Reuters quoted four sources on June 16 as saying that the authorities will introduce far stricter-than-expected rectification measures, including trial holiday counseling bans and restrictions on advertising, etc., aimed at alleviating the pressure of school-age children by reducing the cost of family living. To increase the birth rate, the Ministry of Education of the Communist Party of China is working with other departments to formulate new policies.
Two of the people familiar with the matter said that in addition to banning winter and summer vacation tutoring, the new rules will also prohibit online and offline tutoring on weekends while students are in school, which may reduce the annual income of extracurricular tutoring companies by as much as 70%-80%.
The new rules may be announced as early as next week and take effect next month.
Reuters revealed in mid-May that the CCP authorities are preparing to introduce strict management measures to cool the private tutoring industry. At that time, tutoring classes in schools and weekends will be banned, and tutoring classes outside school, especially English and mathematics, will also be restricted.
An anonymous source said that the authorities see these adjustments as an economic incentive to encourage couples to have more children in order to increase the rapidly declining fertility rate.
On the evening of June 11, the state-run Xinhua News Agency quoted Xi Jinping’s speech during an inspection in Qinghai, saying, “The teachers in the school should take care of the basic learning of students. You can’t do it in school, but go out for off-campus training. This puts the cart before the horse. Now the education department is correcting this phenomenon.”
Xi Jinping also stated that “schools cannot push all the students’ after-school time to society”, and the school is responsible for the time arrangements for students after school.
Xi Jinping’s remarks are considered to mean that the education and training industry will encounter more stringent regulation.
In a report on the 16th, Reuters quoted an insider close to the supervisors who drafted the new regulations as saying that the education and training industry “should prepare for the worst.”
After the results of the seventh national census were announced, the Chinese Communist Party announced the liberalization of the “three-child” policy. However, young Chinese people say that they would rather “lie flat” in the face of multiple pressures such as high housing prices, high education costs, and heavy pension burdens.
In fact, as early as March this year at the two sessions of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping specifically mentioned “chaos in training institutions outside the school” at the joint meeting of the medical and health circles and education circles on March 6th, calling it a “difficult to manage stubborn miasma.” Chronic illness”.
Subsequently, the authorities in Beijing, Shanghai and other places successively issued red-head documents to conduct full coverage investigations on cumbersome off-campus training institutions and suspend various offline trainings.
The Politburo of the CPC Central Committee proposed “preventing the speculation of housing prices in the name of school district housing” at a meeting at the end of April. Now the education and training industry is included in the scope of the crackdown.
In addition to stimulating childbirth, some observers also believe that the authorities’ rectification of the after-school tutoring industry does not rule out the intention to strengthen brainwashing education.
Chinese scholar Xue Chi told The Epoch Times that Beijing, Shanghai and other places have successively issued red-head documents since March to investigate subject training institutions in elementary and middle schools and shut them down. This kind of one-size-fits-all shutdown investigation is relatively rare, and there are many reasons behind it. It may have ulterior motives: “The CCP regards ideology and education as a’ideological front’ that must be absolutely strategic. Now it is becoming more and more extreme. Brainwashing has started from the doll. The off-campus training industry is unique, and students have a thirst for knowledge. The CCP is especially wary of a sense of justice, leaving no gaps.”
He believes: “The CCP’s implementation of the’seven nonsense’ in the education system means that it is not allowed to talk about universal values, press freedom, civil society, civil rights, the historical mistakes of the Chinese Communist Party, the powerful bourgeoisie, and judicial independence. It has caused great public uproar The rectification of after-school training institutions is also for the CCP’s ideological bastion to not leave any outlet.”
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