中国是如何为他最大的考试准备的 [美国媒体]

Experts want to fix the gaokao, which benefits urban youth more than rural students

导言：专家想解决更加偏向城市学生的高考问题

BEIJING — Hu Huifeng, an 18-year-old high school senior from China’s Jiangxi province, is on a strict regimen. Seven days a week she rises by 6am for a day of classes in Chinese, English, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology, with the last one finishing at 9.50pm. “Once I get home, I study until midnight,” she says.

北京-江西省的胡惠峰今年18岁，她正严格的遵守着作息规律。每天，她六点起床，开始一天的语文，英语，数学，化学，物理和生物的学习，直到晚上九点五十才结束。“回家之后，我再学习的半夜。”她说。

Hu is among the 9 million students preparing for the biggest test of their life: China’s annual college entrance examination. Called the gaokao, or “high exam”, it will take place over nine hours on June 7-8 across China. It’s the culmination of years of memorisation and test taking, capped off by at least 12 months of gruelling preparation. With its roots in the imperial examinations that started more than 2,000 years ago, the gaokao decides what school you go to and what career you might have, says Mr Xiong Bingqi, vice president at the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Shanghai.

胡惠峰是在中国的准备他们人生中最重要考试的九百万学生之一：中国每年一度的大学入学考试，即“高考”，这将耗时六月7日到8日的九个小时。这是学生们多年苦读和应试的顶峰，最终终结学生们最少长达12个月令人折磨的准备。这项制度植根于源于2000多年前的帝国考试，高考决定了你去哪所大学，从事什么职业，上海的21世纪教育研究机构副总熊丙奇说。

The gaokao is an especially high hurdle for China’s more than 100 million rural students, who already receive an education of far lower quality than their urban counterparts.

高考对于中国一亿的农村学生来说更加是一个负担，他们已经比他们的城市同龄人接受质量更低的教育。

A quota system for allocating coveted college slots by province, which greatly favours local students, also works against rural youth who often live far from the better universities and need higher test scores than local applicants to gain admission.

中国这个安排令人垂涎的大学名额的配额制度，极大的照顾了当地学生，同时却没有顾及到距离大学遥远的偏远省份的学生，他们需要更高的分数来进入大学。

That means urban youth are seven times as likely to get into a college as poor rural youth and 11 times as likely to get into an elite institution, according to economist Scott Rozelle, a Chinese education researcher at Stanford. “The current system itself is unfair,” Mr Xiong says. “Inequality is inevitable.”

这就意味着城市学生比农村学生进入大学容易七倍，根据经济学家，斯坦福大学中国教育研究员，Scott Rozelle说。“现行制度本身是不公平的，不公平是不可避免的。”熊先生讲道。

The problem stems from household registration (hukou), which ties all social benefits, including education, to one’s hometown or village. The hukou forces most rural students, many of them children of migrant workers, to take the gaokao where their parents hail from, even if they’ve never lived there.

这个问源于中国的户口制度，这个制度把所有的社会福利，包括教育，捆绑在一个人的家乡。户口迫使大多数的农村学生，其中很多人的父母是在城市工作的农民工，去他们的户口所在地参加高考，。即使他们从未在那里生活过。

Hu’s father managed to keep her in school until sixth grade in Huizhou, Guangdong, where he was once a migrant worker and now runs a lighting factory.

胡惠峰的父亲成功的把她留在广东惠州上学，直到六年级，在那里他曾经是一个农民工，现在经营着一家灯泡工厂。

At the age of 12, Hu, like her brother before her, returned to her parents’ rural hometown more than 600km away to live with her grandparents in Jiangxi and go to high school. “We would have chosen for our children to be here if it was possible,” her father says.

在她12岁的时候，胡先生把她送回了六百公里以外的江西农村老家和她的祖父母生活在一起，就像安
排她的哥哥一样，去上中学。“如果可能的话，我们会选择把孩子留在这。”她父亲说。

Poor provinces spend far less on their schools than do wealthier coastal cities. (About one-third of rural students attend large boarding schools of questionable academic quality.)

经济不好的省份相比那些富裕的沿海城市来说，花费在教育上的资金更少。（大概三分之一的农村学生在寄宿学校上学，这些学校的教学质量很令人怀疑。）

In Shanghai, the average amount spent per elementary school student in 2014 was 14,518 yuan (S$3,000), while less-well-off Guizhou province spent only 3,237 yuan. On average, rural students score 40 points lower on the gaokao, 21st Century’s Xiong says.

在上海，平均每个小学生在2014年教育上的投入是14518元，同时平困的贵州省只投入了3237元。平均来说，农村学生比城市学生在高考中要低40分，21世纪教育的熊先生说。

The gaokao’s all-important role in admissions is being reduced by giving universities more freedom to choose students based on class grades and teacher recommendations.

高考，这个在大学录取上尤为重要的角色，正在被削减，国家给予了大学更多的自由，基于课堂成绩和老师推荐，去挑选学生。

The authorities are ordering public schools in Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta and other regions to take in more migrant children and let them take the college entrance exams where their parents work.

当局命令在广东珠三角和其他地区的公办中学招收更多的农民工学生并让他们在父母所工作的地区参加高考。

And the quota system is being tweaked to allow more students from the poorer central and western regions to go to better universities in the east.

同时，大学录取配额系统允许更多中西部的学生上更好的东部地区的大学。

The costs of migrant children entering new schools will burden local governments.

农民工子弟进入当地学校的成本将会给当地政府增加负担。

And families in cities who have benefited from the unequal system are resisting change.

在城市受惠于这个不公平系统的家庭抗拒着这个改变。

When officials recently announced plans to allow 78,000 students from poor regions to enter colleges in the better-off provinces of Jiangsu and Hubei, protests flared.

当官员最近宣布计划允许78000名来自贫困地区的学生进入富裕的江苏湖北的大学时，抗议者们爆发了。

“Governor, come out!” chanted angry parents outside government offices in mid-May in Nanjing, Jiangsu.

“省长，出来！”愤怒的家长在江苏南京省政府门外喊道。

They worried that new students would harm their children’s university prospects, Chinese media reported.

他们担心新的学生将会损害他们孩子的大学前程，中国媒体报道。

Local education officials later reassured parents that the numbers of local students getting into Jiangsu universities would not fall.

当地教育官员随后向家长确保说，当地学生进入本地大学的名额不会下降。

Some young Chinese feel the inequities keenly. “Students in Beijing can get into Peking University with lower scores than us in Jiangxi, but there’s nothing we can do,” frets Hu, who still aims for a top school.

一些中国人由衷感觉到了这种不平等。“北京学生比我们江苏学生可以低几十分进入北京大学，但是我们无能为力。”胡惠峰恼怒的说，她想上最好的大学。

“Unfortunately, for many other ordinary students like myself, gaokao is the sole path to realise our dreams,” wrote Chengdu student Liu Yangxiu on WeChat. She was too busy studying to speak over the phone. BLOOMBERG

“不幸的是，对于像我一样的其他普通学生来说，高考是实现我们梦想的唯一途径，成都学生刘洋秀在微信上说。她没空打电话。（彭博社）