Zhihu | The voices of students from Hengshui No. 2 Middle School, save us

I am a student from out of town at the Second High School of Hengshui City.

I saw the voice of the alumni yesterday morning, and I wanted to watch the original video, but it has been deleted. I don’t know how long these words of mine can exist, but I still want to say them.

I will never delete this article, and if it disappears, it is definitely not my will.

I am currently on a leave of absence due to depression, and I have been diagnosed with a fracture of the toe of my left foot, and I am being treated in the hospital. There are many students around me who have psychological problems, and this must be inseparable from the efforts of your school.

First of all, your school severely punishes students who disclose information to the outside world, and will immediately delete negative news spread online, and investigate the phone numbers reported to the Education Bureau. This is why students dare not speak out.

Your school severely abuses corporal punishment and beating students. Your school abuses corporal punishment methods such as “suspension of classes”, sticking toes to the wall, and sticking the forehead to the wall, with no time limit, from a few classes to several days.

I saw a friend who was reading before the morning exercise being kicked more than a meter away by the angry head teacher, just because the duty was not cleaned up.

A classmate who was tying his shoelaces was kicked in the face, just because he was a few minutes late.

A classmate was pressed against the wall and punched in the chest because he was late for 15 minutes of eating time, and he came out to squat and do the questions, and when he came back, his legs were trembling and limping.

The teacher pulled the student to the podium and slapped him with a book, just because he was only a few steps away from not being able to run into the dormitory after the bell rang for washing clothes.

My friend usually doesn’t have time to defecate, just because he looked at the pre-exercise reading when he went to the toilet during the late break and was caught, and was suspended from class for a whole day.

Someone just stretched his waist after class and was called by the teacher to squat outside the classroom for a whole class.

A large number of students were called to the playground to kneel and re-fold their quilts because they couldn’t fold them well, and they had just stuffed a few mouthfuls of food, and they moved the whole set of bedding to the corridor and didn’t go to class to re-fold them, holding the quilts and squatting in the classroom, and some even squatting in the toilet, picking up the hair in the toilet…

Verbal humiliation, being yelled at, and being publicly scolded as “a bunch of waste”, “fools”, and “what things” are commonplace.

Your school has a set of strict regulations and punishment methods for students, but there are no regulations to protect students’ personal rights. How the head of the department and the teachers treat the students depends entirely on themselves.

Your school colludes with the local Education Bureau. The local Education Bureau’s lack of supervision led to the incident at Taocheng Middle School, and then deliberately avoided other schools in Hengshui, did not conduct a thorough investigation, and has turned a deaf ear to many violations of your school to this day. The three consecutive municipal party secretaries of Hengshui City have fallen from power due to corruption, and the most recent one was in 2019. Due to Hengshui’s economic path dependence on the education industry, your school has a great say in the local area. I don’t know whether the Education Bureau to which your school belongs is derelict of duty or has been corrupted by capital to act as a backstage and umbrella for your school, but at least it is wearing the same pants as your school.

Your school disregards the construction of teacher ethics and teacher morality. The crazy expansion of enrollment scale leads to a shortage of teachers, so it absorbs a large number of graduates from non-normal universities to be teachers. In order to prevent them from quitting their jobs, they illegally detain their university graduation certificates and personal files. Many of them don’t even have a teacher qualification certificate, and the quality of teachers varies. Speaking with a yin and yang tone, swearing, rambling in class, and messy blackboard writing, we are already used to it. Unreasonable, insulting, personal attacks and verbal violence are the most uncomfortable. It doesn’t look like a teacher, but more like a gangster who has been in the rivers and lakes for a long time. There are many teachers like this here.

Your school’s attitude towards students with partial subjects and weak students is not guidance, but punishment. Your school claims to be the “first school with low entry and high output”, but ignores the differences of each student, does not talk about learning methods, and reasonably believes that students who cannot improve their grades are a matter of attitude, and uses various corporal punishment and insults to force them to achieve results. Every evening self-study, a large number of students with partial subjects are called out to squat and do questions as punishment. The head of the department asked all classes to call out 5 students with partial subjects or obvious regression in the evening four public self-study, and carry their stools to the corridor to line up and squat to study.

There are as many as 45 minutes of self-study in a whole class. This kind of punishment is simply a nightmare for me who has experienced it. Every time my legs feel like I have had an amputation. This feeling makes me feel worse than death, and makes me think about what sins I have committed to endure this hellish torture.

Your school implements a full-closed management, and the news within the school is not transparent. Your school prohibits students from bringing any electronic products, and students cannot retain evidence of your school’s unreasonable behavior in any form. Even if there is, it will be quickly deleted through various means.

Your school discriminates against teachers and students seriously, from the head of the department, the head teacher, the teachers in charge of the courses to the students, all of whom are the objects of discrimination. Your school holds meetings regularly to scold teachers to put pressure on their work. The principal scolds the director, the director scolds the teacher, and the teacher scolds the students. The school does not treat the teachers as human beings, and the teachers do not treat the students as human beings. Some teachers, in order to vent their anger, make things difficult for us in various ways. If the homework is not finished, they will tear up the papers and reassemble them; if the composition cannot be memorized, they will let us freeze in the corridor and not enter the classroom. Many new teachers only regard this place as a springboard for employment, and they cannot bear the huge pressure and quit their jobs in less than two or three years. The most senior and best-tempered old teachers, because of too much pressure, cannot sleep at night, but they have to come to work for a living, and they also tell us to save her after graduation. Your school is fair and just, and never treats students differently, no matter how good their grades are. Excellent students in the experimental class are twisted their ears, slapped on the back of the head, and pressed their heads on the table when they make mistakes. If they cannot answer questions, they have to stand all the time, which greatly damages the students’ self-confidence and self-esteem.

Your school’s meal time arrangement is unreasonable. The meal time is fifteen minutes, excluding the time to run to the cafeteria, queue up, and then return to the classroom. It takes only five minutes at most. If you want not to be hungry, you can only gobble it up, or eat while walking on the road, and then endure the torment of stomachache in class. May I ask how to face high-intensity learning without a healthy body? In order to be able to eat a meal, everyone has to watch the watch, and when the bell rings, they rush out like a beast. The whole corridor is filled with earth-shattering sounds. I saw one student after another fall, being knocked down by people running, breaking their legs, breaking their toes, and suffering concussions… In the campus, students with crutches, wheelchairs, and plaster casts are often seen. The head of the department sarcastically said, “Look at how many classes have wheelchairs, and some classes even have two, what’s the matter? A competition?”

Your school’s frequent class division system is unreasonable. Every time the class is divided, it is a painful separation from the people who used to love each other. I will secretly cry, and after the pain of parting, what awaits is the hunger of not having time to eat and the torment of carrying heavy luggage alone. Then let us repeatedly practice raising our legs and stepping in a row under the scorching sun of more than 30 degrees, shouting until our voices are hoarse to practice slogans, and the sweat flows into our eyes and hurts so much that we can’t open our eyes. The new teachers are even more desperately managing us, yelling at us unreasonably, intimidating and threatening us, and telling us, “Don’t blame me for cleaning you up if you can’t finish your homework.”

The vicious competition between the various departments and teachers of your school is serious, and the leaders turn a blind eye. Some teachers deliberately drag the class, and the next teacher will soon enter the classroom, asking everyone not to move, and the toilet is not allowed. I was asked to squat in front of the classroom as revenge for asking questions to the previous teacher. Your school requires recitation before class, and there is not even a minute or two of time after class. Even if there is, no one dares to go to the toilet or fetch water, for fear of being late. The time for self-study is also occupied by the homework of multiple teachers.

In order to cater to the benchmark scores and various quantitative indicators set by your school, and to achieve their own interests through competition among colleagues, some teachers do not hesitate to increase the pressure and even abuse students, leaving us to copy homework desperately after class, secretly stealing the answers to the exam questions, leaking the questions to their students, and reporting the competitors to the head of the department.

Here, there is never a distinction between good and bad people. This is a chaotic world. Only by protecting yourself can you have a way to survive. Arbitrary actions, reversing right and wrong, and corporal punishment and insults without distinguishing between right and wrong and without regard to the severity are commonplace in your school, and they are open and aboveboard, and unbridled.

Your school ignores the living needs of students and artificially creates suffering. In order to keep the campus clean, your school lets the students on duty hold their breakfast and dinner and do their duty at the same time. Many people have upset stomachs and stomachaches at night; your school installs cameras in all classrooms, but the heating facilities in the old teaching buildings are not perfect. In winter, our fingers are stiff and we can’t write, and we are not allowed to wear gloves; in winter, we are not allowed to wear coats when running, and we can only brave the cold, and then a large number of people catch colds and have high fevers; and the exam time is unreasonable, the exam starts at 7:30 in the morning, and the exam room is arranged at 7:10; the exam ends at 6:10 in the afternoon, and the class starts at 6:30. We also have to go back to the classroom, move books, move desks, do duty, may I ask when do we eat? Do we eat when we sleep? Or do we endure hunger and starvation all night under high-intensity learning? I saw one student after another in the dormitory water room who didn’t have time to fetch water and put their feet in the icy water to wash their feet. I saw that the cafeteria had no spoons, and the students who were late could only eat hand-held rice in plastic bags. I saw that the small cafeteria on the second floor of your school could not be inspected, and there were only tables but no stools, and all the students could only eat standing up. There are many similar inhumane problems.

Your school’s requirements for dormitory discipline are unreasonable. Your school requires the building managers to find a certain number of violations within a week. The more they find, the more they earn. The leaders of your school don’t believe that so many students don’t have a single violation. If they can’t find it, they scold the building managers as useless. The building managers are therefore driven crazy and can only artificially create many borderline violations. What I saw was that a roommate sat up at night and covered the quilt and was punished to stand in the back of the classroom for a day, either squatting or standing. What I saw was that a classmate who was sitting on the bed and looking for things in the cabinet at noon was recorded as a violation and suspended from class to write a few thousand-word inspection to the department. Your school explains this as “rules are made for those who do not follow the rules.” May I ask if your school’s overcorrection will backfire? I am still afraid of the white light from the flashlight that the building manager shines into the dormitory in the dark.

Your school violates regulations to make up classes and deliberately shortens the vacation time. The provincial education department issued a notice requiring a vacation, but your school has been delaying it until it can’t stand the pressure before taking a vacation. The routine monthly vacation is only one day, or even counted by the hour. Online classes are not on vacation for a month. There are only a few two-hour rest days during the two and a half months of the epidemic school closure. The only 20 days of winter vacation are the same as the school’s schedule, and even video supervision is used to supervise us to do our homework, and we are given make-up classes in the name of tutoring. We are asked to “voluntarily” sign a letter of authorization to accept the school’s supervision. I once strictly demanded myself, and completed my holiday homework day and night, and after returning to school, I still could not escape your school’s discrimination and humiliation.

Your school’s requirements for running exercises are unreasonable. Your school uses harsh punishment methods to coerce us to run exercises. If our shoes are stepped on, we have to run the whole course barefoot, be suspended from class, and be punished to run in circles, even in heavily polluted smoggy days. I saw with my own eyes that some students tied their shoelaces to their legs for fear of losing their shoes, and saw that some classmates fainted on the ground after running the fifth lap, and saw a student fall, and the next few classes fell down in pieces, and then were trampled, and were suffocated by the people above… In order to prove the rationality of doing so, the director of your school instilled in us the idea of “the pitiful must have something hateful.” The principal explained that education without punishment is not complete education. Even asking a classmate who is being punished requires the head teacher’s threat, saying that if you comfort him again, your end will be the same as his.

Your school’s requirements for internal affairs are unreasonable. The dormitory is on the seventh floor, and it is required to go to the playground in 7 minutes from getting up. We also have to put on clothes, go downstairs, and squeeze in the crowd, and then run to the designated position, and then hold back our urine to go to the classroom for half an hour of morning reading. How can we fold the quilt into a tofu block in one minute? Some classmates bought samples that are easy to shape, and many people secretly did not disassemble the quilt at night, and carefully moved it to the side. Your school spares no effort to strictly investigate, and once found, it is the treatment of being suspended from class. In your school’s department, you can see students who are suspended from class and facing the wall everywhere. The director was dissatisfied because he was scolded by the principal for not managing strictly, so he asked the students in his class to stand in the department one dormitory at a time.

Your school’s personnel system is unreasonable. Your school adheres to the so-called concept of those who are capable go up and those who are mediocre go down, regardless of seniority or age. Whoever is the most ruthless to the students will be promoted, and whoever is the most unscrupulous will be commended. Many of the promoted leaders have serious problems with their quality and character. The head of the department who slapped the students on the back of the head was promoted to the principal of Zhangjiakou Qizhen, and the head teacher of the next class who made the students squat in the toilet and hold the quilt became the deputy director of the department of Qinghe Zhizhen, and the male teacher who kicked the students in Pingdingshan Zhuoyue School became the deputy principal.

Your school has turned teachers into emotionless supervisors who cater to the school system. If you make a mistake on a question, it will affect the teacher’s performance, and what awaits is only punishment, corporal punishment as revenge, plus extra self-service homework at noon, we can only lie on the bed and write in the most uncomfortable posture, and we don’t have time to sleep at noon, and it is difficult to sleep, may I ask how to hold on from two o’clock in the afternoon to ten o’clock in the evening? And the ears were rubbed with blisters by the glasses,

In your school, it is a popular trend among teachers to make senseless troubles and insult students, otherwise they will be out of place. The physical education teacher punished us all to do a two-minute plank support and run around the playground for seven laps, just because someone lost a few pieces of garbage last time.

In order to occupy the excellent source of students, the deputy principal snatched the transfer procedures from the parents and tore them up, saying, “No more, no more, get out”, and also publicly attacked the principal of Hengzhong, telling us that our school has embarked on the road of comprehensively surpassing Hengzhong.

And what does this have to do with us? We still can’t eat enough, we can’t sleep at night because we are hungry, and even at the risk of being suspended from class to write an inspection, we barely stuff a few mouthfuls in the quilt after the lights are turned off. Even every time we go to the toilet during the break, the head teacher stands at the door to urge us, shouting at us, “Hurry up! It’s always you guys!”

The teachers’ salaries are deducted, and they are criticized by the leaders at the meeting. They use the students as tools to vent their personal anger over trivial matters. I would like to ask if this is the original ecological education advocated by your school?

One day, I vomited because of a stomachache and didn’t go to the exercise. The head teacher saw me and said, “I tell you, don’t play any tricks with me.” He even refused to let me go to the infirmary a second time.

The desks in the north district of your school are too short, and the tall students’ legs are so uncomfortable that they can’t stretch out at all. In order to show off, your school requires us to have one tile per person, and our legs can’t stretch into the aisle. The desk mate couldn’t bear the pain and asked me to move the desk out a little so that I could stretch my legs. The head teacher saw it and scolded me, saying that he would chop off my legs, and then threatened me with a stick, saying, “If you dare to move his desk again, I will beat you.”

Your school deceives parents and deceives outsiders who are unaware. Whenever someone comes to visit, all those who are suspended from class, punished to squat, and punished to stand are all sent back. We are not allowed to leave class, and we are not allowed to go to the toilet. We are asked to stay in the classroom honestly.

Your school heard that the higher authorities were coming to inspect, and immediately organized an exam in the afternoon, asking us to claim that we were students of Hengshui Zhizhen Experimental Middle School, and to cover up all the words of Hengshui No. 2 Middle School.

Your school likes to add water to the college entrance examination results data for publicity. Many of the students who were admitted to Tsinghua University and Peking University were outstanding students who were retaking the exam from other places.

Your school likes to do all kinds of things, and all kinds of publicity and marketing methods are flying all over the sky. It is not enough to hold various activities and not invite the media to report them and not make a big splash. It publishes various promotional videos on Douyin and WeChat public accounts, and asks a few students to perform, sing, dance the World Cup dance, and eat cake.

Your school deceives parents. The head teacher has one face in front of us and another face in front of the parents. They beat and punish the students, and everyone is frightened. They send group photos with us in the parents’ group.

Your school has long cooperated with Taihua Group, the largest real estate group in Hengshui, and implements a public-private partnership model of running schools, which is now prohibited by law. Your school cooperates with Taihua Group to register private schools such as Hengshui Zhizhen Middle School and Hengshui Zhizhen Experimental Middle School to recruit students from other places, and charges in stages according to the high school entrance examination results. Teachers and students are uniformly managed and allocated in public and private campuses. In order to cope with the inspection, the foreign students in the first year are all in the private north district, and the local students are in the public campus. In the second year, they are mixed together, and the ratio of foreign students to local students is 5:1. The old teachers with establishment in the public campus are also involved in the vortex of capital. Many large-scale promotional activities held by your school are financially supported by your group.

Each leader of your school allocates a region for enrollment, tracks the students’ grades from junior high school, obtains personal information without consent, infringes on the privacy of others, and snatches all the good students who can be snatched. They also promote in the branch schools through parents’ circle of friends and other means to attract students. The provincial education department has issued policies to restrict enrollment from other places, and your school has opened private branch schools in various places.

Your school is out of touch with reality, blindly pursues the cramming education, and is superstitious about the high-pressure management model. In order to make money, it uses the same model to replicate and expand the enrollment scale, and many teachers have poor teaching levels and also meddle. The high-pressure and strict environment limits the students’ initiative and cannot solve the problems in a targeted manner. May I ask how can you learn knowledge well without a good mood? Students who were originally capable of being admitted to Tsinghua University and Peking University eventually only passed the middle-level 985. In the 2022 college entrance examination, only 10 students from this province took Tsinghua University and Peking University, so we were squeezed even more desperately.

Here, you have to be careful from the moment you open your eyes, and you have to struggle in the vortex, struggling to survive.

Here, no one will feel sorry for you, no one will treat you as a human being, including yourself who is in the center of the vortex. There are only the potential interests of the principal, the director, and the teachers. If you are not careful and touch someone’s cake, you will become the object of attack and revenge.

Here, I can’t feel the future of 985 and 211 that your school says, what I feel is the helplessness and despair of being involved in the vortex and unable to extricate myself, the loneliness and insomnia of a whole night after the lights are turned off, the fact that I didn’t really learn anything in a day, only blind busyness, anxiety, loneliness, worry and the struggle to live well.

Here, no one is willing to listen to your complaints, even the students around you are very indifferent to you, or they are too busy to take care of themselves. In order to block the news, your school educates us to “be worried about the mother when the child travels thousands of miles”, and to report good news but not bad news to our parents on the phone. All the grievances, pressure and pain can only be swallowed by ourselves in the dark night after the lights are turned off. If you don’t do well in the exam and want to confide in the head teacher, he will say, “You have lowered my average score, and I have worked in vain for a month. It’s not bad if I don’t beat you to death, and you still talk to me.”

My grades are in the middle of the class. I once asked a few students who were at the top of the class. He said that he started to feel breathless as soon as he entered the school. Then I knew that I was not the only one who felt that way. When you enter your school, the pressure comes from all directions; when you enter your school, capital will devour you. When you enter your school, you are an exam machine that is being exploited. You treat them as your alma mater and teachers, but they treat you as livestock. I once tried to cheer up, but I was hit by your school again and again.

People say that Hengshui is good, and your school, Hengshui No. 2 Middle School, is good. How many people will know the darkness and dirt behind your school’s brilliance. Teaching and educating people is not your goal, but greater fame, more students and more money are your goals. You design mascots, design school badges, decorate the campus gate brightly and grandly, and even ask us to wear school uniforms and shoot videos and post them on Douyin during the winter vacation. Outsiders can’t see what’s inside at all, and only those who have truly experienced it are qualified to evaluate you.

We are advised to “suffer hardships to become a superior person”, but do the hardships that your school makes us suffer have anything to do with learning? Don’t say that we should be grateful for the hardships we have suffered in your school. Happy people are not happy because they have experienced these, they would be happier if they didn’t experience these. What have we gained here? Don’t we get it if we are not here?

My grades in junior high school were still in the top ten in the class. Because of psychological problems, my grades have plummeted, which has aggravated the psychological problems. I am now afraid to see people, and I have already gone through the procedures for a leave of absence. To be honest, I said these things not because I have much courage, I am also afraid of being expelled, and I don’t want to cause trouble for my family. I just hope that everyone will wake up and see what this school is like. I have no hope for the future, and I hope that everyone still has hope.