Unhealthy to Be Constantly Getting Ready for an Exam

‘Can it be good, from the age of 10 to the age of 23, to be always preparing for an exam, and always knowing that your whole worldly future depends on it: and not only knowing it, but perpetually reminded of it by your parents and masters [i.e., teachers]? Is this the way to breed a nation of people in psychological, moral, and spiritual health?’
– C. S. Lewis, letter to Warfield M. Firor, 3 December 1950

This is where I dissent from the typical East Asian expectation of high-stakes testing for students from late primary school to the end of university, or sometimes even beyond. Undoubtedly it yielded some kinds of results in China, but those fruits have not always been good. It was not the way of Confucius, and it has, over a millennium, instead made the Chinese ready to subject themselves to the lives of bugmen, entombed alive, slaves to dead machines and not to the living Christ. In comparison, the tangping 躺平 (‘lying flat’) movement, in which people check out of the rat race and do only the bare minimum they are required to do, problematic as this movement may be, is actually a sensible response to the insanity of the current system.