As long as the fear of class fall remains, liberalization makes little sense. The reason for the lukewarm response from the childbearing population around me is not that they really can't afford to raise a child, but that a second child might affect their family's standard of living, making their desired middle-class life even more remote.
Also, they want their children to continue to have this dream of a middle-class life, but the long-distance running of class competition ultimately depends only on relative rankings, so the climbing investment in education is a bottomless pit, and anyone's investment in education inspires higher spending by their neighbors. Maintaining this middle-class dream for more than two children, the cost of education is just too heavy. That's why they don't dare to have or raise them. The government can't maintain a stable reproduction of the population if it can't solve this problem by strengthening public education. Here's a comment I just wrote:
"Ease the fear of class decline, and the Chinese will have a second child"
The news of the full liberalization of the second child came out, and as the father of an 8-year-old boy, I silently opened my WeChat circle of friends to see what my friends of the same age had to say. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of students commented on the news in a tone of flirtation and even mockery:
"You can barely afford to feed yourself, and you're still raising a second child?"
"When measuring the number of bear children, "one" is astronomical"
"I won't have one even if I'm fined"
"Housing prices are so high, if we don't wait for this child to go to university, how can there be room for another room for a second child"
And female classmates in particular have maintained a respectful attitude towards the news of the liberalization of the second child. As far as I can see, apart from female classmates who believe in Catholicism, who will prove by their actions that having many children is a blessing, there is only one secular beauty who excitedly encourages everyone to have more children and enjoy the opportunities brought about by the new policy - her husband, who holds a high position in the real estate industry, often inspires envy and jealousy in her circle of friends with photos of overseas trips and luxury goods, which is visible in "Can't afford to raise" and "can't manage" are the common realizations of parents in the late 70s and 80s. Look at the comments section of the news on major websites, and the views are similar to those in the circle of friends. Party Central Committee to liberalize the news of the second child seems to be a heavy bomb, in one fell swoop covered the headlines of various media, but the bomb smashed in the tired parents of the only child, as if smashed into the mud, can not set off half a bit of air waves.
1Really can't afford it?
But when you think about it, it's actually absurd for us post-70s and post-80s to be having a field day in our circle of friends -- by the same standards, we shouldn't have been born at all! Because the previous generation of parents gave birth to the Post-70s and Post-80s, as well as their siblings, precisely under poorer, more crowded, and busier conditions, and used to express strong dissatisfaction because of family planning policies restricting births. Why are today's young parents exhausted by a single child when a few dozen dollars a month, a silo and a single weekend off can raise a bunch of children?
Of course, taking inflation into account, the purchasing power of a monthly salary 30 or 40 years ago was certainly more than today's tens of dollars, and there were many relative conveniences to raising children back then. For example, the county and townships were still a society of acquaintances at that time, and the children could use a considerable area as activity space, making up for the lack of family residential area; another example is that there were fewer cars at that time, and the children would usually walk to and from school on their own without having to be picked up and dropped off; and on weekends they would go to the nearby open space in groups to play without having to intentionally create recreational space. These are all conditions that today's 21st century generation of parents do not have. When I have to interrupt my coding to pick up my son from school at 3:00 pm, when I drive dozens of kilometers to send him to his playmates, I, a child of 30 years ago, do often miss the fun childhood of the 80s.
<img src="/50/8c97bf8b6fd1ab45c14802e615273db8_hd.jpg" data-rawwidth="639" data-rawheight="550" class="origin_image zh- lightbox-thumb" width="639" data-original="/8c97bf8b6fd1ab45c14802e615273db8_r.jpg"> Mai-sae maiya classmates of the series of "homemade youth" with the picture
But emotional memories can not replace rational The average standard of living for urban Chinese civilians 20 years ago translates to a monthly salary of at most a thousand yuan today. And the actual performance of many key commodities, such as flush toilets, washing machines, electricity, televisions, and telephones ...... has improved markedly and is by no means comparable to the primitive goods of that year, providing today's civilians with more leisure and greatly reducing the intensity of domestic labor. If we think we could afford to raise children back then, it stands to reason that we shouldn't veto the two-child program on economic grounds today.
2The risk is too great to "go into the program"
A careful analysis of the process of raising children, the full name is "raising adults". Now this society, the economy is very easy to eat and wear warm, most of the basic vaccines are free, the child is not difficult to raise. The real problem, then, is that the standard by which children should be raised "to adulthood" has changed.
From the perspective of the common people, the TV dramas, commercials, central government documents and melodramatic propaganda films around us are almost all consciously or unconsciously trying to instill a "middle-class lifestyle", and as a result most of the common people have decided that the only way to live is to have a life that is above the "middle class". As a result, the majority of the common people have decided that only a life above the "middle class" can be considered "living like a human being". Any choice that takes us and our future generations away from this goal is considered unreasonable and even immoral. Compared with the past, although our incomes have increased significantly, this "middle class" goal has grown faster than our expectations of life back then, so we feel that the pressure of life is even heavier than that of our parents' generation. We would rather give up the chance of having a second child in order to avoid the possibility of not being able to realize the expected standard of living for ourselves or our offspring.
Also, from my own memory. As most people have moved into modern society, away from the high mortality rate of agrarian societies, the tolerance for risk to children has dropped considerably. When I was a kid, even though society was already very different from traditional agricultural societies, everyone defaulted to the idea that child rearing itself was a matter of probability and that there was no absolute peace of mind. At that time, rural schools inevitably emphasized safety before every vacation, and no swimming in the river was allowed, but at the end of every summer vacation, there was always a spot open because of drowning or food poisoning (food spoils easily in summer). In winter, children were often lost in the wilderness, and when they were found, their hands and feet were frozen and had to be amputated. In any case, in those days, parents could not afford to supervise their children for the entirety of their after-school hours, and recognized that there were certain risks that had to be taken in raising children. It was a cold and realistic choice, and a tradition of thousands of years of agrarian society.
And this attitude is not directly related to the number of children. That's true of families with four or five children, and it's also true of families with one or two children. Most of my classmates and I were only children, but in the absence of cell phones, our parents still acquiesced in the idea that we could go out into the mountains and fields and play all day, a dozen or so miles from home, without the slightest concern for the safety hazards involved. The reason for this is probably because they were all first generation industrial residents coming out of the agricultural era and defaulted to the idea that raising children was a risky investment. A "normal" risk of premature death was acceptable in order to save time on household chores.
Now it's different. Under the influence of education, living environment and various urban myths***, the contemporary parenting mindset is based on the principle of zero risk, and the second generation of the urban population is completely unable to bear the threat of premature death, loss or disability of their children, even if the threat of a very small probability is unbearable. But we all know that the risk can not be absolutely reduced to zero, as long as you are happy to invest, reduce the risk from 1% to 0.1% and then to 0.01%, 0.001% ...... There is always a time of energy and wealth overdraft. This is a big reason why modern parenting is so expensive.
3The Paradox of Family Planning
These two reasons, in turn, explain precisely the population boom after the founding of New China - the marked improvement in social security, the rapid proliferation of medical technology, and the additional de facto guardianship (teachers) provided to children by mandatory education, which led to a marked decline in the rate of premature deaths of children and adolescents . However, men and women of childbearing age did not reduce the number of births in parallel, but maintained the habit of "offsetting" the high death rate with a high fertility rate. As a result, the population has boomed, and it is common for families to have seven or eight children who reach adulthood. Other third world countries that have remained semi-industrialized for a long time have experienced similar population booms.
But by the time the agrarian population got established in an industrial society, and realized that the rate of premature child deaths had dropped considerably, they turned to lowering the number of births.
Family planning policies in the 1980s were enforced much more harshly among the urban population (one child was generally required, while two were allowed in the countryside), but public sources and my recollections indicate that the greatest resistance to family planning policies was in the countryside. The higher the income and the more educated the urban population, the weaker the propensity to have children. Couples who are both teachers and technicians hardly complain about family planning policies.
The continuation of this trend to the present day is the beginning of a society-wide indifference to the two-child policy, i.e., the population plunge. In other words, industrialization itself had a fertility-suppressing effect. China's semi-industrialized society lasted only two generations before it ended, and rapidly entered the low fertility state common in industrialized societies, with only a few backward areas that failed to fully enter industrial society still maintaining high fertility rates. Therefore, when the trend of absolute population decline is approaching, we will in turn find the family planning policy "ridiculous". This fact can be succinctly summarized in the words of my friend Mokhtar:
Mokhtar: Why is India's failed family planning being hailed?
Through the example of India, we can see that the policy of "family planning" is in fact in a subtle paradox: successful family planning is conducive to industrialization, and the success of industrialization in turn advocates the redundancy of "family planning"; failed family planning prevents a country from becoming an independent and sovereign industrialist; failed family planning prevents a country from becoming an independent and sovereign industrialist. Failed family planning prevents a country from industrializing on its own, while exploding populations and failed industrialization justify the need for family planning. It could even be argued that successful family planning is in the end considered "superfluous" while failed family planning is considered "necessary", which is perhaps why family planning is so controversial.
But in any case, the low fertility trend has become a serious reality. While China may not need a billion or more people, it can't afford to see its population plummet by half in consecutive decades. We can accept a gentle fall in population from more than a billion back to 900 million or even 700 million that is appropriate for China's boundaries, but there must be enough time for transition, and there is also a need to keep the population stable for a long period of time after it reaches the population target, so as to avoid recession and turmoil. If family planning once helped China industrialize back then, China in the new era needs another kind of family planning to keep its industrialized society growing steadily.
4Sending children to school is a big problem
Back to the original topic. The so-called fear of having a second child is two things above all:
1 Fear of losing the chance of a middle-class life for oneself or one's children.
2 Unlimited investment in child rearing under the "zero risk" principle.
If these two obstacles can be overcome, I believe that most men and women of childbearing age will not waste their fertility quotas. After all, human beings have a reproductive instinct, and are especially willing to reproduce in a well-nourished external environment. The social system of modern industrial society has suppressed the desire to procreate, and we can also liberate human instincts through institutional reform.
Analyzing the mentality of the modern urban population specifically, we can divide the problem into two parts: the part that cannot be solved, and the part that can be solved.
The so-called unsolvable part is to fulfill the middle-class life expectations of most families. But middle class here does not mean "middle income" by any means. In China's current context,
"middle class" means a standard of living that exceeds that of more than 80 percent of households, if not 90 percent. In a country where the average worker earns 2,500 yuan a month and half the population has less than 1,500 yuan of disposable income, the middle-class dream means at least a large urban apartment, a medium-sized car and a monthly salary of 10,000 to 20,000 yuan. This is clearly not a contradiction that can be resolved by institutional reform. What's more, the middle-class standard is not a static yardstick, but one that will rise with economic growth, a carrot that will always be dangling ten meters in front of young Chinese.
China Labor Dynamics Survey Report: Earned Workers Make $30,000 a Year Working 45 Hours a Week
To fundamentally eliminate the contradictions inspired by the excessive middle-class dream, we can only rely on ****productivism to eliminate the class divide. We are not going to talk about something so far away, but we can make some more realistic improvements, such as increasing the obligation of schooling, extending the school day, and providing group activities and extracurricular training in public schools, so as to reduce the burden on parents while avoiding families entering into a "class war" in the early stages.
The majority of elementary school now, under the principle of "reducing the burden", tend to have two classes in the afternoon, which end at less than 4:00 pm. As a result, from 2:00 onwards, the school entrance to the parents to pick up their children, 3:30 began to crowd the road, 4:00 10 minutes before and after the traffic police to maintain order, in order to barely avoid trampling accidents. This has become commonplace in most areas, and will be repeated in front of many middle schools when junior high school ends at 5:00 or so. The seemingly normal scene, in fact, reflects three social problems.
1 Elementary and middle school students have a lot of after-school time to be arranged by their parents.
2 Most families have to set aside a labor force or quasi labor force to transport their children to and from school.
3 Parents are neither confident that their children will go home on their own nor that they and their classmates will find recreational space on their own.
The combination of these points means that a large amount of labor is wasted on inefficient work (transportation), and also provides a large enough market for tutorials, special classes, and tutors, and puts pressure on parents to divide their children into classes in advance. The result is that "reducing the burden" is useless, fattening up a large number of private training institutions, and raising the cost of family education to such a high level that families are afraid to have a second child. In addition, the new generation of Chinese children are therefore extremely lacking in opportunities to participate in collective activities and grow up with their peers***. In the long run, this is probably the most important negative impact.
5 The new education package
These issues all point to the same conclusion - the basic services provided by China's public schools are far from enough to meet the needs of the average family, and families have to privately purchase additional training and activity opportunities to fill the space with individual labor (drop-offs and pick-ups). Individual purchases, with their volatile prices and high transaction costs, are also bound to trigger comparison among parents, inspire fear of class decline, and ultimately greatly increase the cost of education for society as a whole. To lower the cost, to give children normal development space, the government must take the initiative to assume this responsibility, to provide a more comprehensive education "package".
Specifically, public schools should extend the time students spend in school and provide a diverse range of physical education, music, art, and labor classes, at the very least until after their parents get off work in the cities where they work from nine to five. At the same time, schools should provide lunch and dinner, and use school buses with lead teachers to transport children to and from school in groups. Holidays as much as possible to organize a number of optional group activities, group tours, when beyond the capacity of the school may wish to take the tender to buy services, but also as far as possible to arrange in the school premises, to class, school clubs as a unit of the activities. This is more similar to the effect of centralized purchase of school uniforms - leveling the differences between students, to avoid excessive class competition affecting groups of minors, but also to reduce the burden of family comparison consumption.
Besides primary and secondary schools, public schools should also expand the age range of education and incorporate kindergarten into the public education system, again increasing the time spent in school as much as possible and providing more education around the school, thus depressing the cost of childcare for families. This will, on the one hand, obviously reduce the burden of childcare on families, and on the other hand, it will "delay" the start of the class race and prevent families from investing too much in private education, thus achieving the goal of raising the fertility rate. If most families do not have to spare a single laborer to ensure the daily activities of their children, they will naturally have the energy and desire to have one or two more children. Of course, based on personal experience, I think the biggest benefit is not yet the guarantee of stable population development, it should be the opportunity for children to have group activities again.
When talking about social policies, no matter how good the effects are described, it is a rascal not to talk about funding. And there is no such thing as a free lunch. To increase school services, it is inevitable that more staff will have to be employed to work shifts, more teachers for more subjects will have to be provided, more activity areas and specialized teaching equipment will have to be built, and the purchase of school buses alone will not be a small sum of money. At the present level of education, the combined primary and junior secondary schools consume more than $1,000 billion of education funding each year. If we were to bring education services up to the level described above, we would have to add several hundred billion dollars more to the budget anyhow. Where will the money come from in this year of economic slowdown?
6 Lump sum for society
The first thing to do here is a lump sum for society as a whole. Let's put aside the benefits of raising the fertility rate and avoiding future turmoil. Simply freeing up the parents responsible for transporting their children to and from school would be enough to provide China with a labor force of 10 to 20 million. According to 2014 statistics, there are more than 90 million primary school students and 50 million middle school students in the country, totaling 150 million. Sixty to seventy million of them are concentrated in cities or urbanized suburbs. Taking a conservative estimate from my usual view in front of elementary schools, this means taking up a labor force of 50 million people, half of whom are of working age, to be responsible for picking up and dropping off students, chaperoning them, and cooking their meals. If schools can pick up that slack, it won't be hard to add 25 million laborers to the job market, and there's a much larger population of retirees who could be receptive to rehiring.
Chinese Labor Dynamics Survey Report: average annual wage of 30,000 yuan for gainful workers, 45 hours of work per week
According to the latest data, the average wage of gainful workers nationwide in 2014 was 30,197 yuan (including farmers). Considering that the tens of millions of laborers saved are mostly located in areas with convenient transportation, it is not difficult for 25 million laborers to earn the average income. Society as a whole can thus create an additional 700-800 billion dollars of wealth, enough to pay for the additional investment in education. What's more, many families will save money on expensive private education expenses, so it's not an exaggeration to count two to three hundred billion dollars, and the total amount can be trillions of dollars. Taken together, just counting the immediate and clear accounts, this is also earned.
Why is it profitable? Because training children for society by individual families on their own is inherently a very inefficient individual endeavor. Public education, while also labor intensive, is certainly more efficient than individual families on their own. So rather than having tens of millions of adults work individually, the state should hire professionals to replace them, saving manpower to invest in other industries. Of course, in order to achieve a win-win situation for both the state and the families, it is inevitable that income tax will have to be increased to balance the coffers, and a portion of the wages of the new labor force will be transferred to the teachers who have been hired in excess. It all depends on the level of governance and political credibility of the government.
In addition, since the core issue is to improve the efficiency of the educational labor force, the government's mindset must change. It can no longer tout "one-man elementary school" or "teachers who stick to the mountain villages".
Weihui Liushuling elementary school only a 9-year-old student and 56-year-old teacher (group photo)_Netease News Center
Visit the most pocket-sized elementary school in Zhejiang Province, only two teachers and three students - Education - People's Daily Online
The so-called long pain is better than short pain, combined with poverty alleviation relocation or set up a school bus to transport or relying on the state subsidies to engage in the boarding system or in any case must be removed. The first thing you need to do is to get rid of these decentralized teaching points so that children of the same age can grow up together. Teachers in mountain villages who are afraid of being laid off don't have to worry about employment. Because the schools will need more educators to provide more educational services, they will certainly be given positions in centralized teaching areas.
7 Once a teacher always a father
Of course, policies involving minors are never simply a matter of economics. Even if the government receives enough taxes to change the education model and allow schools to take on more educational functions it can be solved by more than just adding more school buses and teachers. Because it means that families have transferred more responsibilities and custody to schools, if there is no matching institutional and legal support. Improvements will only backfire.
In fact, under the current system, schools will avoid all "extra" group activities as much as possible. Otherwise, parents would have endless claims against the school in case of any accidents. Schools are responsible for the day-to-day management of minors, but they do not have legal guardianship and cannot forcefully restrain the activities of minors as parents do, and as a result, they either carry out passive "closed management" to avoid accidents as in prisons, or they dismiss students early and return them to their parents as soon as possible along with the responsibility for their management. This is also an important reason why elementary school are now dismissed early. As for group activities like hikes and group trips, they have been gone for decades in most public schools. I participated in a hike out a few dozen kilometers as a freshman in high school 20 years ago, supposedly the last large group outing at my alma mater. My previous reply once described a similar reality:
Rural education has all sorts of deficiencies, but isn't it the mentality of rural students that is more important? - The "prohibited materials" that the inspection team wants to block are not only cell phones, but also alcohol, knives and other things that are not appropriate for high school students. "Miscellaneous books", i.e. books that do not belong to textbooks and teaching aids, whether they are novels or science fiction, are prohibited, and as for chess and cards, radios, MP3s, and other electronic and non-electronic entertainment, they are even more unlikely to pass. Only food, clothing and textbooks can be brought into the school ...... No ball games, no jostling, no fast running, not even shouting, except for running exercises in the morning and one or two physical education classes a week, students do not have the freedom to test their muscles.
Parents who work in big cities already have a clear sense of their rights, and they have decided that since the students live in the school -- and in fact don't live in the school, either -- the entire responsibility for supervising their children rests with the school. No matter what injuries the child suffers or what damages he or she causes to others, the school will obviously be held fully responsible. Even if the accident is proved to be completely unrelated to the school, tens of thousands of dollars in "humanitarian aid" will be required.
The parents' sense of entitlement is a step forward or a step too far, this article will not evaluate. But objectively, since the school has to take responsibility, it is clear that it should take the initiative to reduce the rate of accidents by locking up students, keeping them under control, eliminating all free time, and thus avoiding all sports that might cause injuries. This is how the resident students get into "prison".
The problem is the same across the country. Teachers and schools no longer have the moral authority that they did when education was scarce, and parents no longer recognize the parental authority of teachers, but when it comes to accountability, schools are held fully responsible. The result is that schools are trying to avoid responsibility by all means. In this institutional environment, even if schools are given more budgets and sent more teachers. Even if schools are given more budgets and more teachers, they don't really make use of the extra school time, and they just keep students "safe" in their classrooms, working on practice problems.
In the same article above, I made the following suggestions:
First, schools must be given guardianship in practice, recognizing that they not only have the responsibility to teach, but also have the right to manage the lives of their students the rest of the time. The transfer of power can be done through judicial interpretation or administrative order. In this way, the de facto guardian, the school, can organize students to go out of school and participate in long-lost social activities. To this end, it might be possible to introduce life tutors to secondary schools, in addition to the class teacher system, who would specialize in students' lives and after-school activities. Replacement of the already dead system of reunion committees-junior teams. The number of students has begun to decline steadily in recent years and there is an ample supply of teacher trainers. The mentor system can be introduced in tandem with small class sizes.
Of course, this still does not solve the problem of compensation for accidents. I am afraid this would require a comprehensive student insurance system, with the Treasury and parents each paying a portion of the insurance costs. In the event of an accident, the insurance company will give a certain amount of compensation to the student's family; at the same time, anyone claiming extra compensation on top of the insurance is strictly forbidden to do so, unless the person responsible has committed an offense. This would cost the government a fortune in premiums, but it would give educational institutions a great deal of freedom.
Now that the problem extends to the whole country, my suggestion is similar. Schools must be legally given guardianship, and their risks shared through insurance, before school budgets are increased, school hours extended, and educational pressures taken on behalf of families.
8 The beginnings of socialized upbringing
There is no doubt that the above suggestions imply the use of administrative power to intervene in the internal affairs of the family, and to a certain extent challenge established morality and ethics, and infringe upon the right of parents to make security for their children. But we should remember that since the day the Compulsory Education Act was enacted, the government has not recognized the so-called "absolute right" of parents to their children, forbidding parents to keep their school-age children at home from attending school, and denying the "freedom" of parents to send their children to religious schools or to work. They deny parents the "freedom" to send their children to religious schools or to work. Now that parents feel the burden of raising children is too heavy and want schools to take on more educational obligations, it's only natural to shift the corresponding rights.
What's more, this "violation" of parental rights is a new thing. In "traditional" societies, children are often raised in "clans" rather than "families". Parenting alone in the nuclear family is only a few decades old and is not a sacrosanct moral standard. Since the need for education has changed, instead of waiting for the rules of the family to be slowly broken, we should be proactive in adapting to the new era.
And furthermore, according to the needs of modern society, many modern parents are not qualified to educate their children, and should have been deprived of their parenting rights and custody long ago. Numerous left-behind children would have actually been left unsupervised. The recent killing of a teacher by a 14-year-old student and the 2012 case of a child suffocated to death in a garbage bin in Guizhou are examples of left-behind children left unsupervised.
Hunan 3 left-behind students suspected of hijacking and killing a female teacher: all less than 14 years old, 1 parent is serving a prison sentence
Guizhou smothered dumpster 5 children's parents current situation: drunkenness remarried to the death of a disease
In this case, the direct transfer of guardianship to the school, depriving the parents of the right to intervene, in fact, is the optimal choice. Those parents who are denied custody should also be disciplined through modes such as tax increases and fines.
Talking about transferring parental custody from how to encourage two children seems to go a bit far. But in reality, the two issues are the same thing, and both signal that a new era may be looming -- the era of social dependency. The fact that the two-child policy has hit a cold streak suggests that the family rearing method is no longer sufficient in most families to support normal population turnover; the large number of left-behind children left unsupervised suggests that many families simply can't afford to educate their children on an individualized basis. My view on this is that if a problem is "not a matter of money", then the key to the problem is most likely "not enough money". Since the cost of "manual" parenting has risen to the point where neither the family nor society can afford it, a shift to socialized parenting is inevitable, and better than giving up parenting and having children normally.
9Quietly changing morality
Of course, after a few revolutions, the idea of socialized child-rearing was anathema in most countries, and was often associated with "dehumanization" and "moral bankruptcy". But since rapidly industrializing societies are themselves quietly reshaping "morality," "moral decay" doesn't seem such a bad thing.
As a county resident born in the early 80s, almost 100% of my peers around me would have lived together before marriage if they hadn't stayed in the county; at least half of the post-90s people I know can accept the decoupling of marriage and childbearing, and it's not uncommon to see a child born out of wedlock. I think this is good progress, showing that when it comes to family life, young people have learned to use their rights to freedom beyond their parents' generation. Unsurprisingly, this trend will lead to the disintegration of the nuclear family in a generation's time, completely destroying the family morality of the previous generation. At that point, the education of children and young people based on nuclear family parenting will inevitably shift more towards society, and the need and impetus for socialization of upbringing will grow stronger. My previous suggestion is simply a hope that society will take the initiative to meet this wave.
The increase in the cost of education is also related to the increasing complexity of industrialized societies. Children in agricultural societies could learn basic livelihood skills simply by working in the fields with their parents; in the 1950s you had to have gone through elementary school to get out to work; in the 1970s a secondary school diploma may not have been enough; and in the 21st century university education has become universal. This is because no matter how society develops, the starting point of human beings will never change, they are all blank-paper babies, and we have to use longer and longer and more and more difficult studies to reach the threshold of entering adult society.
In this long learning process, and once the learning journey is below average, it is possible to sink to the bottom in the adult world of serious class division, so the education investment is not capped, and has become a bottomless pit of family wealth. In this situation, parents want the state to pick up some of the cost, and also want to get themselves closer to a middle class life, and giving up some of their parenting rights is the inevitable result. You can have an opinion on this fact, but you can't complain about not being able to afford to have (raise) children while complaining that the government is meddling too much, because there will never be a free lunch in the world.
In fact, it was not uncommon decades ago to raise children in groups. As the child of a double-income worker in a large state-owned enterprise, I was sent to a nursery attached to the enterprise when I was one or two years old; when I was in middle school, I spent most of my after-school time with my friends and often stayed in their rooms when I said hello. I'm afraid that the part of my "self" that I shaped in the circle of my classmates and friends was more than the part that I shaped in my family. In addition to the collectivist atmosphere that permeated education in those days, it can be said that I was socialized to a certain extent. When I left my hometown to go to university, 60% of the "hometown" that I missed on vacation was my former circle of friends, that is, the people of the same age with whom I grew up. This should be considered a form of "collective rearing".
Of course, there are drawbacks to this kind of laissez-faire group parenting. For example, while it's fun for teenagers to organize their own activities, it also creates conflict and often leads to the creation of teenage gangs. Parents nowadays could never afford the casualty rate of teenagers in those days either. That's why I suggest that the public schools step right in and provide enough options for organized and recreational activities for teenagers before they spontaneously go off in a monstrous direction in the cracks.
End Defending is not enough, attacking is more than enough
In conclusion, China is a land of rapid change under the rapid onslaught of industrialization, and each generation, from my grandparents to my peers, has a unique way of living and being educated. My grandfather was forced to learn Japanese in a school in pseudo-Manchu, my father listened to decentralized Kuomintang officers in a middle school during the Cultural Revolution, and I was trained to be a website editor by a 21st-century engineering university. Each generation is separated by a sea of change, and my children and grandchildren will not live the same life as I did. Therefore, when designing a society, apart from reason and logic, one should add a little bit of imagination for the future generations. If you really don't have enough imagination, at least don't be so stubborn as to think that the current system cannot be changed.
Right now, the cold reception of the second child and the large number of children left by their parents in their hometowns show that class divisions and the old education system have seriously hampered the long-term development of productive forces, and have even begun to impede the normal renewal of human society. According to Marxist theory, there should be a social revolution to solve the problem at this time, or at least materialist thinking is needed to guide active social improvement. Otherwise, sooner or later, the existing education-population reproduction system will collapse on its own, bringing about even greater turmoil. Whether to actively transform society or passively meet the impact of transformation depends on the choice of this generation.