Like many of China’s public servants, teachers are besieged by bureaucratic drudgery – constant meetings, inspections, and form-filling. Their close contact with families means they’re also drafted as foot soldiers for a bewildering array of local directives. The result is widespread burnout and diminishing time for actual classroom preparation.
On Monday, the Education Ministry released new policies that aim to get teachers back to teaching, part of a long-running campaign against fruitless busywork performed more for appearance than impact – known in Chinese political parlance as “formalism.”
A 2023 report from the state-run China Youth Daily paints a vivid picture of overwork. One principal interviewed for the piece said that teachers are required to input information on their performance and activities into around two dozen platforms on a regular basis. He explained that his school receives some 4,000 documents a year that must be dealt with.
Teachers quoted in the article said they’ve been told to contact parents to urge them to pay into the local state-run medical insurance program, ensure parents and children wear helmets when riding scooters to and from school, and carry out publicity campaigns against pornography, organized crime, and straw-burning.
The tasks can veer into the bizarre. One teacher quoted in the article recalled that a pair of teachers must lock up the school’s pickles after lunch to prevent anyone from poisoning the food.
Failure to carry out these tasks can impact performance assessments. Even carrying them out isn’t a guarantee of praise. One principal said senior officials criticized him after a pupil got scammed online, as the school had carried out a fraud awareness campaign.
Six years ago, the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the State Council released a document that laid out general principles to “effectively reduce unnecessary interference … and return tranquility to schools and time to teachers.” These included halving the number of assessment and supervision-related tasks.
However, the number of tasks has continued to swell, according to a survey conducted two years ago by state-owned newspaper Guangming Daily and the National Institute of Education. The survey, which covered 12 different regions, also showed one-third of teachers were working more than 11 hours a day. Four-fifths said they worked more than 45 hours a week, more than China’s labor law permits.
The Education Ministry’s new regulations, which optimistically aim to “further reduce the non-educational and non-teaching burden” mostly echo the 2019 document. New measures include limits on inspections and document issuance, a mandatory “whitelist” of permitted school tasks, and explicit bans on unrelated work such as river-patrolling.
Unsurprisingly, the online reaction to the news was overwhelmingly positive. However, there was also skepticism. Many Weibo posters worried that responsibility for some tasks would just be shifted onto parents. One often repeated question was who would now stand guard as children file in and out of school, a task the new rules prohibit for teachers. This is a sensitive issue in a country with a grisly record of attacks on schoolchildren. Such concerns may be why the new rules also call on education departments to work with cyberspace and police departments “to strengthen the management of public opinion on teachers’ burdens.”
Anti-formalism has been a hallmark of Xi Jinping’s tenure, and can be seen as parallel to his anti-corruption drive as part of a broader effort to improve overall governance. Shortly after he came into office in 2012, the Politburo issued a list of rules for cadres that included keeping meetings short and to the point.
At a meeting last year, Xi described formalism as a “serious disease.” That August, top party and state authorities issued regulations which exhorted officials to simplify meetings, keep documents brief, and not require grassroots workers to do too much paperwork.
However, as the (rather ironic) repeated meetings on formalism and issuance of documents show, these policies haven’t actually had the desired effect of eliminating busywork – for teachers or any other public servants.
