After Diligence Was Invented as an Ability

I think a mistaken value judgment circulates almost everywhere in society: diligence is treated as an ability.

This is deeply connected to exam-oriented education. The examination system has one central feature: it compresses multidimensional human capacities into a single measurable index. Once the evaluative standard becomes highly standardized, one consequence follows immediately: the ceiling of methodology is low, while the ceiling of time investment is almost infinite. In other words, once the question of “how to study” has been fixed as doing drills, memorizing, and repeating, the only operational variable left is “how long to study.” Diligence is then elevated above other capacities and becomes, within this particular game, the form of input most capable of producing marginal returns.

I find it quite superficial to understand exam-oriented education as “a relatively fair screening mechanism under conditions of extreme resource scarcity.” This is a depoliticized explanation: it narrates institutional choice as something natural and inevitable. Such analysis carries an implicit tendency, namely, to treat institutions as passive responses to objective constraints rather than as active operations of power. Placed back into reality, this is clearly lopsided.

The fundamental problem, in my view, is not extreme resource scarcity, but administrative domination over education and a highly centralized institutional design. China’s educational resources have grown substantially over the past two or three decades: the number of schools, the quality of teachers, and basic infrastructure have all improved. Yet the intensity of examination competition has not decreased; it has become even more brutal. If resource scarcity were truly the root cause, then an increase in resources should have alleviated the problem. What actually happened is that additional resources were absorbed into the same competitive logic, becoming more refined drilling and an ever earlier starting line.

At its core, this is the state’s monopoly over ideology. Unified textbooks, unified exam syllabi, unified grading standards, and a unified route of educational advancement make plural standards of evaluation difficult to sustain. Even if a particular school or teacher wants to experiment with a different educational philosophy, that attempt will be systematically filtered out.

Only from this perspective can we explain several key functions of Chinese school education:

1. Population screening and sorting: social stratification is completed under a highly unified standard, while those who are sorted downward are made to “accept their fate,” because failure is explained as “you simply did not work hard enough.”
2. Discipline and training in obedience: the core capacity trained by exam-oriented education may not be “knowledge,” but “the ability to execute instructions under conditions where the meaning is unclear.”
3. The dissolution of locality and plurality: unified educational content is a tool for ideological integration.
4. The deferral of social contradiction: young people are made to exhaust their energy in endless competition rather than question the system itself.

To call exam-oriented education fair is a fundamental misrecognition; I think this comes largely from a constricted worldview. Fairness should mean equality of opportunity within competition, not the disabling of other options so that most people are forced to choose the examination track. This also explains what feels so treacherous about exam-oriented education: elites possess the right to exit. They can study abroad; they can inherit. So perhaps calling it fair is also a defensive mechanism against trauma. It merely renames the absence of choice as the superiority of the only available choice.