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Purely going off of the China example, it seems to me that one can see the problem as people being incentivized to study more than is needed to establish a hierarchy, which is a waste of time and effort best cut short by limiting the time spent studying, or as the entire structure of the thing being perverse because it requires studying unnecessary material that could be ignored at no cost if the exams didn't establish hierarchy based on the ability to study useless information.
I ramble, but I do think there are multiple angles of attack one could take there, and banning cram schools is just the easiest one, rather than necessarily the best.
I see where you’re going. I think it’s a case of metrics making bad targets. The material the students were cramming probably had some value beyond forming a hierarchy. But competitive pressure forced them to expand vast effort squeezing out a very small amount of extra knowledge which is valuable but not valuable enough to be worth the effort under normal circumstances.
This is close to your first suggestion but maybe not quite the same.
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