, so early, which teacher are you?"

"Good morning, sir, my name is An Yi. I teach the national language for the first, second, and third grades. I haven’t been here before, so I came to understand the environment and clean up a bit."

"Ah, Teacher An, the principal and director have told us about you. I am Old Zheng, responsible for ringing the bell and watching the gate at our school. I live at the school. Come, come, let me take you to familiarize yourself with the classrooms and dormitories."

With Old Zheng leading the way, it was much more convenient. Classrooms these days are not like those in later generations, with high-rise buildings, each grade having a floor. Here, the first, second, and third grades share one classroom as this age group has the most students. Few manage to persist until fourth or fifth grade, so the fourth and fifth grades share a classroom. Schooling here charges a fee; converted to Second Edition Renminbi, it’s about two yuan per semester. So today, the students from three villages combined still don’t exceed fifty.

This clearly shows that in times of high birth rates, children were seen as strong labor, and no one emphasized education. After all, generations were farmers, scraping food from the ground, and even eating was stressful. Who would spend money sending kids to school? The few better-off families just wanted their children to recognize a few characters, so those who could finish elementary school and enter middle school were akin to passing the high school entrance test in later times—if half could make it, the quality was considered high.

She took Qiuxia and Caihua, utilizing the winter break to send them to middle school. It wasn’t due to extraordinary talent but because the elementary knowledge base was minimal in these times. Some advanced students from later times placed in this era might even handle middle school coursework with ease. Many geniuses pressured out in later times had access from a young age to all sorts of tutoring sessions, knowledgeable in everything from astronomy to geography, programming languages, painting, calligraphy, dance, musical instruments, and more than you could imagine.

After third grade, elementary students have to take science exams. What is science? It’s a summary encompassing nature, biology, chemistry, and physics knowledges. Though not tested for the transition from elementary to middle school, it’s part of the regular performance assessment and a criterion in evaluating students for key middle school classes.

Speaking of English, those born in the Seventies and Eighties only encountered it in middle school. The Nineties, Zeroes, and Tens generations started with it from elementary, progressing from shallow to deep levels, including not just school English classes but also extracurricular tutoring, even one-on-one foreign teacher sessions, with some attending up to six different English courses, alternating between online and offline, large and small classes. Can you imagine that kind of pressure?

It’s simply beyond the reach of children from this era.

Thus in terms of education, the competition only grows fiercer over time.

Currently, there’s no schooling in rural areas because of a lack of funds and willingness to send children. Over generations into later times, you’ll find a chaotic situation—rural elementary and middle schools have no students, unable to recruit, merging schools into towns, and towns merging into county centers. Where did the students go?

Parents move to work, taking children to expensive private schools, crowding into cities. Those with a job offering "Five insurances and one gold" have it better, at least securing a spot in public schools, but if they don’t meet the criteria, they have no choice but to go private.

This creates a fatal loop: rural schools are empty, city school slots are overloaded, with classes of fifty or sixty, no space even for children to move—lined up to the classroom wall. Besides the difficulties for parents and children, teachers have it even tougher.

Why say so?

Previously, teachers only managed their "one acre three cents" of land, aiming to improve teaching quality and promoting ranks. Unfinished assignments were taken home to complete.

Now schools focus on comprehensive development, quality education, formalism. Teachers, besides teaching and lesson preparation, participate in various teaching research meetings. Whenever the school holds an event, all subject teachers work together. Do they have time to manage students’ learning quality? Assignments? So, the situation leads to parents needing to supervise.

Furthermore, modern teachers can’t resort to corporal punishment or harsh discipline because children’s hearts are fragile; they may resort to jumping off buildings...

Hence for parents, their actions might not be wrong, but gradually teachers opt for happy teaching, Buddhist teaching: as long as they safely escort students to graduation, nothing else is as important as safety, because who knows what sort of parents they might face?