Involution, derived from work of Clifford Geertz, is now widely cited to describe the current dilemma faced by the young generation in China (see BBC News for an overview). Speaking of education, a surge in family education spending overwhelmed parents as well as school students who aim to excel in the mainstream education system. Such phenomena stirred up wide-spread criticism on parents, teachers, schools, extracurricular institutions and the government, literally everyone involved in education, as well as a sense of nostalgia for the less competitive past. Among them, a popular view equated Involution to Theater Effect and appealed people to ‘sit down’, which seemed to be embodied in recent policies constraining online education and extracurricular activities. Well intended should this advocacy and policies be though, they seem to be expediencies at best and may even induce detrimental consequences.
The superficial similarity between Involution and Theater Effect actually conceals the essential discrepancy of them. The person who first stands up in the theater is bound to blame for his/her selfishness and ignorance of public interests, whereas students involved in over competition are not morally responsible for their peers’ performance and not every academic institution is supposed to provide equal resources for every student. I expect the initial emotional response to this argument likely to be negative from you who highlight cooperation and fairness. They are definitely pivotal values to promote, which I will discuss about later, but indeed cannot be realized by canceling the arm race unilaterally, given that the impetus to excel remains. We cannot assume, on the one hand, extracurricular activities may take up a more covert form and therefore can only be accessed by a small fiction of students with sufficient financial or social resources. On the other hand, if the additional education resources are not offered at all and the competition pressure successfully reduced, will it be accompanied with a decline in education quality and turns out to be a crude equality? Here, we can see the real challenge originates from the desire or pressure to “stand up”, rather than the capability to do so.
The enormous eagerness for academic success is not new in China and actually other East Asian countries as well. Discussions on this topic cannot circumvent the high-stake college entrance exam which is called Gaokao in China. Critics normally accuse Gaokao of imposing tremendous pressure on high school students and such pressure even penetrates into early education stages. Some may insist that Gaokao plays a crucial role in selecting talents equipped with needed abilities for the society so as to justify such pressure. However, from the perspective of psychometrics, an exam, even though perfectly designed, can hardly keep its role as an effective indicator of latent variables once it becomes very high-stake. One major problem is that items in the scale (i.e. Gaokao paper) are, at best, correlated with students’ academic abilities, while there can hardly be any causal relationship in between. In other words, it is possible for students to obtain decent scores by cramming for this exam, which, however, contributes little, if ever, to their real academic abilities. The heavy pressure coming along with the exam preparation therefore appears largely undue.
That being said, I must point out the indispensability of Gaokao, at least in current China. As is widely acknowledged, Gaokao is valued for it providing every student with literally equal opportunities towards higher education. Students with poor educational resources still have considerable opportunities to enter privilege universities because the entrance ticket is something everyone can strive for, or to some extent, cram for. It is certainly not an ideal situation, given what I discussed in the previous paragraph. But it ensures fair opportunity in the first place. In this case, what needed in the long run is not to cancel such opportunity. Rather, we ought to gear students’ endeavor towards a more sophisticatedly designed goals so that their academic abilities can be truly upgraded during the process.
Let’s come back to Involution. Rather than equating it with Theater Effect, I suppose it is better to be understood as a futile endeavor accompanied with detrimental pressure which is driven by the high-stake nature of academic achievement. Indeed, it is not necessarily a bad thing to work hard. But regarding that this process is not as fruitful as expected, we are supposed to reexamine the rationale and validity of our assessment system, and consequently where the students are oriented, and whether the ultimate goals are achievable and suitable for everyone. That is to say, to reduce Involution, more emphasis is needed on expanding definitions of, as well as paths towards the so-called success in not only the education system, but also, broadly, the whole society.