NOVPUBHowever, the teaching quality in the countryside was poor. In a class of 30, it was considered good if even 6 or 7 students passed the exam. Later, the province’s education reformed after the Cultural Revolution occurred, which led to junior high and senior high being connected. The 6-year study was decreased to 4, so there was no need for examinations to enter junior high school. Basically, anyone who had the money, time and willingness to attend school were eligible to enrol.
So the level of high school graduates in this time period was about the same as that of the elementary school kids, which was not useful at all.
No one cared whether the children were good at studying or not. As long as their families were able to afford the school fees, any kid could study.
Hence, there really wasn’t any pressure.
Han Qingping thought that the idea was alright.
After all, he was witnessing the once-gangster-like-son start to study so intensively, as if he was making up for lost time. In fact, it looked like Dawang was trying to catch up so desperately that it made Teacher Han feel a bit of admiration surge within him as well.
After all, in this era, with such a closed and bleak future, who would want to study hard?
It’s nothing more than literacy and it was considered good enough to be able to not be completely illiterate in the future. There wasn’t a standard measurement to test the kids’ book smarts either, so what was the correlation? Why would they still study hard? And why did they even need to?
But it was true that the boy who once despised studying was not only doing so to pass the perfunctory exams, he was also doing it for himself and not for the sake of showing off in front of others.
This feeling shocked Han Qingping, so he wanted to help Dawang out a bit.
Lin Lan, “Okay, just 50 points of the paper then. The questions can be given from the 3rd Grade level, but above all, please do not let him see the paper beforehand.”
Han Qingping smiled and said, “Of course I won’t give him an advantage like that,” A reduction of difficulty could still be accepted, which would be Han Qingping’s way of showing his respect to the boy’s efforts, but there would never be a shortcut road like that.
After returning home, Erwang and Maisui had already prepared dinner as Dawang sat in the yard, reading and doing some workbooks.
At this time, the subjects that they were required to learn were also simple. There were mainly Mandarin and mathematics whereas another subject often taught was science. English was not learned in elementary school, but Mandarin and mathematics at the current level were very simple. For Dawang, Mandarin was mainly about recognizing words and reciting some required literature(3), so the point subject for him to work on was maths.
(T/N: As a Chinese person myself, the language is hard to learn. It doesn’t have an alphabet so kids are literally taught by seeing a word many times as a form of memorisation. One can still guess the pronunciation of some spelt words in other languages, but for Mandarin, if you don’t recognise the word, you probably wouldn’t even able to read it, much less understand it)
