Tomorrow cities throughout China will divert traffic, close internet cafés, prohibit horn honking, muzzle public mourning and even change some aircraft flight paths so that 9m of the country’s top students can concentrate on the “gaokao“, the university entrance exam to beat all others, the final act in an educational drama that begins at birth and involves not just the whole family but the whole country.
UK A-levels and the US Scholastic Aptitude Test are no slouches either, but one image from the internet last month captures the degree to which the gaokao is in a class of its own: students in Hubei province sit huddled over desks piled high with books – and each one is hooked up to an intravenous drip delivering amino acids to help them survive the ordeal. University places are scarce, and most students can forget about getting one if they do not do well on gaokao.
Western students, of course, have been known to mainline coffee (or worse) to keep awake at exam time – but the teacher is not usually handing out the uppers. In Hubei, the school was not only dispensing the drips but the government was providing a subsidy to pay for them.