It's really going to change this time, and it's going to blow up the parents' pot with the phrase, "the cancellation of the mid-level and upper secondary examinations is a matter of time." it's not the roadside news, it's from a council member in shanghai, and it's a cruel, irrefutable data. – at the beginning of 2026, the population will reach the peak of history, followed by a cliff-breaker. The educational logic that is reflected behind this statement is far more dramatic than we thought, and the students are gone. What's with the filter
The decline in population data is by no means alarming. Let's pull back the timeline, with 1,786,000 new births in 2016, which is the highest in recent years, leaving only 9. 54 million in 2025, in just nine years, almost cutting off. This is more than a hundred people who used to rob ten buns and have had to bleed, but then there are only 50 people to rob them, or even more than humans, so that there is no basis for this brutal race to eat。
Zhejiang zhejiang zhengzhou has been shot first, and the small haishima county, whose population has continued to grow in negative terms, has de-separated the mid-level examination years ago, with only 325 students enrolled in the local junior high school and 36 in poor jobs, has been hard-pressed to fill the classroom and has been able to divert. This set of data contrasts is the most intuitive warning: the so-called “generative dividend” is rapidly disappearing, and future schools may have to move from “choice students” to “pupils”。
This, in fact, coincides with the policy direction at the national level, where the spirit of the national conference on education of 2026 can be read in detail, and the state has made clear its intention to continue and deepen comprehensive educational reforms. Beijing, xi'an and others are now adjusting the scoring lines to significantly dilute the weight of a single fraction, and shanghai and chengdu have begun piloting the “premature height” continuum. This series of actions is sending a very clear signal that education is trying to break the “life-long” shackles and to shift from a single “screening machine” to “culture of ecology”。
It is clear that policymakers have seen the urgency of demographic changes, not to cancel them, but to adapt to the demographic realities of the future and reduce the internal consumption of the school-level interface. Policy-level “reduced selection” and population-level “reduced sources” are creating a synergy that forces the educational model to reverse。
The reality is far more complex than the average, and the elimination of the examination is a two-world thing in different places. The so-called selection function is long overdue in the case of vacant areas out of which schools can only open their arms for survival. In the provinces of henan and shandong, where the high enrolment rate is still at 50 per cent and the degree is still scarce, the cancellation of the examination is tantamount to selling anxiety to parents. What does it mean that, even after the peak of the population of higher education age in 2032, only about 10 per cent of the country's “two-class” higher education students are still enrolled? It means that even if nine of the next 10 children can go to college, the nine will still fight for you to get into the only 10 percent of the places. The uneven distribution of resources is bound to prevent this reform from being “one-size-fits-all” and to call for its cancellation now, inevitably with the taste of meat。
Even if everyone could go to high school and college in the future, competition would never disappear as long as qinghua north was still a few and good jobs were so scarce. Today's mid-level examination, even though it is a “false test”, is a dead-end test, but at least it has a cold-stamped test, which is the most fair line of defence for ordinary families with no background or resources. Who can guarantee that there is no water in this once the examination has been cancelled and changed to an expert defence, a comprehensive quality evaluation? Qualitative biographical data from the creative projects for which parents work, which are put together at a cost, can only block the last rising passage of the cold-minded. While the inner volume of scores is suffocating, there is at least one direction to try, and if we lose even the life-saving straw, education may become an invisible game of resources。
Education reformThe intention was to train problem-solving personnel, and it was not simply to cancel the examination to make everyone happy. Competition will only continue on a different track, and instead of waiting for the examination to disappear, we should be prepared not to allow children to learn only to do things and to survive in the future。
