In China, every public-school class runs a mandatory WeChat group, and the teacher uses it to push the school's work onto parents. Parents grade and sign the daily homework, and one missed punctuation mark gets the kid called out in the group. One kindergarten made parents watch a variety... show and write a 10,000-character reflection; a mother stayed up till 4 a.m. doing it. After every notice, parents reply with what People's Daily called the three-piece set: received, you've worked hard, thank you. 老师辛苦了—Teacher, you've worked so hard. Then a father in Jiangsu refused. He'd just finished grading his kid's homework, the job a teacher is paid to do. Instead of typing the line, he filmed himself, asked who was actually tired here, and quit the group on camera. The clip topped Weibo's hot-search in hours and drew over 560 million reads in two days. Zhang Jiewei, a CPPCC member in Lishui, explained how this system came to be. The bureau orders less homework, but schools are still judged on how many kids test into good schools. So the work gets handed down until it stops at the parents, because the only thing below them is the kid. After the video took off, and millions of parents started sharing their own stories, the provincial governments moved fast. Liaoning ordered teachers to mark homework themselves, and a dozen other provinces followed suit. Authorities even went after the flattery, banning the bootlicking reply outright. The father was the first to say, on camera, that the “thank-you” was a lie. The economist Timur Kuran calls this preference falsification: countless parents had each typed 老师辛苦了 alone, sure they were alone in hating it, and, after the video, looked up to find everyone secretly agreed.show more

Sam Szuchan

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