The “Tethering Culture”[1] is a culture of endlessly squeezing students’ study time. This culture is composed of three parts: fatigue warfare, ignoring psychological needs, and equating grades with effort.
Parents treat the equation “time in school = effective learning” as an iron law,[2] believing that educational outcomes can only be guaranteed by forcibly tethering students. This mindset stems from long-term conditioning[3] by the “Tethering Culture”—they have come to accept “sitting for 14 hours” as the educational norm, ignoring the reality of student efficiency, psychological well-being, and ineffective learning.
In reality, the main reason the vast majority of people fail to reach their full potential is not a lack of total effort, but severe errors in educational methods and practice strategies: allowing knowledge gaps to fester, the normalization of ineffective practice, and a disregard for differences in learning speed.
Parents steeped in the “Tethering Culture” completely ignore cognitive science; all they have is an endless anxiety born from ignorance. Once students are freed from the school’s control, parents fall into a twofold fear: first, the fear that their child’s grades will decline due to “a lack of self-discipline”; and second, the sense of relative deprivation[4] that comes from knowing “other county high schools[5] are still holding extra classes.”
They never consider that the very cause of this low learning efficiency is that students are stripped of their autonomy and thus cannot independently engage in practice tailored to their own level. The mental anguish[6] of these parents is entirely pointless.
To escape this “Tethering Culture,” I believe we must first popularize the basic concepts and conclusions of cognitive science to eliminate parents’ false beliefs and set education on a path that truly serves the students.
Jarrett Ye
2025-11-16
Author: 勇敢的小火花
Link: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/18606280051
Source: Zhihu
Copyright belongs to the author. For commercial reprints, please contact the author for authorization. For non-commercial reprints, please indicate the source.
“Involution”[7] is not actually sufficient to describe primary and secondary education in China.
Many people haven’t realized the existence of the “tethering” phenomenon, where a large number of students are fundamentally unable to learn high school material, yet they spend nearly all of their three years in high school.
This is not because a few teachers or students lack ability, but has deep-rooted causes. In the second part of the article, I analyze the “tethering” phenomenon and its origins.
More broadly, there exists a “tethering culture”: it is a culture of endlessly squeezing students’ study time. This culture is composed of three parts: fatigue warfare, ignoring psychological needs, and equating grades with effort. The third part of the article introduces this.
I believe “tethering” is not only a different problem from “involution,” but a bigger one. The final, fourth part discusses this point.
I know a high school student who faced all sorts of conditions unfavorable for learning: he was in a bottom-tier high school, had mediocre aptitude, used poor-quality supplementary materials, and had critical, demanding parents. Like most science students, he simply couldn’t comprehend the abstract knowledge of math, physics, and chemistry, nor could he solve the increasingly complex and difficult problems. Shortly after starting his first year, a student like him could only score 20 or 30 points on science and math exams. He got more questions right by guessing than by actually knowing the answer. From beginning to end, he never really learned much of anything; even the exercises in the textbook were a struggle for him. Even if he occasionally managed to learn something, he would forget it all soon after.
In reality, he wasn’t a bad student at all. He never caused trouble and he wanted to learn something, but the problem was, using his brain for half an hour straight would make him feel extremely uncomfortable, to the point where he was physiologically unable to continue studying. He could barely do any of the problems in his homework; the sight of it made him want to die, and he completed it mostly by copying. The teachers could tell at a glance that the homework was copied, but they would tacitly mark it as correct. During class, if he understood, he’d listen for a bit; if he didn’t, he’d daze off, sleep, or sneak-read novels. It’s not that there was no academic pressure, but it wasn’t huge either, because most teachers recognized the situation, and only a few were still strictly pushing for academic performance.
Zoning out and sleeping in class, laughing and chatting after class—a high school student’s day can actually pass very quickly. Amidst this day-after-day monotony, the only thing that truly made him happy and feel a sense of meaning was perhaps his time playing basketball on the school team. And yet, this 1.9-meter-tall boy was tethered to his seat all day long, forced to learn things he had absolutely no interest in, with no joy whatsoever.
One time, this ordinary, cheerful boy said to me:
“Honestly, I really don’t want to study anymore. I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and I still want to play basketball. Looking back at my two older brothers, one of them is doing just so-so, and the other, even though he graduated from university, it doesn’t seem very useful; his income is just as low.
I feel like by the time I graduate from college, there will be university graduates everywhere. What the hell is a regular bachelor’s degree even worth?[8] I still want to play basketball. At least I’ll genuinely put in the effort. Even if I don’t reach a very high level in the future, I won’t end up that badly.
I’m just afraid that if things go on like this, my studies won’t be good, my basketball won’t be good, and by the time I get to university, it’ll be too late to get serious about basketball.“
If I were his relative, I would definitely persuade his parents to let him play basketball. But as an outsider, if I encouraged him, I would only create more family conflicts. In the end, I just told him, “At least get a bachelor’s degree. It’s just a credential; you can still do what you love in the future.” and “As long as you have the will, it’s never too late.”
But since that day, I’ve been pondering a question: we often talk about the “involution” of the high school entrance exam and the college entrance exam, but it seems we overlook a fact: most students don’t even have the qualifications to “involve.” They haven’t even mastered the knowledge from compulsory education, and they learn even less in high school. Yet, just like the top students destined for 985 and 211 universities,[9] they are tethered in school, living a 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., six-days-a-week life. Three years later, they serve as part of the denominator[10] in the college entrance exam, and then go to a junior college or a very poor Tier 2 university.[11] I really want to ask: Is it worth it?
Actually, this story has already explained the meaning of “tethering” quite well: “Tethering” is first and foremost a phenomenon, referring to the large number of students who, despite being fundamentally unable to learn high school material, are still made to spend nearly all their time in high school, often from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., six days a week. They appear to be “studying” at school, but in reality, they are engaged in futile efforts and end up learning almost nothing. However, regardless of whether they can learn or not, they are all indiscriminately “tethered” in school.
Many people might find this fact hard to believe because they don’t understand today’s high schools. So, I will first use statistical data to paint a picture of the real academic state of most high school students.
From 2000 to 2019, China’s birth population remained stable at around 16 million per year. The vast majority of these children complete the nine-year compulsory education, but only about 50%, or 8 million, can attend high school. 30% (nearly 5 million) can attend an undergraduate program, 10% (nearly 2 million) can attend a Tier 1 university, 3% (nearly 500,000) can attend a 211 university, and 1% (180,000) can attend a 985 university.
This data can tell us a lot, but the most important piece of information is: getting into university is not that easy. Even after more than 20 years of enrollment expansion, every year there are still 3 million high school students who “struggle for three years” only to end up in a junior college.
In the past, the college entrance exam primarily tested “high school textbook knowledge”; now, although textbook knowledge is still the foundation, the exam has transformed into a test of “various complex problem types.”
There is a counter-intuitive fact about high school education: in the last 20 to 30 years, the amount of knowledge in high school textbooks has not significantly increased; in many aspects, it has actually decreased. The material has not become more difficult either; on the contrary, some difficult topics (like inverse trigonometric functions, the Newton-Leibniz formula) have been removed.
The reason for their removal is simple: students couldn’t learn it, and many teachers couldn’t understand it themselves, let alone teach it. In other words, the level of many teachers was actually lower than that of the textbooks. Therefore, to reduce teaching difficulty, the natural course of action was to simplify the textbooks.
At the same time, as successive generations of university graduates became teachers, the overall quality of high school teachers also improved, resulting in a “mutual rush towards each other.”[12] Around 2020, high school education reached a tipping point: the overall level of teachers finally surpassed the level of the textbooks. In other words, most teachers could finally teach the content of the textbooks clearly. Those teachers who couldn’t understand the textbook themselves and could only read from a PowerPoint they found online, while still numerous, are finally in the minority.
However, while the textbooks got simpler, the college entrance exam got harder. If you search for college entrance exam questions from the 1980s on WeChat, you’ll be surprised to find that the content tested was extremely simple and basic. Even the exams from the 2000s and early 2010s were only slightly more difficult than textbook exercises. But today, a student who only knows the textbook material probably couldn’t even score 50 points in the math section of the exam.
The exam became harder not because the textbook knowledge became more difficult, but purely because the students’ level improved. The small number of excellent teachers and students concentrated in key high schools have long surpassed the level of the textbooks. To maintain the exam’s ability to differentiate between students and to avoid widespread perfect scores, the exam must follow this top cohort of teachers and students by continuously increasing its difficulty.
This trend has developed to the point where it has fundamentally changed the nature of the college entrance exam: the focus of the exam is no longer on basic textbook knowledge, but on a series of complex problem types. While these problem types are based on the textbook, their difficulty far exceeds it.
Building on this, consider this: for those students who cannot get into a public undergraduate university (about 60% of high school students), what does high school education truly mean?
My answer is: in any era, they are unable to master the majority of the knowledge required for the college entrance exam.
But no matter what, teachers have to teach. In the past, the textbook content was the exam content, so you had to teach it. Today, if you only teach the textbook content, students can’t even do their workbooks. Therefore, teachers must teach the problem types that go beyond the textbook.
By the same token, the difficulty of today’s homework also far exceeds the textbook. A decade or so ago, homework might have just been exercises from the textbook; now, the difficulty of homework is long beyond what an average student can handle. They already have to give their all just to learn the textbook material, but after spending great effort to learn a little something, they still can’t solve more than a few homework problems. As a result, most students are trapped in an unsolvable dilemma:
If they spend all their time learning basic textbook knowledge, they might learn some of it, but it’s useless because the exam questions are too difficult, and knowing only the basics won’t get them anywhere.
If they allocate some of their time to learning problem types, the result might be even worse, because problem types are much more difficult than basic knowledge, and they may end up learning even less.
The actual situation is even worse than this: students cannot choose their own practice materials. Their practice problems come from either supplementary books purchased uniformly by the school or materials compiled by the school itself. But either way, the difficulty of these problems is set according to the level of the top students in the school. For most students, these problems are too difficult—they are neither easily understandable basic knowledge nor problem types that can be mastered through repeated practice, but rather high-difficulty problems that they simply cannot learn no matter how hard they try.
Most students spend a vast amount of time on things they are fundamentally unable to learn, but they themselves are not aware of it. They just feel that they can’t understand the lectures and can’t do the homework, and the few problems they get right are just lucky guesses. And this unsolvable state of learning will accompany them for three full years.
Therefore, although life as a high school student is very hard, most of them don’t actually learn much. This isn’t because they don’t work hard, but because the demands of the current college entrance exam are simply too high—so high that most students cannot meet them no matter what. They can’t understand the lectures, can’t do the homework, and even if they want to learn, they don’t know what to do. In fact, there’s really nothing they can do. The majority of their study time is, in reality, completely ineffective. They didn’t “involve” for three years; they were simply “tethered” in school, wasting three years.
When I discuss the phenomenon of “tethering,” I’m mainly targeting “students who can’t get into a public undergraduate university.” But more broadly, “tethering” has become a culture that affects all students, even the highest-achieving ones. The “tethering” phenomenon is just one result of this culture. The core of the “tethering” culture is to endlessly squeeze students’ study time, just like a landlord squeezing a poor tenant. It has three typical manifestations: fatigue warfare, ignoring psychological needs, and equating grades with effort.
To extend study time at the cost of students’ sleep—this is what I call “fatigue warfare.” Today’s high schools, in their pursuit of longer study hours, completely ignore the importance of rest. A school would rather let students sleep through three classes during the day than end the evening self-study session before 10 p.m. And the result? Not only are students severely sleep-deprived, but they also waste time that should be for efficient learning on catching up on sleep.
Most high school students do not get 8 hours of sleep, even including the noon nap. The most direct reason is that classes often end at 10:30 p.m. and start at 7 a.m., leaving no room in their schedule for 8 hours of sleep. Since students don’t get enough sleep, they have to catch up during class. Of course, they don’t intentionally choose class time to sleep; they also sleep during breaks and morning reading sessions. But breaks are only 10 minutes long, and there’s only one morning reading session, which is not nearly enough. Thus, class becomes their main opportunity to catch up on sleep.
The absurdity of this phenomenon is obvious: because they don’t get enough sleep at night, they sleep in class during the day, and the result is that those 40 minutes of “study time” are completely meaningless. Blindly extending study time is completely counterproductive to learning. Many students are foolish themselves; after the evening self-study session ends, they continue to “chicken themselves,”[13] burning the midnight oil until the early morning. The next day, they are groggy, which not only affects their learning efficiency but also means they eventually get so tired they can’t stay awake and end up sleeping back the extra hour or two they “studied.”
However, neither the students, nor the parents and teachers, do this math. In their eyes, the laws of nature do not exist; sleep time can be compressed through “effort,” and without any consequences. But obviously, going against the laws of nature never ends well. The time you take from sleep, you eventually have to pay back—either immediately by sleeping during the day, or by forcing yourself to stay awake and paying it back with your lifespan[14] decades later.
But in the “tethering” culture, the standard for judging who is more diligent is who studies longer and sleeps less. Sacrificing sleep for study time is not only seen as normal but is even considered a “virtue.” Valuing study time is, of course, not wrong, but to only value study time, to the point of using all sorts of methods to extend it, is just absurd. I really can’t understand, even for the sake of studying, what is the need to push middle school students to the point of using essential oils[15] to stay awake in class?
The most ridiculous part is how many people calculate study time: they subtract sleep time from 24 hours and call that study time, completely ignoring the time spent napping during the day, eating, using the restroom, zoning out, suffering from internal friction,[16] and chatting. Schools, teachers, and parents want students to study more, so they are happy to see students “launch satellites”[17] with their study hours. The students themselves have bought into this, with many even claiming to study sixteen or seventeen hours a day. I just find it laughable. You have to know, at Hengshui High School, the epitome of involution, students’ study time is only 14 hours and 20 minutes a day. Do they really think they are supermen who only need four or five hours of sleep?
Students are people too, with their own joys and sorrows. But in the eyes of a considerable number of teachers and parents, students should devote all their waking hours to studying; they shouldn’t rest, nor should they have fun. They take it for granted that students can do this.
There are many parents like this: their child boards at school for six days a week. On Saturday evening, they finally come home, grab their phone, and play on it all night, sleeping in until noon the next day. The parents see this and are very displeased, thinking their child is “not working hard enough.” In their view, students should be studying voluntarily, even on weekends. And if they aren’t? Then they’ll spend money to send them to tutoring classes.
These parents seem to lack basic arithmetic skills. They don’t realize that the vast majority of a student’s study time is spent at school; those dozens of hours during the week are what’s crucial, while the little bit of time off each week is fundamentally irrelevant. They also don’t understand what it means to sit in a classroom for over ten hours a day. In these parents’ understanding, “study hard” means “study hard right under my nose.”
(As a day student, I have deep personal experience with this. For my three years of high school, it was 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. six days a week, with only Sunday evening off from self-study. When I took my only shower of the week on Sunday night and turned on my phone to watch a movie, my parents would ask why I wasn’t studying. After lunch at home during the noon break, with the remaining few dozen minutes, I would choose to relax with my phone instead of doing homework, and my parents would again think I was “not as diligent as before.”)
The actions of these parents actually align perfectly with the school’s. Family and school seem to have formed a united front, tightly controlling every minute and second of a student’s life. Strictly managing students’ time and depriving them of the right to entertainment is not just the parents’ idea; it’s also the reality students face at school. During the ten-minute break between classes, students are supposed to relax, but there are always teachers who demand they stay in their seats to “preview” the next lesson. Some even watch you during the lunch break to see if you’re doing problems.
Some teachers, in the words of Lu Xun, exhibit “widow-ism,” where they “feel hatred upon seeing someone innocent and happy.”[18] They can’t stand to see students happy. They’ll intervene if a student reads a non-textbook, they’ll intervene if students chat after class, as if any time a student isn’t studying is wasted time. There are other teachers who don’t micromanage these details but assign a colossal amount of homework, so much that even the best students have to spend three or four hours on it. This is especially true for some junior high teachers, who have no regard for what time students go to sleep and even feel that students shouldn’t have any entertainment. Their strategy is to drain all of the students’ time with homework.
What’s more terrifying is that parents are almost always willing to cooperate. These parents do occasionally feel sorry for their children, but they still think studying is more important. So, not only do they supervise their children’s homework, but they also use their children’s pitifully small amount of free time for tutoring classes. The pressure on many junior high students now is comparable to that of high school students. They do homework until midnight every day and go from one tutoring class to another on Saturdays and Sundays, with almost no time to rest. This is even more absurd than high school. High school students work hard to get into university; are junior high students working this hard just to get into high school? At this level of intensity, they are less like students and more like slaves to studying.
If we are to still treat students as human beings, we must admit that they have a need for entertainment. After a week of school life, they instinctively want to relax. They need to release stress, they need play to recover physically and mentally, so they can face the next phase of learning in a better state. Besides, studying is so tedious, and smartphones are so much fun; when you compare the two, the choice is crystal clear.
However, there are always people who want to go against human nature, who think students should live an ascetic life and that “play” is “self-indulgence.” But high school students are at their most restless age; asceticism is the last thing possible. Forcibly suppressing them with external pressure only makes the students miserable and twisted. They end up only focused on doing problems, losing even basic social skills, unable to even speak coherently in front of someone of the opposite sex.
Unfortunately, in the “tethering” culture, a student is first a student, and only then a person. Nowadays, even in pig farming, they’ve started paying attention to the pigs’ emotional state to improve productivity. Yet, no one cares about the psychological needs of high school students; they are simply required to be ascetics, studying without any entertainment.
To be fair, students’ psychological needs are not completely ignored. To ensure learning efficiency, the “tethering” culture instills this idea in students: effort leads to high scores, poor grades are because you’re not working hard enough, and effort can solve all problems.
This idea is not entirely wrong. But for high school studies, the role of IQ is indeed far greater than that of effort. Students are aware of this, so they don’t fully accept this notion. But they are indeed deeply influenced by it and will use “as long as I work hard, I can get into a better university” to motivate themselves.
This idea has become the biggest driver of students’ efforts. When their grades drop, parents and teachers will criticize them, and the students will also doubt themselves, “Am I not working hard enough?” And when their grades improve, everyone will think “the hard work has paid off.” In this way, grades and effort become equated in their minds. In their view, there are no problems in learning that cannot be solved by effort; if there are, then just double the effort.
This idea is also accompanied by a set of motivational stories, common ones being:
The Hengshui Myth: “Hengshui students study 14 hours and 20 minutes every day.” “They memorize books while running, while eating, and even while using the toilet.”
The Legend of the Top Student: “This student studied fifteen hours a day, and that’s why they got into Tsinghua.”
The Underdog Story: “So-and-so’s child, even though their high school entrance exam scores were poor and they didn’t get into a good class, they worked extremely hard and eventually got into a 985 university.” “The universe is not yet settled; you and I could both be dark horses.”[19]
Schools and parents constantly feed students this “chicken soup,”[20] pump them full of “chicken blood,”[21] and use these near-PUA[22] theories to justify fatigue warfare and the neglect of students’ psychological needs. These stories have even become a spiritual food for many, driving countless high school students to exploit themselves.
I’m not against effort, nor am I against motivation. Effort is right, and motivation is good. The problem is, you cannot believe that effort can solve everything. You have to recognize that human power has its limits. Subjective initiative is certainly useful, but there are times when it’s not. If you don’t realize this, if your head is filled with too much chicken soup and you stubbornly see effort as the only way to solve all problems, you will one day suffer from cognitive dissonance.
Imagine a scenario: a student gets into a key high school through relentless effort and tons of practice problems. He has always believed that effort can be exchanged for scores. But after starting high school, he discovers that no matter how hard he works, he can’t even reach the class average. Meanwhile, there’s a classmate who sleeps in class every day and doesn’t do homework, yet easily scores among the top in the class. Problems that he can’t figure out for the life of him, this classmate understands with just a glance. What a huge psychological blow this would be to him.
There are many students like this. They will suffer from internal friction, blame themselves, and then develop low self-esteem. If they can’t change their way of thinking, they might even completely lose confidence in their studies, eventually giving up on learning, and even becoming depressed.
From the previous discussion, we can form a complete definition of “tethering”: The “tethering culture” refers to the unlimited squeezing of students’ study time. This squeezing is composed of three parts—fatigue warfare, ignoring psychological needs, and equating grades with effort. This culture directly leads to a large number of students being tethered in school for three hard years, even if they learn nothing. Next, I will explain why “tethering” is not only a different problem from “involution,” but a bigger one.
The focus of “tethering” and “involution” is completely different.
The focus of “involution” is on the outcome of the competition. It emphasizes that excessive competition yields no benefits and only leads to internal friction. For example, everyone frantically does practice problems and goes to tutoring, only to find that the returns are diminishing.
The focus of “tethering” is on the process of the competition. It emphasizes that the methods of competition are inefficient or even ineffective.
To illustrate this difference more vividly, let me tell two jokes:
Both jokes start the same way: a school holds an internal swimming competition. First place gets 50 yuan, and the top three get 10 yuan. The problem is, the students basically can’t swim, so they need training.
Following the logic of “involution,” the story would go like this: the teachers arrange high-intensity training for the students, four hours a day for a full month. In the end, the competition is a success. But regardless of whether they won a prize, these students never swam again.
Following the logic of “tethering,” the story goes like this: due to a lack of a pool and coaches, and the students having no basic comfort in the water, the teachers require them to practice on dry land for four hours a day—practicing arm strokes, holding their breath, and jumping, and even memorizing the rules of swimming competitions. But because they have never been in the water, on the day of the competition, most of them just sink.
“Tethering” means that many of the things done for the sake of competition are actually ineffective and do not improve competitiveness. Looking back at the three main tactics of the “tethering culture”—fatigue warfare, ignoring psychological needs, and equating grades with effort—it’s easy to see its problem: it only cares about duration, not efficiency or effectiveness.
If one cared about efficiency, they would let students get enough sleep to ensure they have ample energy to study during the day, or at least sleep through fewer classes. They would pay attention to students’ psychological needs, since a better mood leads to higher learning efficiency.
If one cared about effectiveness, there would be no need to make most students sit in the classroom for over ten hours, because they don’t actually learn anything in those extra hours. It would be better to properly teach the basic knowledge from the textbook, since most students can, at best, only understand the textbook.
From these perspectives, “tethering” is not just another form of “involution,” but a deeper and more widespread problem. If “involution” is a waste of young people’s precious time, then “tethering” is an inefficient or even ineffective waste—a double waste.
I believe “tethering” is a bigger problem than “involution” for three reasons: “tethering” is more widespread, more passive, and also more solvable.
(1) “Tethering” is more widespread than “involution”
“Involution” is the further contest among better-performing students. For example, after mastering textbook knowledge, they pursue more difficult and complex problem-solving techniques. To use an analogy, “involution” is like “knowing the character isn’t enough, you also have to know the four ways to write the character ‘hui’.”[23] But the problem is, only those who know many characters are qualified to compete over the four ways to write ‘hui’ or the “48 models of junior high geometry.”
“Tethering,” on the other hand, is different. It is an “indiscriminate squeezing” that covers all students. Most students have no ability to participate in the competition of “involution” because their grasp of even basic textbook knowledge is fragmented. For these students, the key issue is not “not involving enough,” but “not learning well.”
However, even if they can’t learn and don’t want to learn, they still have to be tethered in the classroom, wasting their time. On the surface, they spend 14 hours a day at school, but in reality, half of that time is spent zoning out, daydreaming, chatting, and sleeping. The other half is spent “learning” stuff they can’t even understand, “hallucinating in front of a dead plant.” The truly effective study time is probably less than 4 hours. This phenomenon is not essentially “involution,” but “tethering.” “Involution” is about who is stronger, while “tethering” is about who can sit longer.
Therefore, the scope of “tethering” is clearly larger than that of “involution.” The small minority of high-level students are involving themselves to death after mastering the textbook, while the majority of students are just tethered within the education system, half-asleep for half the time, and bearing the consequences of the top students’ ever-intensifying involution and the resulting harder exam questions for the other half.
(2) “Tethering” is more passive than “involution”
“Involution” is accompanied by some degree of autonomy. To improve their grades, students will also take the initiative to work hard, such as by doing practice problems or attending tutoring. Although there is an element of being forced, it is ultimately a personal choice.
“Tethering,” however, is completely passive; it is imposed by the education system. For most students, they objectively lack the ability to involve, and subjectively do not want to. All they gain from “tethered” learning is constant self-negation. They don’t want to be at school, but “tethering” gives them no choice. Even if a student doesn’t want to involve and only wants to study four or five hours a day, they still have to be tethered at school from morning till night, unable to do anything else.
(3) “Tethering” is more solvable than “involution”
“Involution” is about competing for high-quality, scarce resources, and it’s hard to cool down this kind of competition. For example, studying 14 hours a day to get into a Tier 2 university is clearly unnecessary; but studying 14 hours a day to get into Tsinghua is perfectly understandable. High-level students will continue to involve—after the college entrance exam, they’ll involve in the “Strong Base Plan,”[24] and after that, they’ll involve in academic competitions. If you tell these students not to involve, they probably wouldn’t want to stop themselves. Therefore, “involution” cannot be solved.
“Tethering” is more like the majority being forced to run alongside the main competitors. This is something that could potentially be reversed. For most students, their 14 hours at school are basically spent just getting by. Tethering them for a few hours less would not have much impact on their studies and could even make them a bit happier.
However, there is a major obstacle to solving “tethering,” and that is the obsession of parents. Let me give an example.
Cao Fengze once said somewhere that if you include more niche, difficult, and weird questions on exams, so that most students can’t solve them no matter how hard they try, then they won’t have to try anymore. The original quote is brilliant:
“The biggest characteristic of niche, difficult, and weird problems is how hard they are to learn compared to ordinary problems. If you can do them, you get it at a glance, after just a few practice problems. If you can’t, then even if you stay up for a hundred nights and do three hundred practice sets, you still won’t get it. This way, neither the kids who can do them nor the kids who can’t will invest all their energy into doing practice problems, because the ones who can don’t need to, and for the ones who can’t, it’s useless even if they work themselves to death. The children will then spend more of their time on other things.”
This idea is largely unworkable because parents cannot let go of their obsession. They are unwilling to believe that their child is also an ordinary person; they are unwilling to believe that their child truly cannot learn it. They will only think that their child is not working hard enough, so they will continue to force their child to learn these things. They believe that as long as their child keeps trying, they might just “have an epiphany”[25] one day. Therefore, they will continue to hope that the school tethers their child, and if the school won’t do it, they will tether the child themselves.
However, “tethering” is not unsolvable. As long as parents can accept reality, reducing the time most students are tethered is achievable. The problem of “involution,” on the other hand, is one where even if you accept reality, it’s useless—you still have to involve. Therefore, “tethering” is more solvable than “involution.” And a problem that is solvable but has not been solved is clearly the bigger problem.
Tethering (拴, shuān): The author’s central concept. The literal meaning is “to tie up” or “to leash.” It metaphorically describes students who are physically bound to their desks for long hours but are not mentally engaged or learning effectively. They are “tethered” to the system without real progress.
Iron law (铁律, tiělǜ): A strong, direct term indicating a belief held as an unshakeable, absolute rule.
Conditioning (驯化, xùnhuà): The original Chinese word means “taming” or “domestication.” In this context, it carries the negative connotation of being broken-in or conditioned like an animal, rather than educated.
Sense of relative deprivation (相对剥夺感, xiāngduì bōduógǎn): A standard sociological term referring to the feeling of being unfairly disadvantaged when comparing one’s own situation to that of others. Here, it captures the parental anxiety of “falling behind” other students who are studying even more.
County high schools (县中, xiànzhōng): High schools located in smaller counties, which are often stereotyped as being even more intense and singularly focused on rote learning and long hours than their urban counterparts. The term evokes the image of a hyper-competitive “exam factory” where the Gaokao (college entrance exam) is seen as the only path to success.
Mental anguish (心理内耗, xīnlǐ nèihào): Literally “psychological internal friction.” This term describes wasted mental and emotional energy spent on anxiety, worry, and counterproductive thoughts
Involution (卷, juǎn): A key piece of modern Chinese slang referring to a zero-sum rat race where participants put in ever-increasing effort for diminishing returns, simply to keep up with peers. In education, it signifies an endless cycle of more homework, tutoring, and less sleep.
“What the hell is... worth?” (算个鸡毛, suàn ge jī mao): Literally “counts as a chicken feather.” A coarse but common slang expression meaning “worthless” or “means nothing.”
985 and 211 Universities: These numbers refer to “Project 985” and “Project 211,” government initiatives that created the top tiers of higher education in China.
Denominator (分母, fēnmǔ): A metaphor for being just an insignificant number in the massive pool of exam takers, serving only to pad the statistics for the successful few (the “numerator”).
Junior College (大专, dàzhuān) and Tier 2 University (二本, èrběn): Lower tiers in the Chinese higher education hierarchy, below the elite 985/211 and regular Tier 1 (一本) universities.
Mutual rush towards each other (双向奔赴, shuāngxiàng bēnfù): A popular, often romantic internet phrase for two parties enthusiastically moving towards a common goal. The author uses it sarcastically to describe how teachers’ improving standards were met by deliberately simplified textbooks.
To chicken oneself (鸡自己, jī zìjǐ): From the slang “chicken baby” (鸡娃), referring to parents “pumping” their kids with extra classes. Here, it means to push oneself relentlessly or grind intensely.
Lifespan (阳寿, yángshòu): From Chinese folk belief, referring to one’s allotted time in the mortal world. “Paying it back with your lifespan” is a common dramatic expression for something that will shorten your life.
Essential oils (风油精, fēngyóujīng): Specifically, a common Chinese mentholated essential oil similar to Tiger Balm. It has a very strong, sharp scent and is often applied to the temples to jolt oneself awake.
Internal friction (内耗, nèihào): In a psychological context, this refers to mental energy wasted on anxiety, overthinking, and self-doubt, which detracts from productive tasks.
To launch satellites (放卫星, fàng wèixīng): A historical idiom from China’s Great Leap Forward (1950s), when communes made wildly exaggerated claims about crop yields. It now means to boast or make ridiculously inflated claims.
“Widow-ism” (寡妇主义, guǎfu zhǔyì): A concept from the famous writer Lu Xun, describing a bitter, joyless mentality that resents seeing happiness in others.
“The universe is not yet settled; you and I could both be dark horses” (乾坤未定，你我皆是黑马): A popular motivational slogan for students, meaning the final outcome is not yet decided, so anyone has a chance to be a surprise winner.
Chicken soup (鸡汤, jītāng): Refers to “chicken soup for the soul” type stories—simple, feel-good motivational anecdotes that offer superficial comfort without addressing root problems.
Injecting chicken blood (打鸡血, dǎ jīxuè): Slang for getting someone (or oneself) extremely hyped up or over-excited, similar to “pumping someone full of adrenaline.”
PUA: The English acronym for “Pick-Up Artist” has been adopted into Chinese internet slang with a much broader meaning: any kind of psychological manipulation, gaslighting, or emotional control.
The four ways to write the character ‘hui’ (回字的四种写法): A famous literary allusion to Lu Xun’s character Kong Yiji, a pedantic scholar who prided himself on useless trivia. The phrase has become a symbol for overly detailed and pointless knowledge, perfectly capturing the essence of educational involution.
Strong Base Plan (强基计划, qiángjī jìhuà): A special, highly competitive university admission program for students with outstanding abilities in basic sciences, involving an additional, very difficult test.
To have an epiphany (开窍, kāiqiào): Literally “to open the orifices (of the mind).” It means to suddenly understand something or for one’s mind to become enlightened.