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Hi, everyone and welcome back to Britain under the Microscope. 欢迎回来【闲话英伦】on the topic of 鸡娃 second episode, brought to you by学霸安澜and学渣Lulu.
Lulu, there's no way that you are 学渣.
Compared to you. I have to say 安澜 is one of those students like别人家里的孩子那种 so always very driven, always very geared on. Very good grades, always getting good grades.
All right, I was a bit of a nerd. Yes. I still am so…
Okay. So coming back to the topic of 鸡娃, I'm sure your parents didn't have to use that on you.
But you notice that in China when people talk about education especially primary secondary education, you hear a lot of these classes, although now there are policies banning them, but this whole cram schools and then tutorial这种补课或者什么培优什么这些乱七八糟的这些东西. Are there similar things in the UK?
Yes, I would say you can pay for tutor, it’s relatively common. But generally, it's… if you can afford it, first of all, it's seen as a bit of a luxury. And also it's more around if you're falling behind in your studies, then you might consider getting a tutor.
所以是补差的那种. What about you？You wanna go ahead, you wanna charge ahead to be better than other people.
Well, to be perfectly honest, I would say for many people, they don't think in those terms. Because you have to ultimately think what is the purpose of the education is to pass the test.
So if it's a case of being the top 1% in the class or whatever, I don't think that really does apply so much in the UK. Obviously there may be a lot of people that do think in those terms; but for a lot of the English people that I know, they don't think in those terms, they just say, okay, you got good grades, you can do this to improve.
And that’s it. There's none of this fixation about you gotta be the top in the class because from our perspective, what's the point in being the top of the class？
Because I think it's the whole idea in China we have the college entrance exam, right？高考, because everyone's gonna take that. That's why being the top one or 0.1 percentile is the most important thing because一分干倒一大片的that's the sort of philosophy.
But in the UK yeah, you can be top of the class, you can get very good grades, but you are applying ultimately for the universities that you like and you can apply for multiple universities, so can your classmates.
So it's not everyone is on that specific path to compete in a specific...
I would say that is the thing I have noticed about China is that for a huge population of students, they're focused on a very limited number of places, a very limited number of courses, which we don't really have in the UK, even for Oxford and Cambridge. Some people really want to get into Oxford and Cambridge. Other people don't really want to go into Oxford and Cambridge. They want to go to another university that they prefer.
OK, you do have some very good universities in the UK, but let's be honest here, let's be brutally honest, going to Oxbridge is still very difficult and we talked about that in... it’s very competitive.
Of course it is, that's why I failed the interview.
Yeah, we still remember that, but that's because you didn't really prepare, actually you know what, you can hire a special tutor or a special agency to help you prepare for Oxbridge interviews.
就是你想进牛剑的话, 是有那种专门的不是辅导班就是mock interview.