Notes:
Besides the gaokao prep starting from middle school, and taking at least 12-14 hours a hour to prep for it each day and it being mentally strenuous and seemingly decisive to your career,
the narrator talks about how the Gaokao varies per province and apparently
depending on how high your city/province's GDP is, it may be easier compared to other provinces
Other than that, though, he talks more about societal issues rather than political ones, so I think he's at worst, a good-faith Chinese lib, even considering his reddit account, which has little political activity...
Also, I've heard there are other comparable hard exams which are not necessarily hard as the Gaokao, in the comments, such as Brazil and India, thoughts on that as well
To any libs around here:
If you lemmy libs want to wander on here, I'll politely tell you which instance you're in and tell you to go back your mother's skirts....
I think anyone who's ever taken the SAT and (I presume) the A-levels went "wait, what the fuck?" When they heard the above. No standardized test is capable of increasing your creativity or critical thinking, and the only problem you solve is how to get good marks on the test. The video author clearly has an unjustifiably rosy view of the West which borders on standard lib shit.
The rest of the video raises some okay points like the uneven distribution of education resources, long hours, and social pressure. The first two are things that the government is taking steps to combat by providing better access to schools to rural populations, and China recently cracked down on the after school tutoring industry, practically gutting it, to make it more fair for all students and to ensure that they get time off.
Unfortunately, most of the problems arise out of a limited number of spots at desirable universities and intense competition between millions of students. Even if you create a completely fair and equitable system based on merit, the people who get in are still going to be the smartest people who work the hardest.
I'm actually wondering: have you, yourself, taken it before? Or any other cousins who've taken it
Btw, any other Chinese users here in Lemmygrad and Hexbear, maybe even lemmy.ml, familiar with it?
Nah, without going into personal details I haven't taken it but all my family members did and so have a lot of my friends. The long hours of constant study and pressure are real things, vid maker wasn't lying about that.
On the other hand, my parents made me do all sorts of extra study for the exam that I was taking anyway, so it's not even clear that long hours and pressure are halmarks of the Gaokao, but rather of parents who value educational achievement (too much?).