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What Conditions Could Foster More Balanced School Experiences? Stability & Change in the Education System in China (Part 5)

Posted on March 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Can the changing economic, political, and demographic conditions in China combine with growing concerns about students’ mental health and wellbeing to create a more balanced education system? Thomas Hatch explores this question in the final post in a series that shares his reflections on his conversations with Chinese educators and visits to Chinese schools over the past two years. The first post in this series explored some of the “niches of possibility” within the conventional Chinese curriculum and schedule that may foster the development of more student-centered approaches. The second post reviewed changes in educational policy in China that may have created some additional flexibility for schools to pursue innovative educational approaches and reinforced exam pressures at the same time. The third post discussed how one experimental school is trying to take advantage of AI to support students’ learning and development and the fourth considered recent efforts to respond to growing concerns about students’ mental health.

For other posts on education and educational change in China see “Boundless Learning in an Early Childhood Center in Shenzen, China;””Supporting healthy development of rural children in China: The Sunshine Kindergartens of the Beijing Western Sunshine Rural Development Foundation;” The Recent Development of Innovative Schools in China – An Interview with Zhe Zhang (Part 1 & Part 2);” “The Desire for Innovation is Always There: A Conversation with Yong Zhao on the Evolution of the Chinese Education System (Part 1 & Part 2);”“Surprise, Controversy, and the “Double Reduction Policy” in China;””Launching a New School in China: An Interview with Wen Chen from Moonshot Academy;”and ”New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with Challenges

The elite schools I visited in China demonstrate the kinds of innovative practices that can fit into the Chinese education system even with its exam-based focus and intense academic pressures. At the same time, the academic pressures continue to constrain any attempt to change instruction and spread more student-centered pedagogies on a wide scale. Although it seems that there may be no way out of the “trap” of increasing academic pressure, it’s also clear that the Chinese education systems has changed substantially over the past thirty years, in concert with significant developments in the demographic, economic, technological and political conditions in China.  These realities left me wondering: Could China leverage the changing societal conditions to create more balanced educational experiences for future generations of students?

“Could China leverage changing societal conditions to create more balanced educational experiences for future generations of students?” 

Changing conditions in China over the past 30 years

In China, the massive expansion of education at every level, and particularly the growth in the number of university places could have helped to lessen some of the exam-based pressure on students. However, those developments took place along with the massive growth in the Chinese population to over 1.3 billion people by 2010. At the same time, almost 800 million people have lifted themselves out of poverty and China’s middle class, now the largest in the world, includes over 500 million people.  Even with the substantial increases in the number of colleges and universities, those developments mean that many more parents aspire to get their children into a handful of top institutions of higher education and many more students are competing for those limited places.

Further fueling the pressure is a substantial rural-urban divide, with students in rural areas experiencing much more difficult basic conditions and much less chance of getting a good education, getting a good score on the Gaokao, or getting into college. Although most villages had a primary school of some kind in the 1990’s, as birth rates fell and rural parents migrated to cities to take advantage of the economic opportunities, almost three-quarters of all primary schools – around 300,000 – were closed. As a consequence, some children have to travel long distances to school and others spend the school week at boarding schools, including what are estimated to be some 60 million “left-behind children” whose parents could not take them when they migrated to find work. As of 2015, there were about 100,000 boarding schools in rural China, with an estimated 33 million children living in them, including about 12% of primary school children and 50% of rural secondary school students. Crucially, the difficult conditions contribute to the gap between urban and rural students in high school completion and access to higher education. 

Recent changes in birth rates, employment, and college enrollment 

But conditions are changing again – fast. Births in China have now declined so much that the birth rate in 2023 was about half of what it was in 2015 only eight years earlier. The population decline in 2023 was also twice as large as it was in 2022, the first year the population dropped in 60 years. China’s economic growth has now slowed to one of its lowest rates in more than three decades; a real estate crisis has contributed to plunging house prices; and unemployment among youth has been so bad that in 2021 more than 70% of those 16 – 24 year-olds who were unemployed in Chinese cities had a college degree. By 2023, once the overall youth unemployment rate passed 21% China temporarily stopped reporting the figures. In 2024, with a new measure that excludes students, youth unemployment still stood at over 14%. At the same time, the expansion of higher education has continued while employment opportunities for post-secondary graduates have dropped. In 2024, only half of the 11.58 million graduates have gotten a job or gained admission to postgraduate study. Recognizing that problem, the Chinese government has encouraged universities to admit many more masters and doctoral students, leading enrollments in graduate programs to double between 2010 and 2021.

Education in China, WENR
Number of total enrollments for graduate students (2010–2021). Graduate Education in China

Unfortunately, the glut of college graduates, in turn, has contributed to diminished job prospects for many of those who worked so hard for good grades and high scores on the Gaokao. As one researcher at China’s National Institute of Education Sciences put it, college graduates should lower their expectations and look for jobs in sectors such as food or parcel delivery; other reports claimed masters degree recipients were taking on jobs like trash collectors. These changing circumstances challenge the very idea that schools are a vehicle for upward social mobility As one joke puts it: “The mortgage is nearly 10 million, the spouse does not work, and the second child is studying abroad. This is simply the three things that will cause the middle class to fall back into poverty.” Given these developments, some researchers see a recent drop in the number of graduate school applicants as a “return to rationality” Perhaps, the latest generation of Chinese students are beginning to recognize that postgraduate study can no longer guarantee them a better job.  

“[S]tudents should lower their expectations and look for jobs in sectors such as food or parcel delivery“

Under these demographic and economic conditions, it’s possible to imagine scenarios where the seemingly inevitable increases in academic pressure and competition might subside somewhat. After years of urbanization that exacerbated the rural-urban gap in educational and economic prospects, a “reverse” migration and a redistribution of the population back to smaller cities and rural areas may be underway. Rural – urban migration had already slowed down before the COVID pandemic, and China’s statistics bureau reported that there were almost two and a half million fewer migrant workers in urban areas in 2021 than there were in 2019, with more migrants staying closer to home. That reversal has been aided by the development of the digital economy and opportunities for remote work as well as by longstanding restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible for migrant workers to access housing, schooling for their children, and other benefits.  

Since 2012, the Chinese leadership has also made reducing the gap between urban and rural development a priority, and the government has supported investment in rural areas through a variety of policies. In 2015, for example, the General Office of the State Council of China issued the “Opinions on Supporting Migrant Workers and Others Returning to their Hometowns to Start Their Own Business” to encourage migrant workers, college students, and retired soldiers to return to their hometowns to start new businesses. in 2017 those efforts took off with the announcement of a “rural revitalization” strategy. That strategy seeks to make China self-sufficient in terms of food production and consumption and focuses on modernizing agriculture and rural areas by 2035. Policies and investments are designed to accomplish critical tasks like ensuring the grain supply, developing high-quality rural industries, increasing farmers’ incomes, and fostering a beautiful countryside. The strategy is encouraging a generation of “’new farmers,’ mostly well-educated young people with new ideas and skills,” to move from big cities to the countryside. In 2021, 1.6 million more people returned to the countryside than in 2019, with the government reporting that more than half of the entrepreneurial projects it supported focused on using livestreaming and other online methods to sell products. 

Taken together, these changes could encourage many more students and their families to stay where they are and to take advantage of the massive growth in higher education outside the major cities. With a decreasing population more distributed around the country there could be fewer students competing for an expanded number of places in colleges and universities. At the same time, if more youth recognize that academic competition is not yielding the access to elite universities or job prospects that previous generations expected – and they see that more studying does not necessarily lead to better results – academic pressure could subside further. 

New developments in curriculum, technology, and assessment?

A new set of curriculum standards and new textbooks may also help to fuel this shift, providing a policy context that can encourage many schools to pursue more student-centered learning. As one description of the changes put it, beginning in 2024 with the initial introduction of new textbooks, “compulsory education will enter a new era in which new curriculum standards, new textbooks, and new classrooms are mutually compatible, from the past ‘educating for scores’ and ‘educating for abilities’ to the comprehensive deepening of ‘educating people.’”

[C]ompulsory education will enter a new era in which new curriculum standards, new textbooks, and new classrooms are mutually compatible, from the past “educating for scores” and “educating for abilities” to the comprehensive deepening of “educating people.”

The new curriculum and textbooks continue to highlight the learning of subjects but promote a change in focus from “fragmented class objectives” to more integrated and systematic unit objectives, a new emphasis on the transfer and application of knowledge, and a transition from “practicing questions to solving problems.” The math textbook, for example, has added two “mini-projects” for each semester that are supposed to take up at least 3 lessons. The changes in the English textbooks create another niche of possibility for more interdisciplinary and student-centered learning by spending less time on grammar and organizing each unit around theme-based projects. Changes being made in the questions for the Gaokao to focus more on applications of knowledge and on problem-solving rather than on memorization could play an important part in this shift. 

Technological developments could also facilitate the development and spread of innovative practices by facilitating more personalized learning experiences and contributing to more powerful assessments. Although these new technologies and AI could be used to teach students more and more traditional content and skills more quickly, they could also help to make conventional instruction much more efficient. As the efforts of the teachers at the Suzhou Experimental Primary School demonstrated, AI could also create more space and time for student-centered learning experiences and to support the development of a much wider range of interests and abilities and student wellbeing. Of course, such technological development in schools depends on close cooperation between AI and tech companies and Chinese schools as well as the Chinese government’s continuing efforts to support digitization of schools and teaching in remote rural areas. 

As I have argued in “The power of condensing the curriculum,” all of these demographic, economic, political, technological and educational changes could create the opportunity and incentives to reduce the time spent on exam preparation and create more balanced school experiences. All of these are enormous “if’s,” however. Predicting generational attitudes, in particular, is far from an exact science and certainly not something to count on. As Yong Zhao, a well-known expert on educational change and China told me in my interview with him before my first trip, “China will not drop the Gaokao,” and taking the “tang ping” route for many is a risk that could have consequences like social isolation, diminished economic potential, and a lower standard of living. 

A perfect storm or just another typhoon? Changing society, changing beliefs, changing schools

In the end, real changes in the academic pressure, and expanding support for a wider range of abilities and student mental health and wellbeing in China, as in the US and education systems, depends on the “perfect storm” of changes in education policies, technologies, economic and demographic conditions, and changes in the deep-seated values and beliefs that sustain conventional school practices. 

As important as the Gaokao may be, by the time I left China I was convinced that the Gaokao is just an expression and manifestation of a basic belief that those who score the highest, those who work the hardest, deserve the riches they accumulate. In that sense, China may not be that different from the United States, where that same kind of belief in individual achievement sustains a highly inequitable system and the conventional modes of instruction and schooling it relies on. 

“[T]he Gaokao is just an expression and manifestation of a basic belief that those who score the highest, those who work the hardest, deserve the riches they accumulate.”

As Daniel Markovitz argues in The Meritocracy Trap, in the US, success in school and in life is generally seen as a product of an individual’s talent and effort. Similarly, failure – in terms of poor grades, the inability to get into a good college, get a good job, or make a good living – is often cast as a personal failing rather than a manifestation of systemic inequalities. From this perspective, those who score high on exams, secure admission to an elite college, become CEO’s or make billions of dollars deserve the rewards and riches they have attained. My conversations with many of my colleagues and many students in China seemed to echo these beliefs, as they noted that competitions and rankings, including the Gaokao, provide the best way to identify those who will be most successful despite the pressure and the problems it produces. Those beliefs also contribute to an internalization of failure and feelings of shame, with many students worrying that with poor performance in school or on the Gaokao they are letting their families down. 

Changing any education system depends on understanding the complex interplay of historical, geographic, demographic, economic, political, and cultural conditions that produced the schools, policies, and practices that operate today. But it also means confronting those conditions, while embroiled in them. We can look for leverage and open up opportunities for people to expand their views, question their values and beliefs, and develop alternative points of view that might support the emergence of new institutions, structures, and practices over time.  Perhaps these generational changes can support the emergence of a hybrid “East/West” approach to education that provides a better balance between a focus on academic achievement the development of a wider range of skills and students’ wellbeing.  

“We can look for leverage and open up opportunities for people to expand their views, question their values and beliefs, and develop alternative points of view that might support the emergence of new educational institutions, structures, and practices over time.“

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Could concerns about the academic pressure on students in China lead to real changes in conventional schooling? Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 4)

Posted on March 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Can growing concerns about students’ mental health and wellbeing support the emergence of educational practices that combine a focus on academics with more student-centered pedagogies? In the fourth post of this five-part series, Thomas Hatch explores this question, prompted by his conversations with Chinese educators and visits to schools and universities in Beijing, Ningbo, and Dongguan. The first post in this series described the “niches of possibility” within the conventional Chinese curriculum and schedule where innovative schools are developing more student-centered approaches even within a heavily exam-based system. The second post discussed some of the changes in educational policies and regulations that created some flexibility within the system but may have contributed to academic pressures as well. The third post shared some examples of how teachers in a primary school in China are using AI to support students’ learning and engagement. The final post will discuss what can be learned from the ways that the Chinese education system has evolved over the past twenty-five years and how future changes could allow for the emergence of more student-centered instructional practices and more support for students’ wellbeing.

For other posts on education and educational change in China see “Boundless Learning in an Early Childhood Center in Shenzen, China;””Supporting healthy development of rural children in China: The Sunshine Kindergartens of the Beijing Western Sunshine Rural Development Foundation;” The Recent Development of Innovative Schools in China – An Interview with Zhe Zhang (Part 1 & Part 2);” “The Desire for Innovation is Always There: A Conversation with Yong Zhao on the Evolution of the Chinese Education System (Part 1 & Part 2);”“Surprise, Controversy, and the “Double Reduction Policy” in China;””Launching a New School in China: An Interview with Wen Chen from Moonshot Academy;”and ”New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with Challenges

When I arrived in China for the first time in May of 2025, it was already clear that education in China has changed, in numerous ways, both in the last 40 years and just in the last few years as well. As I detailed in the second post in this series, those changes have included the achievement of near universal enrollment through lower secondary school, dramatic increases in the number of students enrolling in college, and new policies and practices governing the Gaokao itself. But I heard over and over again that even with the many changes students today face significantly more academic pressure that previous generations. In the end, I’m left wondering: can the seemingly ever-increasing academic pressure in China increase demands – and opportunities – for developing a balanced education system that supports academic development as well as students’ overall wellbeing?

‘[C]an the seemingly ever-increasing academic pressure in China increase demands – and opportunities – for developing a balanced education system that supports academic development as well as students’ overall wellbeing?

Academic pressure in China has gotten worse: The rise of “neijuan” and “tang ping”

I had only been in China a few days when several colleagues told me about the growth in the use of the terms “juan” and “tang ping.” “Juan,” when used in “Huā Juǎn/花卷” means “roll” as in a steamed bun known as a flower roll. But in recent years “juan” has been used to suggest that a person is being rolled in a washing machine the way we in the West might talk about being caught up “in the rat race,” constantly running like a rat on a spinning wheel. Yi-Ling Liu, writing in the New Yorker in 2021, linked the growth in the use of the term to a video showing a student from one of the top universities in China riding his bicycle and looking at his laptop at the same time. 

Meme of a Tsinghua University student looking at his laptop while riding his bike

When I looked up “juan” online, I found a series of stories that explained that the term “nei juan” — represented by the characters for “inside” and “rolling” (内卷) and translated in English as “involution” – emerged as one the most popular Chinese words of 2020. The Chinese anthropologist Xiang Biao describes involution as a process of curling inward that can be considered the opposite of “evolution.” As he puts it, “neijuan” as an “endless cycle of self-flagellation,” in which people are trapped in a competition that everyone knows is meaningless. 

How One Obscure Word Captures Urban China’s Unhappiness, Sixth Tone

For students, it means that getting a high score on the Gaokao is not enough. It means that they also have to compete to get the highest possible grade point average and the most extensive resume. As explained in GPA is king: The prisoner’s dilemma for young people at China’s top universities: “Whether you can learn something or whether it is within your own interests is no longer the only evaluation criteria for engaging in activities. Its value on the resume must be considered. Therefore, this has become a kind of ‘roll’. In order not to fall behind classmates and fall into passivity, everyone has to fill their resumes as much as possible.” 

“Whether you can learn something or whether it is within your own interests is no longer the only evaluation criteria for engaging in activities. Its value on the resume must be considered. Therefore, this has become a kind of ‘roll’. In order not to fall behind classmates and fall into passivity, everyone has to fill their resumes as much as possible.”

Over roughly the same period, the growth of the usage of “tang ping (躺平),” – translated literally as “lying flat” – represents a response to the pressure and the endless competition.  Supposedly, the movement began with a post on a social media site in April of 2021 where the user announced: “Lying flat is my wise movement. Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things.” Since then, the use of “tang ping” has grown on social media as well, including in a series of posts in 2023 in which college graduates were photographed sprawled out in their commencement regalia. 

Photos from Chinese students graduating from college in 2023 Chinese college grads are ‘zombie-style’ on campus. Here’s why. Washington Post

In “China’s young ‘lie flat’ under social challenges,” Yao-Yuan Yeh explains that the term “describes the generations born in the late 1990s and 2000s who, disappointed by their lack of social mobility and economic stagnation, have decided not to strive for their futures.” One worker who embraced the term was quoted as saying: “According to the mainstream standard, a decent lifestyle must include working hard, trying to get good results on work evaluations, striving to buy a home and a car, and making babies. However, I loaf around on the job whenever I can, refusing to work overtime, not worrying about promotions, and not participating in corporate drama.”  

Interpretations of “tang ping” vary, however.  Some I spoke to used it to imply that students who checked out of classes or group activities were lazy or entitled and unwilling to do the work required of others. But “tang ping” also refers to those who drop out or disengage more as a form of resistance, a refusal to participate in the “roll” and “rat race” and all that they entail. Perhaps reflecting both interpretations at once, one survey of a nationally representative sample of adults in China found that, in general, “tang-ping related behaviors” were considered morally wrong, but they were considerable acceptable in scenarios where there was a low expectation that effort would be rewarded (such as working in a company that promised to pay performance bonuses but rarely did). 

Could growing concerns about student’s mental health and wellbeing create a better balance in Chinese schools?

Taken together, “neijuan” and “tang ping” illustrate an impossible choice for Chinese students – join in the endless competition for academic achievement or drop out and lie flat – without any guarantee that either will lead to a better life. Could this impossible choice propel innovation? Already, these growing pressures have contributed to the double reduction policy and greater attention to mental health. 

Although many parents in China have been reluctant to recognize or discuss problems of mental health, a widely cited survey from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2021 revealed that almost one out of four teenagers report depressive symptoms and a professor at the institute, Chen Zhiyan, said over one hundred studies over the past two decades reveal that mental health has gotten worse. A more recent survey from a Chinese think tank in 2023 also found that 26% of secondary school students said they have depressive symptoms once a week, 15% report symptoms twice a week or more. Media reports have also stated that over 7 million children between 4 and 16 suffer from mental or behavioral conditions and estimated that nearly 100,000 minors died from suicide annually. Anecdotally, clinics also report increased visits and hospitalizations, and an emergency psychological consultation hotline in Shanghai has seen a sharp rise in calls from students as well as parents seeking help for their children. 

In response, in 2020, the Chinese government introduced “depression assessments” as part of mandatory health screenings for high school students, and in 2021, the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a directive to strengthen professional support and scientific management, and strive to improve students’ mental health literacy.” Following that directive, the education authority in Beijing required primary and middle schools to incorporate mental health education in their curricula and to hire at least one dedicated counselor to address students’ psychological needs. In 2023, China established a National Advisory Committee for Students’ Mental Health to be “responsible for research, consultation, monitoring, evaluation, and scientific popularization of mental health work in universities, middle schools and primary schools across the country.” In addition, an official from the Chinese Ministry of Education declared “The whole of society has reached a consensus to strengthen the mental health education of students,” and the Ministry announced a series of guidelines to safeguard the mental health of young people. Key steps include:

  • Primary and secondary schools have to have at least one full-time or part-time teacher on mental health and universities are required to have at least two full-time psychology teachers.
  • Primary and secondary schools are encouraged to incorporate psychology courses into their curriculum, and universities are required to have compulsory courses on psychological health.
  • Counties need to conduct psychological evaluations at least once a year and establish mental health records for students from the senior levels of primary school and beyond, and universities are also expected to conduct mental health evaluations of all new students. 

The guidelines also reiterated key aims of the earlier double reduction policy and declared that “effective measures should be taken” to reduce homework and tutoring and to ensure students have two hours of physical exercise daily. The guidelines also noted that to ensure implementation, “students’ mental health will be taken into account when evaluating the work of provincial governments and administrators of all levels of schools.” As with changes to the Gaokao and the double reduction policies, the question is whether or not the pressure to change continues to grow.  Will the desire to support youth mental health and wellbeing continue to spread? Will educators and policymakers take advantage of this window of opportunity and extend and deepen these initial efforts? 

Next week – What Conditions Could Foster a More Balanced Education System? Stability & Change in the Education System in China (Part 5)

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Can AI “ignite the mind and heart”? Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 3)

Posted on March 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

What challenges and opportunities can AI create for creating a more balanced education system? In the third post in this five-part series of reflections on his visits to innovative schools in China, Thomas Hatch describes what he learned from a visit to the Suzhou Experimental Primary School in December of 2025. This post summarizes what he took away from a forum where a group of teachers described the different ways they are using AI and the critical questions that it raises for them. The Suzhou Experimental Primary School is recognized as one of the best primary schools in China. In addition to famous graduates that include the architect I. M. Pei, that recognition builds on a long history that includes two visits from John Dewey during his visit to China that began in 1919. At the time, Dewey described the school as “the equal of first-class elementary schools in Europe and America” (“堪称与欧美一流小学并驾齐驱”). This post draws on an AI-generated transcription and translation of the conversation and benefitted from the comments of Zhenyang Yu and the support of Jianhua Ze and colleagues from the World Association for Creativity (WAFC) who arranged the visit.

The first post in this series described how some innovative schools in China are creating the time and space for more student-centered learning experiences, and the second post discussed how the Chinese education system has changed over the past 30 years. Future posts will discuss the growth of academic pressure as well as the technological and societal developments that may allow for the emergence of a more balanced education system. For previous IEN posts on educational change in China see “Boundless Learning in an Early Childhood Center in Shenzen, China;” ”Supporting healthy development of rural children in China: The Sunshine Kindergartens of the Beijing Western Sunshine Rural Development Foundation;” The Recent Development of Innovative Schools in China – An Interview with Zhe Zhang (Part 1& Part 2);” “The Desire for Innovation is Always There: A Conversation with Yong Zhao on the Evolution of the Chinese Education System (Part 1& Part 2);” “Beyond Fear: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create New Schools (Part 1);” “Everyone is a volcano: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create A New School (Part 2);” “Surprise, Controversy, and the “Double Reduction Policy” in China;” ”Launching a New School in China: An Interview with Wen Chen from Moonshot Academy;” and ”New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with Challenges.”

A warm welcome and an unexpected surprise awaited around every corner of my school visits in China. This past December, those surprises revealed what seemed to be a sudden explosion in the uses and discussions of AI in education. There was an elaborate AI lab at the Shanghai Shangde Experimental School (along with a drone arena and a robotics track); a showcase of sophisticated “kits” for incorporating AI into hands-on activities at the Nanjing PD Center; and a series of presentations at a conference on hands-on learning organized by the World Association for Creativity that highlighted the importance of the teachers’ role in AI. 

AI room from the Shangde Experimental School
AI room from the Shangde Experimental School
An AI kit for teachers from Nanjing’s PD Center
An AI kit for teachers from Nanjing’s PD Center

At the Suzhou Experimental Primary School, I was not thinking about AI at all when the leader from the school, Ge Daidan, and several English teachers, Zhao Hong, and Ye Qiujiao, took me on a tour of the school and led me through the school’s own museum. The many rooms and exhibitions of that museum chronicled John Dewey’s visits to the school in 1919 as well as the school’s growth and development since that time. But the surprise came when I went up the stairs and turned a corner, only to discover a small crowd of about thirty people waiting for me in a well-appointed meeting room. As soon as I was seated at the head of a conference table, six teachers, arranged in a semi-circle in front of a giant screen, launched into a set of carefully prepared and thought-provoking presentations about how they were working with and reflecting on their uses of AI throughout the school. Those presentations offered specific examples of how AI can already be put to work in a wide range of classes – including kindergarten, Chinese, English, Math, and Art – to help create more powerful, interactive, and student-centered learning opportunities in China and around the world. Yet at the same time, the teachers raised fundamental questions about the role of AI in education in general, the specific role of teachers in mediating AI use, and what distinguishes human contributions from those of AI.

Suzhou Experimental Primary School & School Museum 

Questions and Issues for AI in schools

The moderator, Huang Fei, began the forum by asking a question from a paper by Professor Wu Kangning of Nanjing Normal University – “What challenges does AI bring to education?” Faced with the waves of new developments, she asked “Should we embrace AI or wait and see? Should we lead or follow? How will the role of teachers, the form of the classroom, and the ecology of education be reshaped?”

“Should we embrace AI or wait and see? Should we lead or follow? How will the role of teachers, the form of classroom and the ecology of education be reshaped?”

Although it was impossible to capture all the issues that were raised throughout the rest of the forum, key questions included: 

  • Is it too early to be trying to incorporate AI into our work with students? 
  • Will AI provide assistance or will it become a crutch? 
  • How can AI save time, foster creativity, and support innovation, and strengthen teachers’ relationships with their students rather than weaken them?
  • Will AI help students and teachers to extend and develop their capacities rather than undermine them?
  • How can AI foster students and teacher’s creativity rather than stifle it? 
  • How can AI enhance teachers and students’ motivation rather than diminish it?
  • What is the teachers’ role when AI is being used?
  • Will AI lead to a focus on precision and efficiency that may interfere with the spiritual growth of students? 
  • How can we use AI to ignite the mind and heart?  
  • How can future education balance AI data-driven insights with humanistic judgment?  

As the moderator noted, these questions illustrate that “challenges and opportunities are often two sides of the same coin,” tensions that are unlikely to have a simple resolution, but that will require regular reflection. 

[T]hese questions illustrate that challenges and opportunities are often two sides of the same coin, tensions that are unlikely to have a simple resolution, but that will require regular reflection

AI across subjects and classrooms

Following the opening remarks, the other five panelists offered a series of specific examples that demonstrated how the school is attempting to find a balance that enables students and teachers to use AI to extend their abilities without increasing the incentives and creating the conditions that discourage them from deepening their learning and exercising their agency and creativity. 

Kindergarten, Ms. Sheng: 

AI acts as a “good helper” in kindergarten by generating a growth record for each child, based on the teachers’ observations and other data. In turn, AI can use this data to generate lesson plans and personalize growth plans which can save teachers time and enable them to focus on developing their relationships with their students. 

As one example, they are using commercially produced software to help record students’ read-alouds,” and to use AI to track students’ growth in fluency, integrity, and accuracy. (For comparison to uses of AI in the US see “AI Tutors Are Now Common in Early Reading Instruction. Do They Actually Work?).  When they identify students who are hesitant and reluctant in reading and speaking aloud, they can also use AI to create interactive picture books that match each child’s interests and skill level. By reducing the demands of the interactive dialogues on pronunciation, ideally, they can increase a child’s willingness to speak and express themselves.

English oral reading results

Chinese, Ms. Huang: 

AI has helped teachers shift from answering questions to generating them. In the past, teachers assessed comprehension by asking students to answer questions about what they read about in historical, scientific and cultural texts. But now, they have shifted to inviting students to share their own questions, and teachers then use AI to analyze the students’ questions and to build their curriculum around them. As Ms. Huang put it: “Every good question is a seed of creation” and a window into the students’ interests, their observational abilities, and their logical reasoning. Reading a text about achievements in science, technology, and engineering, like the Zhaozhou Bridge, can lead to questions that help make visible the “germination of scientific thinking.” 

 “Every good question Is a seed of creation.”

4 slides illustrating how AI has organized and categorized the students’ questions generated from their reading about the Zhaozhou Bridge

Art, Ms. Wang: 

AI has “injected a new vitality into our primary school art class,” Ms. Wang explained as she chronicled how the teachers are helping students to use AI to  expand their artworks and designs in a variety of ways, including: 

  • Making drawings on tablets that can then be printed on graduation t-shirts or turned into stop-motion animation.
Students in Art class with t-shirt designs
  • Using AI to explore what paintings of objects like their school campus might look like if they were painted by different artists or in different artistic periods as a way to develop students’ understanding of different artistic styles. 
Drawings based on the school.
Pictures of drawings based on the school.
  • Giving students opportunities to place themselves in ancient paintings to enhance  their historical and cultural understanding of art forms like Dunhuang Feitian dance. 
Students using AI with artwork.
  • Developing students’ designs and design abilities by using AI as an assistant to render their drawings in 3-D, enabling them to envision whether their design for an object like a chair would support someone’s weight or collapse to the ground.
Design and drawing of a chair.
  • Building a virtual exhibition hall where the students can display their paintings and sculptures, and parents and friends can view and comment on them. 

Yet, at the same time that Ms. Wang highlighted these artistic possibilities, she wondered: with the ease of generating finished products, will students become lazy? She concluded with a metaphor of hope: “I have always thought that AI is a museum that helps us find inspiration, not a print shop that gives you finished products directly.”

Math, Ms. Xu:

Teachers are using AI to help them create interactive and collaborative activities. For instance, to help students understand that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is always 180 degrees – a fundamental geometric principle – the teachers are usingAI to produce a series of interactive demonstrations. Groups of students can manipulate the vertices of triangles of different shapes, discuss the results, and make comparisons. AI can record the conversations and help teachers identify key words and misconceptions that can inform their subsequent instruction. 

AI and data technology.
AI and data technology.
AI and data technology.

They envision as well using AI to increase the precision and effectiveness of their teaching. They can imagine assigning students exercises to complete on digital devices and developing AI agents that can identify mistakes and then link to corresponding explanation videos and examples to work on. 

Data-use, Ms. Hu: 

In addition to using different AI applications to collect subject-specific data within particular classes, the school also uses AI to help them look for trends and patterns in data across the school.  These analyses make it possible for them to quickly visualize growth trends and patterns in in five different areas including physical fitness, effort, ethics, and academics. 

Five Virtues Growth Chart

Teachers can also use AI to help them adjust their instruction to meet the needs of different classes. For instance, teachers can compare students’ English homework to see that one class may be struggling with pronunciation while another may be more be particularly advanced in vocabulary, leading a teacher to emphasize activities for sound discrimination for the first class and to introduce new content to the second.  Ms. Hu concluded by noting that “AI can give us a clear diagnostic map. But a prescription…is our teacher’s duty and wisdom.”

Hope and concerns for the future

Across these examples, I was particularly struck by the way teachers addressed the common concern that AI could transform teachers’ roles and the effect it might have on the teacher-student relationship. As Ms. Sheng articulated it, will the use of AI help to deepen teachers’ expertise and help to strengthen the relationships between teachers and students? Or will it interfere with teacher-child interactions and violate the essence of their child-centered educational approach? 

“[W]ill the use of AI help to deepen teachers’ expertise and enable them strengthen their relationships with their students, or will it interfere with teacher-child interactions and violate the essence of child-centered educational approach?”

In response, the teachers emphasized that AI can’t replace the emotional links between people, and that teachers need to be able to pay attention to the more emotional aspects of children lives that may not be captured in the notes, observations, and other data that AI relies on. “AI can create beautiful paintings,” Ms. Wang, the art teacher noted, “but it can’t read the crooked little happiness in the sun painted by children. AI can’t replace the teacher who squats down to ask the child ‘Why are the clouds painted pink today?’” 

The presentations concluded with each teacher sharing, with hope and confidence, that they could find a balance that takes advantage of the potential of AI while enhancing the opportunities for teachers to draw on their emotional experience and humanity. As one put it, “I think as a teacher, the real wisdom lies in using the computing power of AI to liberate the teacher’s mind.”

The moderator added, that by following the development of the students and constantly adjusting teachers’ practice and cognition of teaching, “we will be able to gradually adapt to this educational change… It is really good to let AI be good at its skills and let the teacher keep his heart. Cultivate each child’s unique light with educational wisdom. Let’s guard the children’s unique light together.”

“It is really good to let AI be good at its skills and let the teacher keep his heart. Cultivate each child’s unique light with educational wisdom. Let’s guard the children’s unique light together.”

Posters.

What does education demand of AI and its developers? 

I don’t have any idea how many other educators in China are using AI in these ways, but I have no doubt that these are the kinds of questions we should all be asking: How can we find a balance that takes advantage of AI without succumbing to it? How can we enable students and teachers to use AI to extend their abilities without discouraging the from exercising their agency, deepening their learning, and developing their creativity? 

As Dewey suggested, education is not preparation for life; it is life itself. And in that spirit, we need to go beyond arguments about whether and how to stop children from using AI to ask, as these teachers are doing, how we can use AI powerfully, ethically, equitably? 

At the same time, even if we embrace Dewey’s philosophy and strive to engage students in real world activities, we do so with care and guidance. We can encourage students to explore the world beyond their classrooms, venture into the forest or cultivate a garden, but that does not mean that we leave them to play in a patch of poison ivy. Reflecting the concerns about the potential harms of AI use in schools, the Chinese government has already developed guidelines designed to support ethical and appropriate uses of generative AI and to address potential harms. According to these guidelines, “primary school students are not allowed to independently use open-ended AI content generators, which could allow them to use AI to do their assignments for them. Middle school students may explore the logical structure of AI-generated content, while high school students are permitted to engage in inquiry-based learning that involves understanding AI’s technical principles.” At the end of 2025, the Chinese Cyberspace Administration also released draft regulations that would restrict AI chatbots from influencing human emotions in ways to could contribute to self-harm. (In contrast, as Max Tegmark, MIT physicist and founder of the Future of Life Institute, points out that the US government has more regulations on sandwiches and food safety than on a technology that could sell AI girlfriends to 11-years olds and might develop a “superintelligence” capable of overthrowing the government itself.) 

Like the teachers at the Suzhou Experimental Primary School, we have to keep in mind both the possibilities for learning and the dangers that AI brings. It can analyze huge amounts of data and identify patterns on a large scale. It can provide greater precision and efficiency in some tasks, but it can also be addictive, misleading, and biased. It works, in a sense, on the past, on the data that has been generated and made accessible, but lacks – for now at least – as the teachers pointed out, human emotion and imagination. That means that the greatest benefits of AI may come when educators are a crucial part of children’s relationships with AI and other technologies; when we equip teachers with the tools of AI rather than relying on the ghost in the machine; when we use AI to help us imagine new and more equitable educational arrangements, new opportunities for learning and teaching that are not trapped in our past experience. As Cornelia Walther expressed it: “We must double down on the human element. The better we become at being human, at communicating, at reasoning, and at envisioning, the more the mirror of AI will reflect back greatness.”

The examples these teachers shared point to some of the many ways that AI and other technologies may open the doors to more interactive, student-centered activities in China and other parts of the world. But will they? In the end, I came back to the moderator’s initial questions that launched the entire forum: What is the role of teachers, students, and schools in artificial intelligence? Should we lead, or should we follow? These presentations taught me that teachers and students should be leading the way. To make that possible, rather than asking “what challenges does AI bring to education?” We need to bring the challenges of education to AI and demand a thoughtful and ethical response. 

“These presentations taught me that teachers and students should be leading the way. To make that possible, rather than asking “what challenges does AI bring to education?” We need to bring the challenges of education to AI.”

Teachers and students should bring their questions and ideas to artificial intelligence. We need to tell the AI ​​designers and developers what education demands; what schools, educators and students need, and what problems they face. By truly challenging the designers and artificial intelligence itself, perhaps we can make AI a tool that expands our educational imagination. 

Next Week: Could concerns about the academic pressure on students in China lead to real changes in conventional schooling? Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 4)

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Education policies and academic pressure: Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 2)

Posted on February 12, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Can real changes be made in a system dominated by exams and academic pressure? Thomas Hatch explores this question in the second post in a series drawing from his conversations with Chinese educators and visits to schools and universities in major urban areas like Beijing, Nanjing, Shenzen, Shanghai and Suzhou. The first post in this series described how some innovative schools in China are putting in place more student-centered learning experiences. Future posts will discuss the use of AI in an experimental primary school; increasing concerns about students’ mental health; and the technological and societal developments that may allow for the emergence of a more balanced education system. 

For previous posts on education and educational change in China see “Boundless Learning in an Early Childhood Center in Shenzen, China;” ”Supporting healthy development of rural children in China: The Sunshine Kindergartens of the Beijing Western Sunshine Rural Development Foundation;” The Recent Development of Innovative Schools in China – An Interview with Zhe Zhang (Part 1& Part 2);” “The Desire for Innovation is Always There: A Conversation with Yong Zhao on the Evolution of the Chinese Education System (Part 1& Part 2);” “Beyond Fear: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create New Schools (Part 1);” “Everyone is a volcano: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create A New School (Part 2);” “Surprise, Controversy, and the “Double Reduction Policy” in China;” ”Launching a New School in China: An Interview with Wen Chen from Moonshot Academy;” and ”New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with Challenges.”

I’ve always heard that Chinese schools – in the grip of the Gaokao, the college entrance exams that drive so much of the academic pressure in China – are unlikely to change. But during my visits to schools and universities there over the past two years, it was clear that education in China has changed, in numerous ways, both in the last 40 years and just in the last few years as well. Those changes include the achievement of near universal enrollment through lower secondary school and dramatic increases in the number of students enrolling in college – including a five-fold increase in the decade between 1999-2009. Enrollments in kindergartens have also risen over 25% since 2012, with more than 90% of preschool-age children enrolled in kindergarten by 2023. 

Expansion of higher education in China, 1999– of all eligible children in China 2015. China Statistical Yearbook n.d.
Gross enrollment in secondary school as a percentage

Along with those dramatic developments, China has made significant changes in educational policies that have helped to create the conditions – and “niches of possibility” – that can support more student-centered and innovative educational experiences at all levels of schooling. In fact, since 2001, the Guidelines for Pre-school Education have emphasized development of child-centered play. In addition, a new national pre-school law that took effect in 2025 specifically prohibits the introduction of an elementary school curriculum into kindergartens and pre-schools. For older students, changes in the Gaokao and in the regulations governing private schooling that created some flexibility to develop more innovative schools and learning experiences. At the same time, these kinds of changes in policies reflect somewhat conflicting purposes that have also contributed to the academic pressure and competition that continues to reinforce a focus on conventional academics.

“[C]hanges in policies reflect somewhat conflicting purposes that have also contributed to the academic pressure and competition that continues to reinforce a focus on conventional academics.”

Changes in the Gaokao

Although many of us in the US think of China as a centralized government that exercises tight control across the whole country, provincial and municipal governments also have considerable discretion, particularly when it comes to education. The regional differences in policies and policy enforcement may allow for the development of alternative educational approaches in some places rather than others. For example, the kinds of micro-schools that have emerged in the US since the pandemic, began to appear in some parts of China even before the school closures. Dali, described as China’s “hippie capital” or “Dalifornia,” became a popular destination for remote workers during the pandemic and others looking to get away from everyday pressures. It’s also a place where new, small educational programs, many unsanctioned, have sprouted for students who have dropped out or want to get away from the academic pressure.  

Children build a stove of mud and bricks for a school project.[Photo by Chi Xiao For China Daily]
Micro schools aim to make a major impact, China Daily
How China’s Western-style micro schools seek to free kids from the stresses of traditional education

Among the most significant differences in educational regulations, local governments can even produce different versions of the Gaokao with different questions and cut-off scores.  That means that any central attempts to change the Gaokao have to be coordinated across regions.  For example, in 2014 to help reduce some of the academic pressure, the central Chinese government launched initiatives to provide students with more flexibility and choice in the exams. As Aidi Bian reported in “New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with challenges,” an Education Ministry document guiding the Gaokao reform specified that provinces were to adapt the reform based on local context. In Zhejiang, one of the first provinces to undertake the reforms, key changes included requiring only three compulsory exams – Chinese, mathematics, and English – and allowing students more choices in the three elective exams, which include subjects like chemistry, biology, geography, politics, history, and technology. In addition, instead of having to take all the tests once in June, students were allowed to take the elective subject tests starting in the second year of high school (in October and March). They can also take each elective subject test and English twice and use the highest grade for their admissions application. 

The changes did not always achieve their aims, however, as some have tried to “game the system” by choosing subjects that top students are less likely to take. In addition, taking some electives earlier may help some students but it also prolongs the Gaokao schedule and it means that the test pressure is distributed throughout the high school years.  Furthermore, reflecting the regional variations, only 8 of the 18 provinces that were originally scheduled to undertake the reform had started the new policy by 2018. 

New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with challenges

Complicating matters further, over the years, different regions and municipalities have set different cut-off scores and created “extra-point” schemes to increase access to higher education for certain groups. Although the government has placed more restrictions on these schemes in recent years, historically, “bonus” points have been awarded to members of some minority ethnic groups to support their assimilation into society, to the children of Chinese who return from overseas, and to children of Taiwanese residents. Some provinces have also awarded points to those who demonstrate “ideological and political correctness” or have “significant social influence” including children of Revolutionary Martyrs, and some categories ex-servicemen  Many of those I spoke to also explained to me that students in some of the larger cities have a better chance to get into China’s top universities than their peers from around the country. That’s because Tsinghua University, Peking University, and other top institutions have admissions quotas that explicitly admit more students from urban centers like Beijing and Shanghai.   

These kinds of policies have been part of the expansion of higher education that has benefited those in all economic classes, but that has also fueled rising inequality and a growing rural-urban divide. Given these problems, the central government has advocated for the elimination of the Gaokao bonus schemes that contribute to these inequalities. However, these advantages are part and parcel of a paradoxical system that embraces exams and competition as the fairest and most transparent way to identify academic potential but can also allow for some special privileges and where some may try to “game the system.” The recognition of special privileges is reflected in the use of another term I frequently heard, guanxi, which refers to the importance of networks of trusted friends and families that can provide access to power and social and economic advantages. Although as an outsider I find it hard to understand how both the tradition of national entrance exams and guanxi can coexist, both are deeply rooted in Chinese history and culture, developing a thousand years ago in imperial China where the rule of law was not well-established and where many people had to rely on trusted family and friends for support and protection. 

Changes in policies related to private schooling

At the same time that there have been contradictory efforts to change the Gaokao, changes in education policies gradually allowed the development of private schools and encouraged foreign investment in the education sector. In concert with the changes in regulations that opened up the economy after 1977, school options for students expanded significantly, including the development of private primary and secondary schools that prepared students for admissions to universities in the UK, the US, and elsewhere. Those developments contributed to the establishment of 61,200 private schools by 2003, serving over 11 million students; but by 2020, that number had increased to almost 180,000 private schools enrolling more than 55 million students. Those numbers amounted to almost one third of all primary and secondary schools in China and almost one fifth of all students.  

In recent years, however, new regulations governing private education have reversed the expansion of private primary and secondary school options. In 2021, for example, a new “Law on Private Education” went into effect. The 68 articles of the new law restrict how education can be monetized; establish stronger oversight of private and non-profit operators of schools; and require the curriculum of private schools to align more closely with those of public schools with adherence to the national curriculum more strongly enforced.  In addition, foreign entities are prevented from having ownership stakes in Chinese private schools and foreign textbooks have been banned. Regulations promoting “patriotic education” in all schools have also been established. 

“The 68 articles of the new law restrict how education can be monetized; establish stronger oversight of private and non-profit operators of schools; and require the curriculum of private schools to align more closely with those of public schools”

Within this changing policy context, the economic downturn, a declining population, and the COVID pandemic, the rush to open new private and international schools has been followed by a wave of school closures. To avoid closing, other private primary and secondary schools have tried to attract more students by diversifying their offerings. Those changes include offering programs that lead to entrance to Chinese universities in addition to their programs leading to other university qualifications. As one account of the changing landscape of international schools put it, “Whether it is a newly built international school or an old international school, “domestic college entrance examination courses + AP/A Level courses” and ‘domestic further study + overseas study’ have become high-frequency hot words in the enrollment brochures.” Ironically, these efforts to diversify their offerings contribute to the challenges that private schools face in trying to create a more balanced educational experience that distinguishes themselves from government subsidized schools.

Changes in tutoring and academic demands?

At the same time that the Chinese government put more limits on private schools, they also enacted the “Double reduction policy” which sought to address the increasing pressure on students and curb the explosive growth of the private tutoring sector. The policy, Opinions on Further Reducing the Burden of Homework and Off-Campus Training for Compulsory Education Students, both limited the amount of time students in primary school could spend on homework and banned most private tutoring (reflecting the “double” in double reduction).  

Following the initial implementation, some surveys reported that many Chinese parents agreed with the double reduction policies and felt their concerns about their children’s education had eased. At the same time, the restrictions mean that many teachers have had to take on more responsibilities, more work, and more pressure. One study, published after the policy went into effect found that over 75% of Chinese teachers experienced “moderate to severe anxiety” with almost 35% of primary teachers and over 25% of middle school teachers at high risk of suffering depression. Chinese policymakers have even acknowledged that teachers are “teachers are more tired” and “teachers’ anxiety has obviously increased compared to before.”

“[Many Chinese parents agreed with the double reduction policies and felt their concerns about their children’s education had eased. At the same time, the restrictions mean that many teachers have had to take on more responsibilities, more work, and more pressure.”

At the same time, the policy had an immediate impact in reducing the availability of private tutoring and other supplemental education programs, that, ironically, may have contributed to the stress and concern of the many students and parents who felt they needed extra support to compete in the exam-based system. Just seven months after the implementation of the policy, the Ministry of Education reported the closure of over 110,000 companies, almost 90% of the companies focused on in-person or online tutoring in primary and middle schools. Those changes in turn contributed to stock prices of many tutoring-related companies to drop by 90% or more. According to some accounts, one of the tutoring CEO’s, on his own, lost over 10 billion dollars because of the policy. With a corresponding loss of over 100 billion dollars in China’s education market, the closures contributed to dramatic reductions in the availability of related educations jobs in China and layoffs of hundreds of thousands of workers. A once growing market for English-speakers to tutor Chinese students online also dried-up almost overnight.  

Under these conditions, those tutoring-related companies that found ways to continue operating often did so with higher fees that can contribute to greater inequities. Correspondingly, some parents reported that the costs of private tuition have doubled for them, “Our burden has not been reduced at all,” one parent lamented, and described the situation using a common expression that likened the continuing competition for entrance into the top universities to “thousands of troops and horses pushing and shoving to cross a single-plank bridge.” 

“Our burden has not been reduced at all,” one parent lamented, adding that the continued competition for entrance into the top universities is like “thousands of troops and horses pushing and shoving to cross a single-plank bridge.”

In the latest set of complexities and contradictions, additional policy changes, particularly a decision to reduce the number of middle school students who can enter academically-oriented high schools have also increased the competition for high scores on the Zhongkao, China’s high school entrance exam. Implemented at least in part to address labor market shortages, the earlier policies on national vocational education development require that approximately 50% of high school students attend vocational high schools. But that reduction in the percentage of students who can attend the academic high schools, have led some to conclude that the Zhongkao is the new Gaokao, generating even more academic pressure on students and parents at an even earlier age. 

Later this month: Could concerns about academic pressure lead to real changes in conventional schooling?

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What do innovative schools in China look like? Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 1)

Posted on February 12, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Can China reduce the pressures of the national exams that dictate which students get into top universities? Is it possible to maintain a strong academic focus and expand support for student-centered learning and students’ overall wellbeing at the same time? Thomas Hatch explored these questions during interviews with Chinese educators and visits to schools and universities in Beijing, Ningbo, and Dongguan, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhuo in 2024 and 2025. Over the next few weeks, Hatch shares some of what he learned from those experiences. In the first post in this series, he describes the “niches of possibility” both inside and outside the school day in China where the conditions can support more student-centered learning. In subsequent posts, he discusses changes in education policies, educational technology and AI, and other societal conditions that both support and challenge the development of a more balanced education system.  

For previous posts on education and educational change in China see “Boundless Learning in an Early Childhood Center in Shenzen, China;” ”Supporting healthy development of rural children in China: The Sunshine Kindergartens of the Beijing Western Sunshine Rural Development Foundation;” The Recent Development of Innovative Schools in China – An Interview with Zhe Zhang (Part 1& Part 2);” “The Desire for Innovation is Always There: A Conversation with Yong Zhao on the Evolution of the Chinese Education System (Part 1& Part 2);” “Beyond Fear: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create New Schools (Part 1);” “Everyone is a volcano: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create A New School (Part 2);” “Surprise, Controversy, and the “Double Reduction Policy” in China;” ”Launching a New School in China: An Interview with Wen Chen from Moonshot Academy;” and ”New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with Challenges.”

The schools I visited in China were stunning. They were elite schools – public, private, and international – in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Ningbo, and Dongguan. Each school had tremendous resources far beyond what a typical school in China might have. What’s more, these schools had facilities that rivaled – or surpassed – those of any of the top schools I have visited in the US, Finland, and Singapore. These schools in China are still focused on conventional academics and on preparing students for exams and college admissions, but they are also developing a variety of student-centered, “hands-on,” and collaborative, learning experiences that offer more opportunities for students to pursue their own interests and support their wellbeing. In that sense, they are not that different from the top public and private schools in the US and around the world that are trying to implement some innovative and engaging educational approaches at the same time that they continue to prepare their students for entrance into top local and international universities. But my visits and my conversations with Chinese educators revealed strikingly different assumptions about innovation and educational change. In the US, the “innovators” I talk to are often seeking to “revolutionize” education and transform almost every aspect of schooling. In contrast, in China, innovative educators often emphasize a more incremental approach to school improvement. That approach aims to integrate a traditional focus on academic knowledge with more progressive pedagogies designed to support the development of the whole person and to foster a wider range of abilities like creativity and critical thinking.

“[I]n China, innovative educators often emphasize a more incremental approach to school improvement. That approach aims to integrate a traditional focus on academic knowledge with more progressive pedagogies designed to support the development of the whole person and to foster a wider range of abilities like creativity and critical thinking.”

I saw this kind of hybrid approach at almost every one of the elite schools I visited in China (as well in other schools in Asia like the Olympia School in Hanoi). Moonshot Academy, a private K-12 school launched in 2017 in Beijing, offers an education “rooted in China and oriented to the world;” the HD schools, a network of private bilingual schools with campuses in four major cities, describes their approach as striving to “foster a global perspective and integrates the best of Chinese and Western culture to develop the talents of the children it serves.” also reflects this hybrid approach. Wenping Li, formerly principal at Tsinghua University High School and a founding member and head of the Tsinglan School, a private bilingual international school, in Dongguan described Tsinglan’s approach as an “integration of Chinese and Western education, rooted in China with Tsinghua Characteristics.“ These schools, as well as a number of others I learned about, show how to create time and space to pursue more student-centered and hands-on activities, even in a system with intense academic pressure such as China’s.  

“Niches of Possibility” for Student-Centered Learning in China

Although student-centered learning activities are in some sense “counter–cultural” in Chinese schools (as well as in many other systems around the world), these kinds of activities do not have to be forced into the schedule to replace conventional instruction or to take time away from academic subjects. Some schools in China are finding and creating what I call “niches of possibility” where the conditions are more amenable for more student-centered learning and supporting the development of a wider range of abilities. In the process, the schools are taking advantage of places both inside and outside the regular school day where students can pursue projects and other collaborative inquiries and activities in some core courses and elective classes, extra-curricular programs, summer camps, field trips, competitions, school improvement projects, cultural celebrations and festivals.

The hallways of E-Town Primary School

In the primary schools I visited, the attention to student-centered learning, critical thinking and creativity was evident in “signature projects.”  In these projects, students worked for several weeks to solve a problem or design a product related to a particular theme or issue. Sometimes all grades and classes would focus on a broad theme like sustainability, but in most schools each grade took up a different theme like water or the seasons designed explicitly to fit the students’ interests and development levels. At the E-Town Experimental Primary School, a public school in the Beijing National Day School network, the products from these projects include cardboard houses and origami creatures that the students designed and constructed. These and other products spill out of their classrooms, taking over the hallways and serving as visible representations of the school’s philosophy and interdisciplinary approach.

At the middle school level, the student-centered projects often focused on a specific problem or issue in the local community. Students in an interdisciplinary global studies course at the HD middle school in Ningbo, for example, developed products to enhance the history and culture of their city, just south of Shanghai, the oldest and now second-largest port in China. The project, like many of the high school projects I observed, followed a design-based thinking process that included researching the history of the port and developing an understanding of the kinds of products and services that might help support tourism in Ningbo. Building on what they learned, one group of students designed souvenirs incorporating a new symbol they created to represent the city. In the process, the students not only learned about the design and manufacturing process, they also learned how to deal with a crisis caused by an unscrupulous factory owner who failed to deliver the souvenirs they had paid him to produce. Another group scripted, filmed, and edited a video to celebrate the port city, but only after having to convince city officials and security guards to fly their drone over the harbor. 

The high school facilities at the Beijing National Day School

The high schools I visited certainly emphasized preparation for college entrance exams, but students can also engage in many different self-directed, interest-based, and project-based activities. The Beijing National Day School is well-known both for the success of its graduates and for its innovative educational approach and personalized curriculum system. Encompassing both a public school that prepares students for the Gaokao and a private international school preparing students for colleges outside China, BNDS offers 327 Subject Courses, 29 Exploratory Activities, 164 Career Exploration options, and 172 Student Societies. As one teacher at the school described it, “If there are 1,000 students, then there are 1,000 different course timetables.” Although alternative schools in many contexts, often develop outside of or on the margins of conventional systems, BNDS developed their model as part of a pilot program supported by the Ministry of Education, and it has been recognized publicly for its success through awards like a 2014 designation as the only “Flagship Public School in Beijing for Comprehensive Educational Innovation.” BNDS has now expanded its approach in a network of more than thirty schools in Beijing and other areas

Other high schools I visited, such as Beijing City Academy, created a variety of inter-disciplinary courses, including research and design courses where students can develop and carry out investigations of issues of special interest to them as a regular part of their schedule. At the HD Schools network’s Ningbo High School, 9th and 10th graders can enroll in a two-year long course sequence to learn design thinking and to prepare to carry out their own research and action projects as 11th and 12th graders. Illustrating the kinds of projects I observed at many of the schools I visited, at the Shanghai Shangde Experimental School, I witnessed presentations of projects that included the design of an “anti-tipping” device to prevent classmates from tipping too far back in their chairs; a “proof” that used that used Godel’s incompleteness theorems to show that AI cannot replace human judgement in legal decisions; and the production of a competition-winning remote-controlled race car.  

As a result of these developments, even with most classes devoted to conventional academics, students at these schools now encounter repeated opportunities to engage in projects throughout their K-12 experience. At the Tsinglan school, those opportunities include, at the kindergarten level, an investigation of their community that results in the development of a brochure introducing new teachers to local resources and sites; science fair projects in primary school; a 5th grade service project linked to the UN’s Sustainable Goals; end-of-the-year capstone projects in 6th and 7th grade and a culminating “passion project” in 8th grade. Although the emphasis on preparation for college ramps up at Tsinglan’s high school, students can also participate in a “project-period” (after AP exams and other tests have been completed in May) in which they develop a research project in a subject of interest and complete it with some guidance from a mentor. 

Research projects from City Academy

Creating supports and incentives for student-centered learning 

The schools have also found ways to demonstrate the value of innovative educational activities by connecting student-centered activities to field trips and cultural explorations and competitions, cultural celebrations and longstanding Chinese values and traditions.  These strategic moves help to create more supportive conditions for developing a “hybrid” system combining key elements of Chinese and Western educational approaches.

 Field trips 

Beijing City Academy has embedded research and design projects in an extensive set of field trips where the trips themselves provide students with the rewards for their hard work. These efforts began with a one-day trip to a local site and then a two-day camping trip for the 4th grade students. Building on the initial success and popularity of those projects, the trips have now grown to include a week-long cultural exploration of Beijing for students at many different levels, and, for older students, a three week-long cultural exploration of a site somewhere in China. Those extended trips generally involve a week for the students to prepare; roughly a week for the visit; and a week of activities in which the students follow-up and reflect on the experience. These trips usually culminate in performances and presentations where the students shared what they learned (and demonstrate the value of the trips) to their peers, parents and teachers. Notably, the high school students can also elect to work with their teachers in designing and organizing the trips, including booking hotels, arranging transportation, and taking care of other trip logistics.  

Cultural festivals, community-wide celebrations, and competitions

The schools I visited also take advantage of holidays, cultural celebrations, and community-wide events to provide a meaningful context for students to pursue projects, make presentations, and create performances. At BNDS, for example, one teacher in a Chinese literature class engaged her 7th & 8th grade students in a project to learn about “coming-of-age” ceremonies in different communities. In the project, students researched youth development and related ceremonies; wrote reports on what they learned; and produced “flash talks” in which they summarized their reports in 1-minute speeches. The class voted to determine the best speeches, and then the winning students performed their speeches at a ceremony in front of the whole school. At the HD School in Ningbo, middle school students organized a “Cyclathon” to raise money for a local children’s hospital. That event, like other public events at the school, provided opportunities for students to set up booths to sell products they had made and to share performances they had been working on at the same time that they gave members of the wider school community the opportunity to see the value of these student-centered activities

The HD School “Cyclathon,” covered in a local news broadcast

Similarly, at BNDS, every year on the Friday after the college entrance exam, students participate in the “Red Window Fair,” a community wide festival in which students present and share their learning results and sell products to interested teachers and schoolmates. According to the school, the products “can be derived from students’ personal interests, community activities or courses,” and “the purpose of the Red Window Fair is to drive learning motivation from the end of the course chain, improve the implementation of courses, and stimulate students’ internal motivation.” Reflecting the interest in competitions, students vie to be one of the “top ten sellers or even the sales champion” (who will be recognized at the Fair’s opening ceremony the following year), and the students can also participate in the “fierce competition of the auction.”

Images from the Red Window Fair at BNDS

“The purpose of the Red Window Fair is to drive learning motivation from the end of the course chain, improve the implementation of courses, and stimulate students’ internal motivation.”

Many of the schools I visited also encouraged students to participate in a broad range of electives and extra-curricular programs and activities by embedding projects in contests and connecting more student-centered activities to national and international competitions in areas like robotics, debating, and sustainability. Although contests and competitions do create more pressures for students, they are also consistent with the long history of imperial exams and rankings, and they result in highly valued awards and rewards recognized in the college admissions process and by parents and the public more generally. 

Challenges for expanding student-centered learning in China

Pushing the boundaries of conventional instruction in any system is not easy.  Illustrating the challenges, one of the most innovative schools I visited in 2024, the Etu School, a private school in Beijing has faced financial and regulatory challenges that by the end of 2025 threatened to close the school. Furthermore, even if a few schools can create more innovative learning experiences, there is no guarantee that those innovations will spread across the system. Isolated successes do not necessarily lead to system-wide change, particularly when the successes depend on considerable resources and unusual conditions. 

Given the pressures and prevailing conditions, will most schools in China — just like schools in the US and around the world — find it easier to focus on the “innovative” activities that fit into the conventional system with the least disruptions? Schools might adopt just one project period or field trip or cultural experience or celebration (after exams are over) without creating a better balance between conventional and more student-centered activities. What’s more, concerns about the quality of public performances and products and the desire to win competitions might also encourage teachers and parents to dive in and take over or to try to “game the system” to ensure that their child, class or school produces the “best” project-based results. As with any “hybrid,” even innovative activities may become more conventional over time. In the process, projects and other “innovative” educational activities can find a place in the regular school day without disturbing many other aspects of conventional schooling. Under these conditions, expanding the work of innovative schools and taking advantage of the niches of possibility for supporting student-centered learning will depend on changes in many other institutions and the larger society as well. 

Next week: Can changes in education policies create flexibility in schools without increasing academic pressure? Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 2).

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Scaling and Adapting Tablet-Based Supplemental Learning in Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 3)

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

In the third part of this three-part interview (see Part 1 and Part 2), Joe Wolf and Kira Keane discuss the role of teachers in a table-based supplemental learning model and the efforts to adapt the model to three different contexts in Africa. Part one described the evolution of Imagine Worldwide’s approach and part two discusses Imagine Worldwide’s approach to make the work sustainable by building partnerships with government officials and local community members. The tablet-based program at the center of Imagine Worldwide’s work, developed by software partner onebillion, serves as a supplement for regular instruction, with each child in a school spending a targeted 150 minutes per week working independently on problems related to reading and mathematics. Imagine Worldwide partnered with the Government of Malawi to rollout the program in 500 schools in Malawi in 2023-24, with the ultimate goal of expanding to all 6000 primary schools, serving 3.8 million learners in standards [grades] 1-4 annually. Joe Wolfis the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Worldwide, and Kira Keaneis the Director of Communications. (Photos/graphics are from Imagine Worldwideunless otherwise noted.)

Thomas Hatch (TH): What can you tell us about the work that has to be done with teachers to scale and sustain the tablet-based model? 

Joe Wolf (JW): The role of facilitator in the model is relatively straightforward. You don’t need a highly trained adult, and they don’t have to be a teacher. It can be a community volunteer or someone else, and that’s made it a very scalable model in terms of human capital. That’s important, because there just aren’t enough humans in these educational contexts. What makes this so scalable, in my opinion, is that when you have a single child and you have a single tablet, there’s an interaction between the child and the content that creates learning gains. When you move to one hundred kids, that linkage doesn’t change. When you move to a million kids, that linkage doesn’t change, you still have the relationship between the child and the content. Things do get more complex in that you have more equipment, and you have more schools, and you need to make sure that the equipment doesn’t get stolen. But when you have a model that depends on human capital, you need more and more and more teachers; and those teachers need to stay trained; and they need to show up every day; and they need to be able to engage one hundred children at the same time. It’s ten out of ten in terms of complexity when you have an inadequate number of teachers and you have to train those teachers to somehow be effective for those one hundred learners. 

[W]hen you have a single child and you have a single tablet, there’s an interaction between the child and the content that creates learning gains. When you move to one hundred kids, that linkage doesn’t change. When you move to a million kids, that linkage doesn’t change, you still have the relationship between the child and the content.

TH: This is definitely a critical problem – how can programs be effective if they depend on more qualified teachers than can ever be supported? But then there are legitimate concerns that programs that don’t rely on teachers are sending the message that teachers aren’t important and that we don’t need those adults. How do you address those concerns that you’re trying to replace teachers with technology? 

KK: That issue has really been top of mind for us, particularly as we think about our communications around the program.  One very conscious decision we’ve made is to go back into the community to report on our research results. This means going back to teachers and saying, “Look, this is how your students are doing. This is what we’re learning. This is how this work can support you. This is how it reinforces your instruction.” From the beginning, we’ve really tried to include teachers as well as parents and community leaders in saying that “what you’re part of has implications not only for your own children and your students, but for the country.” We’ve had to be very mindful of that and of making sure that we build in feedback opportunities for teachers. Now in our implementation research, we have researchers going out into the community, conducting workshops and creating opportunities to hear from teachers so that we can continue to improve that process. But so far, our early implementation results and qualitative information coming from teachers is that it’s highly, highly popular.

Photo: IRC

JW: I also think that we just have to be realistic and fact-based with the current situation. In Malawi, there are one hundred kids per classroom and the average age in Malawi is 16 or 17 years old. It’s one of the youngest countries in the world. That means the number of kids is going to go up dramatically, but the level of resources is not going to go up dramatically.  So you already have a problem, and the problem is going to get worse. You cannot build enough schools or hire enough teachers quickly enough or at low enough cost to solve this problem. That’s just the reality, and, in that context, many of these countries are eager to pursue innovative approaches. They’re not building bank branches. They’re going to mobile banking and now their mobile banking is so much better than ours. It had to be. It’s classic Clayton Christensen and his theories of disruptive innovation: where does innovation take root? It takes root in areas of non-consumption, where the status quo is not entrenched. The government of Malawi is really open about this and there is a real thirst for innovation. This is being well received by the government, by the communities, because what’s currently happening is not producing learning gains. 

In addition, we have purposely situated ourselves in a supplemental, complimentary part of the government school’s timetable. There is already literacy and numeracy on the timetable, teacher led instruction, and that stays the same. Then we have a complementary supplemental period where every student is learning adaptively, and what we’re finding is that some of the biggest fans of that model are the teachers, because they’re saying, I have a little bit of a break during the tablet program, because the kids are super immersed in their own learning. The kids are showing up more often. Attendance is going up. They’re learning more; their attitude toward learning is improving. The teachers and the parents are seeing a higher return on investment of keeping the kids in school.  There are just a lot of positive things that are happening for that teacher so that it isn’t in any way positioned as a replacement, as much as an aid that just makes their jobs easier and more sustainable.

“[W]e have purposely situated ourselves in a supplemental, complementary part of the government school’s timetable. There is already literacy and numeracy on the timetable, teacher led instruction, and that stays the same. Then we have a complementary supplemental period where every student is learning adaptively.”

TH: I think that’s so crucial. What a difference it might make for a teacher to have a period like that where they can see every student engaged. That’s just such a classic win-win. As we wrap-up, I’d love to hear more about scale-up. What have you learned from scaling across different contexts? 

JW: We’ve come up with what we think are the preconditions for success in partnership with governments. We want to find governments that are already committed to: 

  • Bringing technology into the classroom for teachers and students; 
  • Boosting foundational learning; and
  • Providing solar electrification for their schools. 

We want governments to be already moving on this journey. Then we’re helping them get there, as opposed to trying to convince them to do things. We are out of the convincing game. It doesn’t serve anybody. But we know we need strong government buy in, so we need strong leaders within the government that are committed. We also need a strong local ecosystem of partners that can execute. To help with that, we fill the position we call the “ecosystem coordinator.” That helps us act as a group that is solely dedicated to bringing together the disparate pieces and stakeholders and having them all march forward together to do this work. If you don’t have somebody who has this as their only job, the work will not happen because there’s too much else going on. The jobs are too overwhelming. 

“We want governments to be already moving on this journey. Then we’re helping them get there, as opposed to trying to convince them to do things. We are out of the convincing game.”

We also need a funding community that is interested in the places that we’re working. We need bold philanthropic capital that’s willing to go first and willing to do the things that need to be done to get the full government buy in. We need support to get to a critical mass of schools. We need evidence that’s generated specific to that context. We need the ecosystem to be organized in a way that you can create an executable plan. Nobody can make decisions on whether this should go to scale, whether that’s the government or whether that’s funders, without having that done first. And it’s the perfect role of philanthropy to be that risk capital early within a country. What we’re in the process of proving, is that if we do that well, the program is in a position to go to scale with government support and they government is also in a position to mobilize more international and multi-lateral funding. 

Organizationally, we’ve seen that the demand is everywhere. Every week, there are countries asking us work with them, but we’ve decided to focus on four countries of different sizes, with four different languages. We want to work in partnership with these government and prove that the model can, in fact, scale. Then at the end of that phase, we’ll just open source everything and try to bring in a lot more players beyond us. We’ve decide to hone in on what we’re calling our “scale portfolio” with Malawi, Sierra Leone and Tanzania being the first three countries that we’re prioritizing. Then we’ll also have a Francophone country in that portfolio. If we do this well, I think that will provide the evidence that’s needed to figure out how to scale this. At this point, adding a fifth or sixth or seventh country, that’s not what the world needs. We know the demand is there. It’s more important that we show how we can build a system, in partnership with a national government in different contexts. 

TH: Have you had to make adjustments or adaptations so that the model you developed in Malawi can work in these different contexts? 

JW: Absolutely. I think continuous improvement is the DNA of our organization. How do we make the procurement better? How do we make the training better? How do we make those community sensitizations better? How do we better collect data in super low-connectivity areas? How do we take that data so we can improve the software and the implementation model? Innovation is a messy game, and it’s filled with fits and starts, so every day there’s a whole bunch of challenges that come up and a whole bunch of solutions that make the model even better. We have to acknowledge that as much as we want to create standardization in systems, every place is different. Our model in Tanzania will look slightly different than our model in Malawi, and we have to allow for those bottom-up adjustments.  It’s back to that relationship between the child and the content. That relationship probably doesn’t change all that much. There are slight adaptations as you go from language to language or from national curriculum to national curriculum, but those are pretty minor. There’s a lot of overlap in the instruction. It’s really the behavior of the adults surrounding the program that may look different in Tanzania. Just as an example, one of the districts that we’re launching in Tanzania is bigger than the entire country of Malawi, so the logistics of working in smaller and larger countries have to be considered. In terms of other differences, in Sierra Leone, we’re working in standards one through six and in a context that is post- civil war and Ebola and everything else. That means there are a lot of overage kids that are way behind in foundational skills. In Tanzania, we’re only working in standards one through three, because that’s been a more stable place. Malawi is in between, as we’re working in standards one through four. That comes from very different realities in terms of number of kids that have to be served with that same tablet and that same content.

TH: Is there anything you’d like to add that you haven’t already mentioned?

JW: I just want to hammer home the importance of philanthropic capital. The governments do not have the early-stage capital. The Big Aid organizations are not going to be early – that’s not their job. Nearly half of the world’s youth will be African by 2030 – half!  Yet there’s not a single foundation that any of us can name that writes million dollar checks for primary schools in Africa. The disconnect between the size of the challenge and the amount of institutional capital focused on it is stunning. So I do think that when people say, “What can we do about this?” Providing capital has to be part of it. A big reason why the work in Malawi has advanced is because some of our supporters decided to make a big philanthropic bet. It wasn’t just, ”Let’s fund 10 schools and see what happens.” This was, “Let’s fund five hundred schools in a year and see what happens.” That made it a really different conversation, and we’re having success in finding other bold philanthropists that think about things the same way. But it’s not easy. There’s not a lot of institutions that focus on this. Under these conditions, I think part of the work is saying, “Hey, whatever you care about world, if it’s environment, if it’s economy, or if it’s global peace, foundational learning is directly tied to all of that, and we have to pay attention to the region that will have half of the world’s youth in a few years.” 

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Building the Capacity to Improve and Sustain Foundational Learning Through Government and Local Partnerships in Malawi: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 2)

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

In the second part of this three-part interview, Joe Wolf and Kira Keane describe Imagine Worldwide’s efforts to develop a sustainable model for supporting foundational learning by building partnerships with government officials and local community members. Part one described the evolution of Imagine Worldwide’s approach and part three will discuss the role of teachers in the model and the efforts to adapt the model to three different contexts in Africa. The tablet-based program at the center of Imagine Worldwide’s work, developed by software partner onebillion, serves as a supplement for regular instruction, with each child in a school spending a targeted 150 minutes per week working independently on problems related to reading and mathematics. Imagine Worldwide partnered with the Government of Malawi to rollout the program in 500 schools in Malawi in 2023-24, with the ultimate goal of expanding to all 6000 primary schools, serving 3.8 million learners in standards [grades] 1-4 annually. Joe Wolfis the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Worldwide, and Kira Keaneis the Director of Communications. (Photos/graphics are from Imagine Worldwideunless otherwise noted.)

Thomas Hatch (TH): In the first part of our interview, when you talked about having the tablets delivered by the government trucks, that seems to me to reflect the idea that you’re trying to build capacity; you’re not just trying to get the equipment to the school. You’re trying to build a local infrastructure that makes it possible to sustain the supply and transportation of the necessary equipment. Is there anything you can add about that coordination and that effort to build capacity? Is it just that you have to be patient and maybe sometimes accept that things will go more slowly and it may take longer to build that kind of relationship with the government? 

Joe Wolf (JW): I think that’s a good question. There’s sort of a simple and beautiful framework that Malawi talks about where there’s an “I do,” and then “we do,” and then a “you do“ phase. The “I do” starts with Imagine and our local partners showing that this can be done. Showing that a certain number of schools have launched the program.  Showing how efficiently the school can be equipped for solar; that the tablets can get delivered; and that kids can get learning. In the “we do” period, where we’re working hand in glove with the government and establishing the different functions within the government. But we’re still providing a lot of support, acknowledging that some of these functions are new and that this is the phase that we’re in right now. Then there’s eventually the “you do” where the government is fully doing this on their own, because the functions have been fully built out. So yes, I think you have to be patient. I think you have to acknowledge that certain things take longer than if we could do them completely on our own all the time. You also have to be transparent in terms of the inevitable challenges that have to be faced. You have to talk about things like the recurring cost for governments. This is technology. It will eventually break, and we have to be in a position to fix it and get it returned into the schools, or else the learning will stop. These are crucial functions that have to be fulfilled for these solutions to be sustained over the long term. 

It’s not easy to get there, but I remember a moment when I was in Malawi and we were doing a co-creation workshop at the Ministry, and many people were saying, “Well, what about this, and what about this, and what about this?” At some point, the head of the program at the Ministry stopped the meeting and said, “Hey, everybody, you’re thinking about this the wrong way. This is not their program. It’s not their job to answer these questions. This is our program, and it is our job to answer these questions.” All of a sudden, the tone really shifted.  The head of ICT said “Oh, okay, let me brainstorm how this is going to work in Malawi.” The head of quality assurance said, “let me talk about how it’s going to work in our context.” So you have to find a way to really bring them in as co-creation partners. It’s saying, “Hey, we’ve got some knowledge. We have some experience here, and we’ll bring what we know to the table, but this is your program, and you have to want it.” In Malawi, it took us about seven years to have the right conversation with the right people about the right topics. But as we’re launching in Tanzania and other places the seven years of learning has been compressed a bit. Now, it’s a little bit easier because the starting point in Tanzania has included all the different departments within the Ministry of Education. It’s included the Ministry of Finance. It’s included the Ministry of Regional Administration and Local Government. 

Kira Keane (KK): In terms of sustainability, there was another lesson learned that I think was particularly important. At first, we were thinking that there would be ripple effects, like the creation of jobs for local fabrication or the development of training for local technicians to make repairs. But we quickly realized that these were far more than just ripple effects. We recognized that our government partners foresaw the impact of job creation, ICT training, digital skill training, bringing solar power into communities that hadn’t had it. So now we are trying to be more explicit about building the support for these into the communities and government systems. Now, countries like Sierra Leone and Tanzania are very interested in these additional benefits of the program. 

A close-up of a graph AI-generated content may be incorrect.

“At first, we were thinking that there would be ripple effects, like the creation of jobs for local fabrication or the development of training for local technicians to make repairs. But we quickly realized that these were far more than ripple effects. We recognized that our government partners foresaw the impacts of job creation, ICT training, digital skill training, bringing solar power into communities that hadn’t had it.“

TH: Those are great examples of some of the infrastructure and capacity that needs to be built to get the tablets into the school, what were some of sort of the key implementation challenges that you had to address at the school level to get the tablets into students’ hands for the right amount of time?

JW: First of all, data systems in many of the countries we are working in are really, really inadequate, so we first needed to answer a basic question: “How many kids are in this school?” Our model is predicated upon every child having a tablet every single day for up to an hour, and then that tablet rotates to many children. Just establishing how many kids are there drives the number of tablets, which drives the number of solar panels and lithium batteries needed. We’ve found that when the equipment goes into the school and the children start learning, enrollment spikes because kids that were out of school come to school. Then kids start moving to schools that have the tablets. Even low-fee private school kids are transferring back into the public systems. We have to anticipate that and have to make sure there are extra tablets available. We also have to have a buffer in terms of the solar capabilities: because sometimes the sun might not be shining. We have to do all these calculations to determine how much equipment each school needs. 

We also have to make sure the school is ready. It needs to have a watertight, secure, room to house all of this equipment, so sometimes we’ve had to do roof reinforcements and replace or repair windows and doors. It’s not a huge operational challenge in the grand scheme of things, and it’s not particularly expensive. But you do need to make sure that when the equipment shows up, you actually have a place where it can be securely and safely stored. That’s a process that has to be completed well before the equipment gets there. Then you have a logistical puzzle that stems from the fact that the solar energy and the tablets and the cabinets for charging and securely storing the tablets all handled by different entities. Someone has to coordinate everything to make sure the charging security cabinet is already there before the tablets arrive. Compared to the challenges of building a school, getting all the teachers to show up, keeping the teachers trained, and enabling them to teach effectively, these logistical things are fairly low on the complexity scale. But they have to get done on time and under budget. 

A table of information with text AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Imagine Worldwide Theory of Change

We also have to take into account what we call community sensitization. Very often, this is the first technology that has gone into a community, and there can be a lot of skepticism and concerns about the content on the tablets – “What is this?” “What’s this going to do to my child?” We’ve found that a really important first step is to enable the community leaders, religious leaders, the tribal leaders, the PTA leaders to experience what their children will experience. That helps them to feel comfortable with what’s happening and to take ownership. We use language like “this is your equipment;” and emphasize that they are the ones that will benefit and it’s their responsibility to help us make sure that it’s taken care of. We’ve seen surprisingly low theft rates, given the value of the equipment in some of these contexts, and a big part of that is that communities are owning it as their work for their children. These aren’t third party assets that are controlled by some distant NGO. 

TH: Has that community sensitization become a standard part of the model now?

JW: Yes, it’s a workshop we’ve developed, and it brings together the power centers within a community. That happens before a child gets anywhere near the equipment. We also do trainings for all of the teachers and administrators within a school. We do that so that if a teacher isn’t there one day, or a teacher leaves, there are others that can step in to be facilitators. The facilitator role is relatively straightforward. The children are autonomously using the content, but people need to be trained in order to be able to take care of technical issues and things like that, and having the entire school get trained has proven to be very beneficial. It’s also technology-oriented training that’s valuable to the teachers. A lot of them haven’t had a lot of exposure to technology, so it’s a positive professional development opportunity for the teachers themselves.

A group of people sitting on the ground with headphones on AI-generated content may be incorrect.
A community sensitization session in Malawi (CRECCOM)

KK: It’s also important to note that the people that are conducting these community sensitization workshops are usually from the community themselves. They’re trusted messengers. It’s either our implementation partners who are local and are known within the community, or teachers showing other teachers. 

TH: You’ve already talked about many of the key steps for implementation, is there anything else you want to highlight? 

JW: I think what we have on our side is that engagement is incredibly strong. When you walk into a classroom with 100 standard one learners, six-year-old and seven-year-old learners, it’s completely silent. Every student has the headphones on; they’re looking at the tablets; they’re completely immersed. 100% of the time when people come and see this work they tell me they’ve never seen a room with one hundred six- and seven-year-olds that’s completely silent with every kid totally on task. But the teachers have been very positive as well. Nearly 98% of teachers have said that the program has made them more effective; made their jobs more enjoyable and made their jobs more sustainable. Kids are coming to school more often. They’re paying more attention while they’re there. 

“Nearly 98% of teachers have said that the program has made them more effective; made their jobs more enjoyable and made their jobs more sustainable. Kids are coming to school more often. They’re paying more attention while they’re there.“

The tablets are also really good at helping with remediation, so kids are catching up faster, but it’s also good with acceleration for kids that are ready for harder content. That means you have stakeholders responding uniformly positively. We always ask, “what can we be doing better?” but it’s always “can you bring more?” “Can we do the older grades?” “Can you expand to the school next to us?” Once you make sure that you have enough equipment for all the kids, and once you do a good job of getting the adults to do what they need to do to get the equipment in the room and safe and secure, the rest of it kind of takes care of itself. 

Next Week: Scaling and Adapting Tablet-Based Supplemental Learning in Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 3)

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Next steps and critical challenges in the development of the Vietnamese education system: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 4)? 

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

What might it take to develop a competency-based education system? The final post in this 4-part series from Thomas Hatch describes some of the key issues that will have to be addressed to sustain and deepen Vietnam’s efforts to transform the Vietnamese education system. For other posts in this series on Vietnam see Part 1: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling? Educational improvement at scale, Part 2: Building the capacity for high quality education at scale: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling, and Part 3: Challenges and opportunities for learning and development in Vietnam: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling. Earlier posts related to Vietnam include: Achieving Education for All for 100 Million People: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Minh Lương and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 1); Looking toward the future and the implementation of a new competency-based curriculum in Vietnam: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Lương Minh and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 2); The Evolution of an Alternative Educational Approach in Vietnam: The Olympia School Story Part 1 and Part 2; and Engagement, Wellbeing, and Innovation in the Wake of the School Closures in Vietnam:  A Conversation with Chi Hieu Nguyen (Part 1 and Part 2).

Viewed retrospectively, Vietnam’s recent effort to shift the aims of education and the process of teaching and learning can be seen as part of a long-term, multi-decade, “renovation” effort rather than a recent initiative to transform education in one fell swoop. From this perspective, Vietnam has made substantial improvements in educational access and quality over a period of 30 years while taking incremental steps towards more flexible, student-centered approaches to teaching and learning. 

Vietnam has made substantial improvements in educational access and quality over a period of 30 years while taking incremental steps towards more flexible, student-centered approaches to teaching and learning.

Although Finland and Singapore began the journey to systemic educational improvement earlier, they followed a similar trajectory, creating comprehensive education systems with centrally developed curricula or curriculum frameworks, focused on national education goals, aligned with those on international tests like PISA. Singapore continues to top the international educational rankings, but it is also trying to contend with wide-spread concerns about the effects that the competitive, high-pressure, academically focused system has on students’ development, mental health, and wellbeing. Finland, on the other hand, has slipped somewhat in rankings like PISA (though it continues to score at relatively high levels) raising concerns that the autonomy of teachers widely cited as a key ingredient in Finland’s educational success, may also be contributing to growing inequity and an inability to move the whole system to support interdisciplinary learning. 

Reflecting on what I’ve learned about the development of all three of these systems leaves me with a number of questions: 

  • Will Vietnam follow the trajectories of Singapore and Finland or will it chart its own course? 
  • What are the chances that Vietnam will be able to expand enrollment to secondary schools, to continue to increase quality overall, and to continue to expand and deepen the use of more powerful pedagogies?
  • Will Vietnam’s education system develop in ways that are equitable, benefiting ethnic minorities as well as elites, while reducing the pressures on students and continuing to move in more student-centered directions?  

Answering these questions depends in turn on how Vietnam deals with some critical challenges: 

Can Vietnam maintain the commitment and support for K-12 education and expand support for other aspects of the education system?  

The Vietnamese government has already launched major initiatives to support the development of early childhood education. These initiatives aim particularly at creating more equitable access for early childhood education in remote, rural areas for ethnic minority groups. In February of 2025, the government also began gathering feedback on a National Assembly proposal focuses on “modernising the preschool curriculum using a competency-based approach, fostering holistic child development in physical health, emotional well-being, intelligence, language skills and aesthetics. It also aims to lay a solid foundation for personality development, ensuring children are well-prepared for first grade while instilling core Vietnamese values.” 

“[A] National Assembly proposal focuses on “modernising the preschool curriculum using a competency-based approach, fostering holistic child development in physical health, emotional well-being, intelligence, language skills and aesthetics.”

At the same time, Vietnam’s higher education system remains under-developed, with the enrollment rate under 30%, one of the lowest among East Asian countries. Increasing expenditures on both early childhood education and higher education could result in a shift in the attention and funding that has been so crucial to the development of K-12 education over the past 30 years. 

Can Vietnam continue to develop the education system despite long-standing constraints? 

Although there have been efforts to improve teacher education and the quality of the teaching in Vietnam, there are continuing concerns about shortages of teachers and further declines in the quality of the education force. Ironically, the development of other sectors of the economy means that teachers can now find higher paying jobs in other occupations. At the same time, as one of my colleagues described it, many of those who do become teachers have to work multiple jobs often having to hustle side jobs at nights and on weekends just to cover basic expenses for their families. The increasing urbanization and movement of more and more people from rural areas to cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to find jobs also mean that many urban schools will continue to be overcrowded, with large class sizes. In turn, that urban overcrowding will continue to make it difficult for teachers to adopt many student-centered pedagogies; that urbanization can also make it harder and harder to find educators to staff rural schools. 

Can Vietnam promote increased autonomy and flexibility and maintain a focus on equity at the same time?

Over time, Vietnam has tried to increase autonomy and provide more flexibility for schools and education leaders as part of their improvement efforts. In particular, initiatives to increase school-level decision-making include providing some schools with the flexibility to charge higher fees to make up for reductions in public funding. For example, about 20 of the schools in major cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have been developing investment models in which parents can pay for their child’s full tuition for all 12 grades when they start school in first grade. In return, the school makes the commitment to pay the parents back when their child graduates. In this arrangement, students can get a free public-school education (though they lose their investment if the child leaves the school), and the school gets funds it can use to make improvements in facilities and the quality of education which can help the school to raise more revenue. 

In this arrangement, students can get a free public-school education… and the school gets funds it can use to make improvements in facilities and the quality of education which can help the school to raise more revenue.

The hope seems to be that the increased autonomy will drive improvements and might encourage schools to innovate and offer more student-centered instruction. At the same time, these developments also create issues of equity as top-performing schools may be able to charge more and may be able to pay higher salaries to attract effective teachers. In addition, the increased competition for placement in top schools can also intensify the pressure on students and teachers to focus on performing well on conventional tests and exams. That pressure can already be seen in early childhood education, where, as one of my colleagues told me, there is considerable competition to get into some of the top preschools and primary schools. In order to help their children prepare for the application and admission process, which often includes tests, some parents are sending their children to both preschool and “transition programs” that cover the content and skills needed to meet the entrance requirements. 

A map of the country AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Can Vietnam continue to develop the education system in the face of resistance to changes in conventional instruction?  

Even with the efforts to encourage a shift to competencies, the pressures to maintain the conventional instruction remain. Many teachers, students, and parents are reluctant to embrace the changes. That resistance is already showing up as parents and teachers respond to the new textbook policy. Some parents, for example, have complained that having too many textbook options is both too costly for them and too confusing for students. As one of my colleagues explained, textbooks have long been passed down among siblings but that cost-effective practice will have to stop if teachers are choosing different textbooks. That flexibility may also erode the shared experiences and shared understanding of the instructional process that families gain from a common text. 

Allowing teachers to choose their textbooks was also supposed to be part of the move to provide them with greater flexibility in how best to help students achieve the new competencies. However, choosing the textbook and designing activities is a significant amount of work, and many schools and teachers may prefer to use more conventional textbooks and even those that use new textbooks may continue to move through them in a rigid, lock-step way. Complicating matters further, the textbook industry – and the corruption in it – has to be a part of this change as well. 

Schools in Vietnam have changed and improved, but can schooling be transformed?

Political commitment and funding, shared values, hard work by students, educators and parents, with textbook-based teaching that has provided alignment between what’s taught and what’s measured are all critical contributors to the development of the Vietnamese education system. These factors work in concert with the efforts to make an improved education system a key part of the effort create and sustain a strong nation, with a modern economy, that can defend itself in the face of threats from outsiders. Now the question is whether the textbook-based teaching and shared belief in conventional education will serve as a foundation for — or a barrier to — the development of more student-centered pedagogies and a competency-based system.

A building with trees in front of it AI-generated content may be incorrect.


On my visit, I talked with educators and visited schools, including private schools, like the Olympia School, that have found ways to prepare Vietnamese students for the Vietnamese national exams and still make room for more student-centered, interdisciplinary learning activities. Of course, the presence of some innovative practices in some places may not have a substantial impact on the rest of the system. But if some steps toward competency-based instruction continue to be taken, and the number of policymakers, educators, parents, and students who have positive experiences with new forms of teaching and learning continues to grow, the forces of generational change may begin to put pressure on the status quo.

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Challenges and opportunities for learning and development in Vietnam: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 3)?

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

How can education in Vietnam continue to improve despite questions about the quality of teaching, concerns about the coherence of the education system, and other issues? The third post in this 4-part series from Thomas Hatch explores some of the challenges as well as the opportunities that educators in Vietnam face as they try to shift the whole system to focus on competencies. For the other posts in this series on Vietnam, see part 1 on educational improvement at scale beyond PISA and part 2 on some of the key elements that have contributed to those improvements. Earlier posts related to Vietnam include Achieving Education for All for 100 Million People: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Minh Lương and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 1); Looking toward the future and the implementation of a new competency-based curriculum in Vietnam: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Lương Minh and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 2); The Evolution of an Alternative Educational Approach in Vietnam: The Olympia School Story (Part 1 and Part 2); and Engagement, Wellbeing, and Innovation in the Wake of the School Closures in Vietnam:  A Conversation with Chi Hieu Nguyen (Part 1 and Part 2).

Illustrating the complexity and contextual nature of educational change, some of the factors identified as critical in the evolution of other “higher performing” education systems do not apply in Vietnam. Somehow, the Vietnamese education system has improved substantially even though improving the qualifications of teachers and the quality and consistency of teacher preparation have been concerns for some time. At the same time, even as the PISA tests in 2012 were showing the world how much the Vietnamese education system had improved, the government was already developing initiatives to embrace new competency-based goals and student-centered instruction. To that end, among other changes, new competency-based textbooks began to roll-out in Vietnam during the pandemic, even as many other high-performing education systems struggle to make that major systemic shift. Given developments in the Vietnamese education system over the past 30 years, what are the challenges and possibilities for creating a competency-based education system moving forward? 

A group of books with cartoon characters AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Covers of some grade 4 textbooks of Vietnam Education Publishing House (Photo: Vietnam Education Publishing House)

Improvement despite concerns about the teaching force, coherence, and corruption

The improvements in the Vietnamese education system in the 1990’s and 2000’s were made despite a series of persistent concerns about the quality of the teaching force that remain today. These issues include a low cut-off for entrance into teacher education and failure to attract good students into teaching along with substantial numbers of underqualified teachers. Furthermore, despite feeling valued, teachers in Vietnam are not well paid, with wages that are not competitive with those in other sectors. In fact, at the same time that the “Growing Smarter” report from the World Bank highlighted the importance of a highly qualified, well-paid teaching force, it also acknowledged that teachers are paid substantially less in Vietnam than they are in other “high-performing” education systems like Singapore.  Teachers are also paid less in Vietnam than they are in other Asian countries like Thailand, which perform much worse on international tests. 

Explanations of high education system performance also often highlight the importance of coherence and alignment among goals, strategies, and incentives across all aspects of the education system. In the case of Vietnam, the historical traditions and top-down structure of the bureaucracy fosters a culture of compliance that, for better and worse, can maintain a rigid focus on textbook-based learning and exam performance. At the same time, Vietnam has decentralized control over financing of education in particular, leading one analyst to suggest that Vietnam’s 63 provinces are almost like 63 different education systems, with weak links between financing, information-processing, and accountability. Lê Anh Vinh, Director of the Vietnam National Institute of Educational Sciences, and colleagues also named the fragmentation and poor connections among key aspects of Vietnam’s education system as a critical enduring problem. 

“Vietnam’s 63 provinces are almost like 63 different education systems, with weak links between financing, information-processing, and accountability.”

Corruption across sectors in Vietnam also remains a concern. Although measures of corruption show some improvements over the past ten years, Transparency International reports that as of 2023, Vietnam ranks 83rd out of 180 countries in corruption, slightly below the average, and 64% of those surveyed in Vietnam think corruption is a big problem. Transparency International also reported that in Vietnam there has also been “an explosion of competition for admission to ‘desired schools.’…As a result, corruption in enrollment for desired schools – particularly primary and junior secondary schools – has become rampant in Vietnam, threatening the affordability and accessibility of public education.” The textbook industry, central to the efforts to shift to the new focus on competence, has also been embroiled in a major scandal. 

Building blocks for a shift to competency-based learning? 

In a system long dominated by rote learning and teacher-directed instruction,  the implementation of a new curriculum and textbooks in Vietnam that began during the pandemic is not nearly as abrupt as many might expect. There has been a history of interest in and encouragement for the application of knowledge – not just the acquisition of knowledge – and to more active, student-centered pedagogies as far back as the 1980’s. As part of the Do Moi renovation efforts, Vietnam introduced a new set of textbooks and related policies that sought to support “a more practical and learner-centered education which was seen at the time as necessary for post-war social and economic recovery. Those initiatives recognized knowledge acquisition as important, but also advocated for the engagement of students in real-world activities, application of knowledge, and the holistic development of students.  

Shortly after the turn of the 21st Century, another reform plan put in place a different set of state-sanctioned textbooks that were to be based on newly developed curriculum frameworks (which Vietnam had never had before). This effort sought to balance knowledge acquisition and application by establishing educational aims in knowledge, skills and attitudes. Skills included those identified as relevant for students’ present and future lives such as conducting experiments, raising questions, and seeking information. In turn, teachers were encouraged to adapt their teaching to students’ needs and to use more active learning methods. 

By 2010, some policymakers from the Ministry of Education had also taken an interest in adopting the Escuela Nueva model of education, which had been developed and scaled up in Colombia. That model sought to promote students’ development through active engagement in learning using materials like self-paced learning guides and formative assessments. Piloting began in a few selected school districts, but, by 2016 tens of thousands of teachers and millions of students in Vietnam were using the model. Those experiences exposed the teachers and students involved to some of the key pedagogical ideas and practices reflected in the most recent curricular materials.

At the same time that the Escuela Nueva initiative was underway, the Vietnamese government was also developing the comprehensive plans to shift the whole system to a focus on competencies. Critical aims of these reforms included altering “the outdated teaching and learning methods – which were formerly structured around the transmission of knowledge and memorization of facts – with technology-based education to equip students with hands on skills necessary for the twenty-first century.” Along with the adoption of the competency-based curriculum in 2018 (with implementation begun in first grade in 2020), the government implemented a “one curriculum – multiple textbooks” policy freeing schools from the requirement to use the single set of state-sanctioned textbooks. This new policy was designed to give schools greater choice in selecting materials relevant for their students and their local context and more flexibility in determining the content to be taught by reducing compulsory subjects and adding optional and integrated subject and theme activities.

A group of people sitting at a table with books AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Teachers in Vietnam studying new learning materials (Photo: Vietnam Education Publishing House)

In the most recent reforms, the Vietnamese government also made substantial changes in assessment and testing in order to take the focus off academic performance in conventional subjects and reduce the pressure on students. In primary classrooms, along with eliminating homework, the reforms replaced the grade-based evaluation system with oral and written feedback. At the high school level, the reforms created a single standardized exam to replace a long-criticized sequence of a six-subject exit exam followed about a month later by an SAT-like placement exam for college. 

Summing up the shift to expand the focus of the system beyond academics, at the end of 2024, the Minister of Education and Training, Nguyen Kim Son, stated that the goals of the systemic education reform efforts include developing “well-rounded individuals who know how to live happily and create happiness for themselves and others.” He went on to say: “When students engage in self-directed exploration, problem-solving, and discovery, they develop enthusiasm and are motivated to delve deeper. This progression – from knowing to understanding, from analyzing to applying and synthesizing – enhances their excitement and happiness as they master each level.”

“[T]he goals of the systemic education reform efforts include developing “well-rounded individuals who know how to live happily and create happiness for themselves and others.”

Signs of a shift in (some) instruction? 

As has been the case almost everywhere, the large-scale efforts to transform conventional instruction in Vietnam have encountered considerable resistance and numerous challenges. A review of Escuela Nueva’s expansion to Vietnam by the World Bank, (one of the funders of the project) concluded that the program had a “positive” impact on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive achievement. However, other evaluations suggest that the effects were modest at best. For example, a more recent evaluation acknowledged some short-term positive outcomes, particularly for ethnic minority students, but, over the long-term, those effects appear to have faded away. Furthermore, observers reported that some teachers and students ended up mechanically following the steps in the learning guides – much as they had rigidly followed the textbooks the guides were supposed to replace. In addition, skeptical teachers continued to use traditional methods alongside the new approach, and some parents, concerned that their children were not learning, complained their children came home with “empty minds.” Critics and the press picked up on issues like these, leading to an explosion of negative coverage in the local and national press, with many schools stopping the project as a result. 

At the same time, even in the early piloting phase of the implementation of the Escuela Nueva model, there were some provinces where there were reports of “transformative impact.” An evaluation of from the Department of Education in a northern province with a large ethnic minority population was particularly enthusiastic: 

“Students who were dependent on teachers are now more independent, bold, confident, and excited to learn, and their learning results are better. Thanks to slower-paced learning, teachers have more time to pay attention to weak students, helping to reduce the percentage of weak students. For ethnic minority students, [the program] offered chances to participate in many activities and communicate (listen and speak) with friends in Vietnamese, and their Vietnamese learning results are more advanced. In particular, the new School Model has fundamentally changed the pedagogical activities of the school in the direction of self-discipline, self-management, democratization, and formation of necessary competencies and qualities of Vietnamese citizens.”

Another review of the comprehensive reforms noted similar challenges but also evidence of progress, stating: “When launched in 2014, the process has been challenged due to concerns about the feasibility by public opinion, schools, and teachers. However, after two years of implementation, there have been obvious changes in primary education. The guiding principles of learning and teaching at primary schools now are what the students learned and what they could do, rather than their grades.”  

“[C]conventional instruction continues to dominate but… ‘there may be more competency-focused learning than is often reported in research on Vietnamese education.’”

Most recently, researchers have been analyzing videos of classroom practice in a small set of high schools across 10 provinces. Their preliminary analysis uncovered numerous instances in which teachers were using strategies like questioning, feedback and modeling to support students’ learning of skills like creative thinking and problem solving. They also found that teachers in high-performing classrooms provided more opportunities to discover new concepts and connect them to prior knowledge and experiences. They conclude that conventional instruction continues to dominate but add: “there may be more competency-focused learning than is often reported in research on Vietnamese education, and perhaps more than many policymakers know, given their ardent critiques of the education system that, they think, is tailored to memorization and testing.” 

Next Week: Next steps and critical challenges in the development of the Vietnamese education system: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 4)?

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Building the capacity for high quality education at scale: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 2)?

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Despite a much more limited budget and a much larger population than “high performing” countries like Finland and Singapore, some common factors help explain Vietnam’s educational success. Drawing on observations from a trip to Vietnam, the second post in this 4-part series from Thomas Hatch focuses on some of the key elements that helped Vietnam make substantial improvements in education. Future posts explore Vietnam’s subsequent efforts to shift to a competency-based approach and some of the critical issues that have to be addressed in the process. For other posts related to Vietnam, see part 1 of this series, Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling? Educational improvement at scale, and earlier posts including Achieving Education for All for 100 Million People: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Minh Lương and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 1); Looking toward the future and the implementation of a new competency-based curriculum in Vietnam: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Lương Minh and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 2); The Evolution of an Alternative Educational Approach in Vietnam: The Olympia School Story Part 1 and Part 2; and Engagement, Wellbeing, and Innovation in the Wake of the School Closures in Vietnam:  A Conversation with Chi Hieu Nguyen (Part 1 and Part 2).

What does it take to create a “high-performing” education system? For long-standing top-performers like Singapore and Finland a comprehensive educational infrastructure includes: 

  • Technical capital – adequate funding, facilities, curriculum materials, and assessments 
  • Human capital – well-prepared, well-supported, and well-respected educators
  • Social capital – shared understanding and strong connections and relationships among educators, policymakers, community members and between schools and the education sector and other parts of the society.

In Vietnam, a more limited budget and a much larger population have made it harder to produce and sustain high-quality facilities, a well-prepared and supported workforce, and a tightly connected and coherent education system. Nonetheless, the Vietnamese education system has been able to draw on and develop some key aspects of technical, human, and social capital that have contributed to the establishment of a system that provides almost universal access to education through 9th grade at a relatively high level of effectiveness.

Technical capital: Funding, Facilities, and Textbooks 

In terms of funding, the Vietnamese government demonstrated its commitment to education by increasing public spending on education from about 1% of GDP in 1990 to about 3.5% in 2006. Those investments were essential for the construction of large numbers of new primary and lower secondary schools in the 1990s and for the production and distribution of free textbooks for students whose families could not afford them. In turn, these efforts contributed to the substantial increases in enrollment and access to education during that time. 

Vietnam has continued that financial commitment to education by spending nearly 20% of its budget (almost 5% of its GDP) on education from 2011 – 2020,  a level of spending higher than countries like the US and even Singapore. That commitment was put into a law passed in 2019 that stipulates that the government should spend at least 20% of its budget on education moving forward, though it has not quite reached that level. Notably, the government commitment has included an investment in equity as Vietnam allocates more spending per capita to disadvantaged provinces and municipalities and pays higher salaries to teachers serving in those areas.

A graph of red bars Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Government-produced textbooks have also played a critical role in the evolution of Vietnam’s education system. These textbooks served as the “de facto” curriculum for some time, with teachers trained to deliver the content in the textbooks and large classes of students moving through the textbooks in a lock-step fashion. Like “managed instruction” approaches that have raised test scores and achievement levels in some districts in the US, textbooks produced by the government with centrally established learning goals may have provided the rapidly increasing student population with access to a common educational experience aligned to conventional assessments and international tests. As a history of the education system in Vietnam explained it, the replacement of textbooks at all school levels in the early 1990s “brought consistency to general education across the nation.” 

Human Capital: Respect for teachers and teachers’ expertise 

In Vietnam, explanations of the development of the educational system often cite the respect for teachers and their work and dedication as critical factors in the development of the education system. Notably, in OECD’s 2018 TALIS survey of teachers and teaching 92% of Vietnamese teachers report feeling valued by society, some of the highest rates among all OECD countries and astoundingly high compared to the OECD average of 26%. By comparison, slightly over 70% of teachers in Singapore (#2 in the rankings) and slightly less than 60% of teachers in Finland say they feel valued by society. In addition, 93% of teachers in Vietnam reported that teaching was their first choice of career (versus an average of 67% of teachers in other OECD countries).  Correspondingly, teacher absenteeism is virtually unknown in Vietnam. 

92% of Vietnamese teachers report feeling valued by society…astoundingly high compared to the OECD average of 26%. By comparison, slightly over 70% of teachers in Singapore (#2 in the rankings) and slightly less than 60% of teachers in Finland say they feel valued by society.

There is also some evidence to suggest that, overall, teachers in Vietnam have a relatively high level of expertise. For example, data from the Young Lives project shows that primary school math teachers’ pedagogical skills are the one school variable that explains a significant amount of the difference in the gap between the scores of students in Vietnam and their counterparts in India and Peru. Furthermore, the variance in the effects that teachers have on their students’ learning is much smaller in Vietnam than it is in many other countries, suggesting that there are relatively few really bad teachers. 

A graph of the teacher's values Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Social capital: Shared values, common commitment, and relationships

Along with Asian countries like China and Singapore, Vietnam shares Confucian traditions that have placed high value on education for hundreds of years. That commitment to education has also been a critical part of the economic and social development of Vietnam over the last half century of the 20th Century. In 1945, for example, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s future depended on the education of its children, and that same year, the government issued decrees announcing a call for “anti-illiteracy” campaigns and the establishment of literacy classes for farmers and workers. Shortly thereafter, 75 thousand literacy classes with nearly 96 thousand teachers were serving 2 and a half million people. 

The intertwining of education and national development was also evident in the 1980’s as Vietnam’s shift towards a more market-based economy aligned well with the interests of international NGO’s like the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank. These and other international organizations have provided crucial funding and guidance for economic and educational development in Vietnam since the 1990’s.  

Those I talked to in Vietnam also emphasized the importance of the commitment to education that parents demonstrate in their support for schools. Vietnam’s education minister in 2015, put it succinctly:  “Vietnamese parents can sacrifice everything, sell their houses and land just to give their children an education,”

“Vietnamese parents can sacrifice everything, sell their houses and land just to give their children an education,”

Importantly, students also demonstrate a belief in the power of education and respect for their teachers. 94% of the Vietnamese students surveyed as part of the PISA tests in 2015 agreed with the statement that “It is worth making an effort in math, because it will help us to perform well in our desired profession later on in life,” and surveys from the latest PISA test in 2022 showed that the proportion of class time teachers in Vietnam have to spend keeping order in the primary classroom (9%) is one of the smallest among all participating countries. 

Along with these shared values and commitments, Vietnam also appears to have developed some strong relationships between educators, government officials, and community leaders and parents.  Attention to these relationships may have played a particularly valuable role in the effort to extend and support schooling in rural ethnic minority areas. Phương Minh Lương, who has worked and conducted research with several ethnic minority communities, explained it to me this way:  “That is the power of the collective or what we might call the ‘power with.’  There’s close coordination between authorities at grassroots levels and schools, with monthly meetings between the village or what we call the commune authorities and school leadership and educators. These include school officials like the headmaster and representatives of mass organizations like the Women’s Union, Youth Union, and Study Promotion Associations at the village level. These meetings are organized by the commune authorities, and they discuss all the problems related to the life of the local people in the village and in the school.  Then if there is a problem, like there are children who have dropped out, then the authorities can support the school in that area and they can come to see what are the reasons these children dropped out, and are there any solutions to get these children back to school.”

“That is the power of the collective. There’s close coordination between authorities and schools, with monthly meetings between the village or what we call the commune authorities and school leadership and educators.”

Reflecting on the extent and impact of this coordination, Lương described instances in which educators or village heads travel significant distances to meet parents and students in their homes, and, when necessary, provide transportation to help the students get back to school. Illustrating the shared cross-sector commitment, another interviewee reported that in some mountainous regions, parents who live far from the local schools can send their children to temporarily live at border army posts where soldiers then transport the students safely to the local school.    

Later this month: Challenges and opportunities for learning and development in Vietnam: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 3)?

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