Two recent analyses — one dissecting the THE 2027 World University Rankings [1] and another reporting from the ground at WorldDidac Asia 2026 in Hangzhou [2] — document the extraordinary rise of Chinese education. But read together, and against a broader critical lens, they also raise a harder question: what kind of graduate is this system designed to produce, and what is being left out?
When Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) overhauled its assessment strategy around generative AI, it demonstrated that governance is not about catching cheaters—it is about validity protection: ensuring that assessments measure real student understanding (Sadowski & Oliveira, 2026)
However, secondary schools operate under vastly different constraints than universities. While higher education institutions enjoy institutional autonomy and research budgets, secondary schools deal with rigid exam board syllabi, strict safeguarding duties for minors, severe teacher workload constraints, and an environment that a recent report described as "chaotic" and "crying out" for national guidance (Clarke, 2026; Seldon & Bunting, 2026)
I was teaching economics to a class of final-year high school students and spoke about Jeffrey Williamsons work in economic history, when one of them found that Jeffrey Williamson had died a few weeks earlier.
I stopped for a moment. Most people would call Jeffrey a famous economic historian: a Harvard professor and the author of dozens of books. To me he was something rarer. He was one of the few teachers who really changed me, even though he never taught me a single class.