IMO Education

To be fair, China’s Olympiad training system is truly without equal in this world. Children still losing their baby teeth are stuffed into all kinds of “training camps.” Schools run “competition classes.” There are county‑level classes, city‑level classes, provincial‑level classes — layer upon layer of sieving. At the end, the few dozen that remain are locked away behind high walls, from dawn till dusk doing only one thing: solving problems. Forget literature, history, geography, poetry — all that is set aside. Even eating and sleeping are timed with a stopwatch. The coaches are “gold medal coaches,” the textbooks are “internal classified papers,” and the goal is singular: IMO gold.

This is our whole‑nation system applied to mathematics. Is it efficient? Very. Is it utilitarian? Utterly so. The child solves problems with the speed of a machine. But ask him: What is the beauty behind this formula? Which eccentric drunkard thought up this theorem? More often than not, he will stare blankly.

A child studies Olympiad math not because he likes it, but to get into a better school. A coach pushes his team not to pass on a tradition, but for a bonus. A school brags about its gold medals not for academic excellence, but for enrollment. Everyone measures themselves on this utilitarian scale — a little heavier, joy; a little lighter, grief. All he knows is that solving this problem earns points; failing to solve it means no provincial team; no provincial team means no recommendation to Tsinghua or Peking University. Everything is for advancement, for that “slot.” The joy of mathematics, the pleasure of discovery — before this great, gleaming “Olympiad machine,” they are nothing but useless, romantic nonsense.

What we produce are standardized “problem‑solvers,” quick‑turn “contest hands.” It is like a broiler chicken farm — forty days from chick to market, each plump and meaty. But if you crave the taste of a free‑range bird, that you will not find. And the child himself? He is nothing but a pawn, shuffled about on this utilitarian chessboard.

People worry that one day the IMO will become the “Asian’s Olympiad”. They worry too much, cause we ourselves have already turned mathematics into the “Utilitarian Olympics.”

Mathematics is supposed to be useless, pure, and fun. But here, it has become far too useful — so useful that it suffocates. Now and then, I think of those children locked inside the walls, grinding through problems. I wonder if they ever look up and see the moon outside the window. That moon has not changed in thousands of years. But they, I fear, have no time to look.