If you read this blog regularly, you probably know that I’m writing a book called Survivor of the Future.

In the last two years, MY outlook on the future has changed dramatically and I feel very pessimistic. This book is my attempt to explain to you why you don’t have opportunities in the future.

“Overall, the next generation of young people is unlikely to have as many opportunities as the previous generation. Economic growth has started to slow and will continue to slow; The peak of population growth has passed; With the exception of high technology, almost all industries will not have the same high growth rate as before.

They are poor now, and most likely will remain poor in the future. Only a few will be able to rise, and it is getting harder and harder.”

It took two years to write and contained more than 20 articles, about one a month. Finally finished this month, the following is the final chapter, “The Rise of Technical Education”. Then it was time to go to the publishing house.

The topic of today’s article is about the training industry. After the article, there is another training news. Haitang Academy, which has been cooperating with me, has launched a new course called Front-end Full-stack Advanced Actual Combat Development.

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1.

One year, I was traveling around Taiwan.

On the beach in Hualien, I met a young Taiwanese couple playing on the beach with their daughter. We struck up a conversation.

At that time, I was still a college teacher. They asked me if I thought Taiwanese children were happy. I said why? The father pointed to his daughter and said, “There is no pressure on these kids to go to college.”

That’s true. Taiwan has more than 100 universities, but the shrinking fertility rate has left many unable to enroll students. There is a report that says:

In 2006, Taiwan students only needed 15 points in each subject to go to university. In 2007, this record was broken, with a total of 18 points in four subjects. In 2008, the total score was 7 points. A 7 is enough to get into college, making it the joke of the year. “Even if you can’t do anything, you can still get into a good school by guessing all C’s,” one joked.

But that doesn’t explain a phenomenon. I thought for a moment and asked the father what I was wondering: “If getting into college is so easy, why are there so many cram schools in Taiwan?”

For those who have never been to Taiwan, it is hard to imagine how big an industry cram schools can become. Teachers at private institutes are highly paid, and famous teachers are rich and famous in society. I don’t understand, why there are so many students in cram school, obviously there is no pressure to go to school?

Dad could not answer, thought for a long time, just said, “parents want their children to be successful.”

2,

When I returned from my trip, I found a thriving cram school industry in China, even more so than in Taiwan.

Around each neighborhood, there are several cram school companies, which recruit students from the age of two or three to the age of teenagers. It offers a wide range of subjects, from mathematics to art and sports, and offers study Tours to the United States, Japan and Europe in summer and winter holidays for parents to choose from. Every night, the lights are brightly lit and parents pick up their children at the door.

Our cram school company has gone public. From the earliest New Oriental, to the later danai Technology, Zhengbao Education, Xueersi, 51Talk are all outstanding companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange and sought after by investors. There is also a queue of training start-ups waiting to go public. This is probably unique in the world.

3,

The training program with the longest history and the biggest market demand is foreign language training.

When I was in middle school, new Concept English and oral English classes were popular among my classmates. In universities, toefl and GRE cram schools are popular. People believe that good English is the only way out of life.

At that time, the income of foreign companies was higher, several times higher than that of state-owned enterprises, and there were opportunities to go abroad. If you can get a scholarship from an American university, it will be like “diving into the dragon’s dragon”. Everybody wants to go this way. Marx’s famous saying “a foreign language is a weapon in the struggle of life” is our motto.

Foreign languages have changed the lives of many Chinese. Ma said that as a child, he spent all day by West Lake, chatting up foreigners to practice his spoken English, so he got to know an Australian family and was invited to go abroad to Australia for a month. He studied English in college, and his first business project was a translation agency. In 1995, he went to the United States for the first time. He saw the Internet in Seattle and thought it was promising, so he started an Internet business. It was also because of English that I got to know Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo, and got the most critical investment in Alibaba.

4,

Chinese people’s passion for learning English has created cram school giants like New Oriental. However, after 20 years, I gradually find that Learning English is not as important as before.

On the one hand, there are more and more opportunities and incomes at home, not less than abroad. What’s more, with the rapid development of technology, the language barrier is getting lower and lower, even disappearing.

The earliest time is dictionary software, as long as the mouse point, there is A Chinese explanation, without looking up the dictionary. Later with the translation software, do not need to point to the mouse, directly translate the full text into Chinese. Up to now, machine translation has been very reliable, grammatical rules of literature, machine translation quality close to human translation.

The latest technological achievement is that Google has launched Buds, a real-time translation earphone, which is already on the market. When you put your headphones on and the other person speaks English, you hear translated Chinese in real time. If you answer in Chinese, they will hear in English! With this, will it be necessary to go to an oral English cram school in the future?

I once traveled alone in Morocco for two weeks. Arabic is the official language, French is spoken by the upper classes, Berber is spoken by the lower classes, and I have a little English, so most of the time I can’t communicate. However, I managed to travel around the African country without any difficulties and stayed in the Sahara desert for two nights. Thanks to 3G networks throughout Morocco (thanks to Huawei), I can check traffic and hotel information at any time, and accurate mapping software that keeps me from asking for directions.

(Photo caption: My camp in the Sahara Desert)

Technology has made learning a foreign language less important. For most people, this is a blessing, because learning a foreign language is so life-draining.

In 2004 lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s leader, admitted a mistake. At the outset of independence, he decided that all Singaporeans, regardless of IQ, should learn two languages, one English and the other their mother tongue (Malay or Chinese). Later, he realized that there was a big problem with this decision. Mastery of two languages was too much to ask of the people. Most people can’t be bilingual at all, and even after years of learning English, they still stutter and stumble over their words. Forcing everyone to learn English is a waste of national lives. That year, the government changed its rules to require people to learn only one language.

5,

As foreign language training declines in importance, I think the emphasis will shift to technical training. People used to line up to go to foreign language classes. They will line up to go to technical classes.

The reason is that technology is becoming more important than language. Go back 20 years and if you were fluent in English, you would have more opportunities than others. Now it’s technology’s turn. Those who master the technology will have a lot of opportunities. Many parents have realized this, children should not only teach ABC, but also teach a little programming.

The future is far grimmer than we think. Technology will replace more and more people. Looking into the future, most people, even more than 90 percent of them, will spend their whole lives at the bottom of the social ladder, earning moderately or slightly more than subsistence wages.

Only technology can turn you around. Bitcoin, for example, has seen its price rise millions of times over the past few years. Many tech people I know have made fortunes in Bitcoin, and this is just one prominent example of the wave of technology wealth. If you understand the technology, you will see the opportunity. Only technology, it now seems, offers such a rapid rise from the bottom.

I have a gloomy premonition. There are only two ways to change your life in the future, one is to learn technology, the other is to buy lottery tickets.