English integrated edition · v003
Chapter 32. Schools and Education: Differentiation Networks of Student Registration, Evaluation, Qualifications, and Future Opportunities
Schools are easily presented through two images: one treats them as channels of upward mobility, as though children could change their fate simply by studying hard; the other treats them as ideological machines, claiming that they do nothing but train students in obedience, produce selection, and reproduce the existing order. Each account grasps part of what is real, yet both judge too soon, compressing intersecting processes into a single image. Admission, examinations, certificates, teachers' recommendations, and a school's reputation can indeed open new opportunities for children; student registration, household registration, places, scores, rankings, evaluations, language habits, family fallback support, and school resources also do lead different children down different paths. In admission, examination, student-registration, evaluation, and qualification procedures, the opening of opportunities can occur alongside the consequences of selection, exclusion, compression, and stratification.
These consequences do not come from an abstract entity with a unified will. They are jointly carried by teachers, homeroom teachers, admissions or review personnel, school administrators, and concrete examination, student-registration, archive, and qualification procedures. Different responsibilities are involved in who accepts applications, who interprets materials, who makes classroom observations, and through which question-setting and scoring procedures results are produced; qualifications, too, are confirmed or interrupted at specific steps. If every action is described as “the school decides,” different authorities, materials, and responsibilities are merged, and a particular instance of handling is easily mistaken for the unified will of education as a whole.
In tracing these events, student-registration systems, application materials, and classroom order provide common entry points. Teachers' evaluations, peer relations, examinations, disciplinary records, recommendation opportunities, school places, internship opportunities, and graduation qualifications allow differences to be extracted, assigned weight, connected, transmitted, and written back within different relations. School space and school time also play a part. These entry points intersect; they do not constitute a general theory of education or an exhaustive list. Still less can differentiation networks within schools be elevated into the underlying reality of education or an all-purpose explanation.
Within a single school, opening opportunities and forming constraints can occur at the same time. A teacher’s supplementary explanation may give a student a new entry point into understanding, while student registration and certificates may preserve the learning the student has completed. By contrast, another material requirement, a missed deadline, or an evaluation that has hardened into a fixed form may narrow later choices. Analysts need not decide in advance whether schools bring upward mobility or suppression. They need to identify which differences are amplified and which concealed in different events, and who still has opportunities at concrete steps to present new materials and change judgments.
Continue with the family of workers from elsewhere in the preceding chapter. The father works on a construction site, and his wages are in arrears; the mother does casual work in a restaurant, with wages settled daily; rent falls due at the end of the month, and the landlord may raise it or be unwilling to cooperate in producing certain rental documents. Meanwhile, medical care for an elder has taken up the family's cash flow, and relatives are still pressing for repayment of loans. When the child reaches school-entry age, some of the materials concerning residence, renting, the parents' social insurance or work, and the application may enter review, depending on local policy and the admission category. When progressing to further schooling or transferring, existing student-registration materials may also be checked, while school places are handled separately under specific arrangements. Formal admissions materials belong to a different level from family cash flow and the landlord's cooperation, yet they meet within the same event in life.
Preparing materials itself takes time and coordination among those involved. Parents must know what is required, where to obtain it, who issues it, and when to submit it. Whether landlords, community personnel, employers, or other bearers of materials are willing to cooperate may also affect whether the information can be produced in time. A family does not enter the school only on application day. Events involving renting, work, and communication before application already determine which differences can be turned into documents. If analysis begins only with the stack of materials received by review personnel, obstacles preceding their production disappear from the analysis.
Once differences in life enter the admission event, they continue to be transmitted along nodes such as housing, the community, receipt of materials, admissions review, student registration, and class placement. Receipt of materials and admissions review concern whether the address is stable and application materials are complete; whether student registration has been established and entry into class is timely must be identified at their respective processing stages. After entry into the classroom, the stability of results, teachers' evaluations, and the smoothness of communication with the family also form materials that can be handled, connecting to whether later examination eligibility remains continuous. Recasting differences from life outside through such stages as receipt of materials, admissions review, student-registration management, and teachers' evaluation has a real organizational role. Yet this does not mean that the relevant personnel and procedures have seen the child's entire life. These states belong to different stages and cannot be assembled into one procedure that every child must complete in sequence. A child's school admission is therefore not simply an educational issue, but the result of differences in the family, locality, state, market, and school connecting with one another in a concrete qualification event.
“Successful admission” is not the end of every problem. Early differences involving address, whether materials can be submitted on time and received and reviewed, establishment of student registration, and timely entry into class may continue to be transmitted, connecting to explanations of transfers and absences, adaptation to classroom language, homework support, and future examination eligibility. Gaps in coursework caused by late entry into class may appear in the first assignments and tests. Teachers' preliminary judgments based on performance at that time may affect seating, opportunities for classroom questioning, supplementary guidance, or communication with parents; after receiving evaluations, parents in turn rearrange their time and expectations accordingly. The first qualification event thus connects to subsequent classroom events, but this chain does not inevitably deteriorate: new teaching interventions, peer assistance, and subsequent performance can all change its direction.
A child's attending lessons in the classroom does not mean that admission formalities are complete, that student registration has been successfully established or updated, still less that all subsequent qualifications follow automatically. In reality, the child may already be sitting in class listening to lessons, getting to know classmates, and submitting homework. Yet checks at the admissions stage concerning rental documents, proof of residence, parents' work records, community registration, school places, and application timing, or formalities not completed in the course of a transfer, may leave a gap between actual attendance and registration in the system. If the student-registration file is not successfully established or transferred, subsequent examination eligibility, transfer, and progression procedures may still face substantive obstacles. Student registration affects current qualifications only when personnel or procedures authorized to handle it retrieve and check it anew in a concrete event.
Student registration is a mechanism for preserving qualifications within school relational chains. Under the Measures for the Administration of Student Registration in Primary and Secondary Schools as revised in 2025, after initial enrollment formalities have been completed, the school collects and enters information using the student's valid identity document [F02], establishes a student-registration file within two months, and updates it promptly after start-of-term reporting or a transfer. Materials concerning renting, residence, or social insurance required at the admissions stage in particular regions, years, and application categories belong to admission-entry review. They have their own procedural nodes, distinct from the collection of student-registration information and establishment of files using identity documents after enrollment, and from subsequent examination eligibility. Personnel receiving materials, reviewing admissions, and managing student registration handle materials and preserve registration records under different rules. When subsequent examination, transfer, or progression events arise, the relevant personnel and procedures retrieve records again, making them one item of material for confirming qualifications. Student registration is not a simple name or an ordinary form, nor is it the student's complete identity. Its continuity cannot be considered only in abstract terms of “having it” or “not having it”: the time it was established, transfers in and out, continuity between grades, records of coursework completed, and consistency of personal information such as names may each become a separate issue in subsequent events. A registration's having been valid at the previous school does not mean it will necessarily be accepted in the same way at a new school, in a new examination, or in a new review. Those handling the matter need to check the materials required by the current event and whether the old record supports the qualification now being claimed.
Teachers, review personnel, and administrators in schools often have to handle student affairs through student registration, materials, results, written evaluations, attendance, and archives. They confront not the whole of children’s lives but some differences preserved and formatted through these forms. Misalignment may therefore arise between a child’s real circumstances and the child in school records. At the stages of qualification review and entry, actually living nearby does not mean that application materials are valid; a family’s real poverty does not mean its financial-aid materials will necessarily pass review. If moving house causes the family to miss the application window, this may appear in the review procedure as “incomplete materials.”
Such misalignment can also occur in everyday teaching, continuity of coursework, and understanding behavior. When facts of life cannot enter the corresponding forms, they are easily omitted, compressed, or misread. A child’s having actually studied does not mean continuity of student registration can be smoothly maintained; an actual transfer does not mean that coursework can be picked up where it left off; real difficulties do not mean teachers can correctly understand them from existing records. Discontinuity in coursework after a transfer may appear in classroom and results records as “weak foundations.” Having no quiet space at home may be understood by teachers from homework results as “poor study habits.” Parents’ irregular working hours and slower replies in the parent chat group may also be understood as “low family cooperation.” These misalignments need not be attributed to someone deliberately ignoring the child. School organizations rely on materials, results, attendance, written evaluations, and archives to handle large numbers of affairs. The focus of analysis is not an abstract accusation against schools, but identifying through what materials facts of life pass, who receives and interprets them, and at which step a break occurs.
Materials may also conflict with one another. Attendance records show missed classes, while medical or transport materials kept by parents may explain why. Results suddenly decline, while transfer records, differences in coursework, and teachers’ observations may reveal another line of explanation. Slower replies in the parent chat group do not necessarily mean a family is unconcerned; they may also be connected to working hours and the use of devices. If personnel handling the matter use only the records that are easiest to quantify or that appeared first, other facts of life struggle to enter judgment.
Supplementary materials do not guarantee that the original judgment will be overturned, but they should be able to form an objection open to examination. The relevant personnel need to explain whether new materials bear on the current event, which record they can correct, and which parts still cannot be confirmed. This neither treats every family account directly as sufficient proof nor grants existing archives an unquestionable status merely because they were preserved first. Repairing breaks in materials depends on concrete receipt, checking, and response, not abstract goodwill. Omissions, errors, or outdated content in student-registration records further involve explicit entry points for correction: can parents and students learn where the problem lies, can they submit supplementary proof, which staff member has authority to amend the record, and will amendments be synchronized with the records used later? All these affect whether qualifications can be restored. Calling student registration an automatically operating system conceals how materials are accepted, refused, and corrected, and makes procedural responsibility untraceable.
An examination is not ability itself. Procedures for setting questions, answering them, scoring, and using results compress part of a child’s abilities, training, language habits, family support, time arrangements, physical condition, and answering techniques into scores, rankings, and qualifications. Scores have real effects: they may influence class placement, progression to further schooling, recommendations, scholarships, and school choice. But they cannot fully represent a child’s understanding, capacity to bear strain, curiosity, expressive ability, care pressures, family burdens, and future possibilities.
Scores take shape through several steps. Question setters choose what to measure; teachers decide the focus of routine training and review; students answer within a limited time and in a particular physical condition; scoring personnel or procedures then turn answers into results according to rules. No step has to be described as arbitrary, but each establishes which abilities are more readily seen. If only the final score is retained, the scope of the questions, conditions of answering, and method of scoring drop out of the explanation. Low results may be connected to speed of understanding, but may also involve difficulty adapting to the language, insufficient training resources, continuity of coursework after a transfer, a sick person in the household, insufficient sleep, or physical condition on the examination day. The examination compresses these differences into a score, which teachers, class-placement personnel, and admissions or qualification-review personnel may retrieve in later events. Understanding examinations requires both acknowledging that scores enter real consequences and preserving the possibility that new materials, subsequent performance, and counterexamples may change existing judgments. A single result cannot be treated as the whole child.
Scores from different examinations cannot be directly compared apart from their uses. A classroom test can help a teacher identify current gaps in understanding, whereas an examination for further schooling or qualifications may directly allocate limited opportunities. The same score has different consequences in different classes, at different times, and for different purposes. Analysts need to distinguish scores as learning materials from scores as qualification materials, without portraying every test as the same kind of selection or denying an examination’s comparative role within a particular scope merely because it is limited.
Examinations are a starting point; evaluation in schools has no single source. Teachers’ evaluations, homeroom teachers’ evaluations, examination results, and discipline and reward-and-punishment records may form formal or semiformal materials under school rules. Experience as a student class officer, peer reputation, family evaluations, parent communication, and recommendations may operate through different interpersonal and organizational relations. They differ in origin, mode of preservation, and consequences, and cannot be merged into an undifferentiated “school evaluation,” still less become a judgment on the child’s entire worth.
Low results do not mean low ability, just as silence does not mean having no thoughts, and inconsistent homework likewise does not necessarily stem from a lack of effort. Evaluation often forms through everyday accumulation. Speaking up once may be understood as engagement, or seen in another interaction as an interruption. Silence may stem from thought, unfamiliarity, anxiety, language difficulties, or a judgment of the present atmosphere. Teachers must handle class affairs within limited time. Preliminary evaluations have a working role, yet may take insufficient sleep for laziness and anxiety for inattention. Adjustment after a transfer, upheaval in the family, and difficulty adapting to the language may also be read, respectively, as weak foundations, regression in learning, or poor expressive ability. Physical weakness may even be moralized as a lack of effort in physical-education evaluation. Teachers’ judgments may help a child be seen, but may also misread family, bodily, emotional, or language problems as problems of attitude and character.
Once teachers or homeroom teachers turn classroom behavior, homework, results, and parent communication into written evaluations, rewards and punishments, recommendations, or other records, these materials may affect class positions, family judgments, and subsequent opportunities. Peer evaluations operate through everyday interactions and reputation, while family evaluations affect resource investment, expectations, and arrangements of responsibility. Different evaluations may support or conflict with one another. When temporary observations enter formal written evaluations, recommendations, or disciplinary records, their scope of effect changes. Yet none automatically amounts to the student’s essence, and preliminary evaluations must still be distinguished from subsequent materials.
Students also respond to evaluations. Some participate more after receiving recognition; some speak less after being repeatedly misread; others turn to another teacher, peer, or family member and explain their own circumstances. These responses may change the materials teachers see next time, forming a new cycle. Analysts cannot portray evaluation as a direct cause of personality, nor ignore that evaluation has already changed opportunities for participation. They need to trace how evaluation, response, and subsequent records connect with one another.
V. Authority to Extract Differences, Evaluation Authority, and Recording Authority in Schools
Differences within schools do not automatically become educational consequences. Application or admissions personnel receive materials, review personnel judge whether they are valid, and student-registration personnel preserve registration records. Teachers and homeroom teachers evaluate classroom, homework, and everyday performance; examination and scoring procedures produce results; school administrators handle rewards, punishments, and records. The power held at each node is different: authority to extract differences, evaluation authority, recording authority, and authority to process qualifications, each within a different scope.
Specific personnel must judge from existing materials and procedures whether an instance of lateness is an isolated event or an attitude problem, whether silence stems from not yet having adapted or from a lack of ability, and whether missing materials can be supplemented and corrected or will interrupt qualifications. Education-department personnel, admissions or review personnel, homeroom teachers, subject teachers, and relevant people in parent committees and training organizations may extract differences from different positions. Student-registration and examination systems preserve or process records, community attestations carry materials that can be submitted, and peer relations operate through interaction and reputation. The authority, materials, and consequences at different nodes must not be written as though they were the same.
Authority to extract differences also includes choosing the scale of observation. Teachers can focus on a single assignment or compare changes over a period. Review personnel can look only at whether materials meet current requirements, or, within the permitted scope, inform people of entry points for supplementation and correction. In handling a conflict, administrators can retrieve one side’s records or check materials preserved by different participants. A difference in scale does not make every conclusion valid. Such differences in scale remind interpreters to explain the span of time, number of events, and sources on which their judgment rests.
Personnel or procedures able to turn a difference into results, written evaluations, disciplinary action, places, recommendations, or qualifications may thereby change a child's position in school relational chains. Review of materials, confirmation of student registration, classroom judgments, examination rankings, parent-communication records, and peer responses each affect the child's circumstances in the corresponding events. They do not form one path that all educational consequences must traverse. Organizations and procedures do have effects; no single node can possess or explain a child in full.
At the same time, different authorities may constrain one another: subject teachers can describe classroom performance but may not have the authority to amend student registration; student-registration personnel can handle registration but may not understand the child's everyday learning; peers can describe their experience of interaction but cannot directly determine formal qualifications. Bringing each limited judgment into its appropriate scope can supplement materials. Elevating one node's evaluation into an overall conclusion turns limited authority into an overall naming of the student.
Family fallback support is not a background outside school. Who can be present to support a child’s studies, drop the child off and pick the child up, help with homework, and purchase materials; who can afford extracurricular training and transfer costs; who can provide time, emotional support, and material support when results decline—all these differences enter school through homework, lateness, communication, results, and teachers’ evaluations. A father returning late, a mother working nights, the lack of a desk in a quiet place at home, a phone needed by parents to handle work messages, and an elder’s medical treatment disrupting daily routines may all leave traces in the child’s school performance.
With fuller family support, an instance of lateness, a missed homework submission, or fluctuating results may be more easily remedied. With insufficient family support, the same event is more readily preserved as a fixed evaluation. This difference has real weight, yet family fallback support cannot be portrayed as the sole source of educational outcomes. How teachers interpret, whether materials can be supplemented and corrected, how peer relations develop, whether school resources are available, and how the child subsequently responds may all change the original outcome.
Family fallback support also takes different forms. Money can buy materials and save travel time; care can sustain daily routines; family members familiar with procedures can help organize materials; a stable residence makes continuity in student registration and peer relations easier. These forms of support do not necessarily coexist and cannot all be converted into income. Families with similar incomes may develop different capacities to remedy problems because of differences in working hours, available caregivers, residential stability, and familiarity with school procedures.
Family investment likewise cannot be directly equated with how much a family cares. Parents may be unable to come to school because of work, transport, care, or physical constraints; slower replies to messages may also result from shared devices or working hours. If teachers can obtain supplementary explanations, original judgments may be adjusted. If families do not know what evaluations are forming at school, they also struggle to provide relevant materials. The role of family-school communication therefore depends on who sends messages, whether they arrive, when both sides respond, and whether responses actually enter subsequent handling.
School space is not a mere background to education. Seating changes how teachers observe, with positions near the teacher increasing everyday observation. Drop-off and pickup at the school gate may make family fallback support visible, and various parent activities also make some families more likely to enter teachers' view. Responses in parent chat groups may affect teachers' judgments of family communication; students who frequently visit offices may likewise leave more formal or informal impressions. Who is readily seen, and which part of life is seen, change with these positions.
The classroom foregrounds answering questions and discipline; the playground brings the body, cooperation, and peer positions into view; the dormitory exposes daily routines and interactions. Office conversations often organize scattered events into explanations that can be recorded and may become formal evaluations. Cafeteria spending, dormitory interaction, tutoring-class lists, and results boards may also bring resources, peer evaluations, and examination results into view. The teacher's dais, playground, cafeteria, dormitory, tutoring class, bulletin board, and results board may all become nodes where differences are seen, compared, preserved, and interpreted.
Increased visibility may bring help but may also increase the density of evaluation. Those less readily seen may avoid certain kinds of attention while also losing entry points for explaining difficulties and obtaining support. Materials formed in different spaces may supplement or contradict one another. Someone's silence in class does not mean a lack of ability in collaboration with peers; the existence of a dormitory conflict cannot directly be turned into a fixed character trait across all learning activities. Space itself makes no judgments: consequences arise from how teachers, students, parents, and administrators observe, compare, record, and respond. What parent chat groups sustain here is school communication; their limited role cannot represent the general mechanisms of platform ranking, recommendation, or visibility.
Educational consequences may also change with time nodes. Application windows, deadlines for materials, and school-entry age form one set of conditions; transfers, examinations, supplemental admission, terms, and progression to further schooling each have their own timing, as do the preservation of disciplinary records and graduation. These must be identified through specific procedures; they do not share a uniform policy or fixed deadlines. School procedures turn growth, migration, illness, family upheaval, and delays in materials into temporal differences within qualification events. Materials becoming complete a day earlier or later, a transfer occurring at the start of term or before graduation, and fluctuations in results occurring in an ordinary examination or at a point of progression to further schooling may receive different evaluations.
Behind the family of workers from elsewhere missing the application period may lie a landlord's failure to file the lease, parents' inability to obtain leave, insufficient time to supplement materials, or a delayed move caused by unpaid wages. These difficulties in life already exist; once they enter application and review procedures, they are also processed as missed timing, late submission of materials, or unstable qualifications. Only when temporal differences are received, reviewed, and assigned weight within concrete procedures do these corresponding qualification and evaluation consequences form.
School time is also cumulative. Short absences can be made up for; if they fall precisely at the start of new coursework, before class placement, or before qualification confirmation, the later cost of catching up may increase. A late submission could have been supplemented and corrected; if several procedures close one after another, the family faces a new transfer or a wait. Consequences come not only from “how late” but also from which node was missed and whether later arrangements still leave entry points for repair.
The time of a child’s growth may also be misaligned with organizational time. Students need a longer period of adaptation, but term schedules and evaluation arrangements do not necessarily wait. A family has just finished moving, while applications, coursework, and examinations may already have occurred in succession. This misalignment does not directly prove that the procedures are wrong, nor can it be attributed to insufficient ability in the child. Analysts must separate individual change, family events, and school schedules before judging which temporal difference actually entered qualification or evaluation consequences.
In some regions and particular admission years, changes in housing may affect a family's obtaining or submitting formal materials concerning residence, renting, social insurance, or work. Admissions personnel process only the items required under local rules [F05g]; the effects of parents' working hours, family routines, and study space on homework, results, and teachers' evaluations belong to the composite scenario in this book, not to admissions-policy requirements. The entry of these external differences into schools does not make the respective mechanisms of family, locality, the state, or the market disappear. Stages such as receipt of materials, registration, examinations, and evaluation recast them as student registration, results, written evaluations, places, and qualifications. Current determinations by teachers, homeroom teachers, or administrators form write-back when preserved as differences that can be extracted again in the future. Only when specific personnel or procedures retrieve these records anew in subsequent handling may they again affect family resource arrangements and future opportunities.
Materials formed at the preceding node have not reached their endpoint. Teachers’ evaluations may enter recommendations, class positions, reward-and-punishment records, and opportunities for further schooling. Examination results may enter rankings, class placement, scholarships, certificates, and school choice. Consequences continue to be transmitted only after specific personnel or procedures at the next node retrieve and interpret the materials anew and assign them weight. As it unfolds, the chain may branch, weaken, or break. Actual residence does not necessarily become valid materials, and family hardship is not necessarily understood by teachers as a child’s lack of effort. These breaks belong to the analysis and cannot be erased by a single image.
Relational chains may extend in several directions at once. A decline in results can enter teachers’ written evaluations, parents’ expectations, peer positions, and the student’s own subsequent participation. Correction in one chain does not necessarily change other records at the same time. A teacher has updated their view, but the family may still allocate resources according to old results. A student’s subsequent performance improves, but old recommendation materials may not yet have been updated. Analysts need to trace each chain separately, rather than sum up the whole situation through a single improvement or failure.
There are also repair nodes in the chains. Supplementation and correction of materials, retesting, teachers’ supplementary explanations, new information from parents, students’ subsequent performance, and peer testimony may all reopen existing judgments. Their effectiveness depends on whether the relevant personnel actually receive them, which record they can amend, and whether they enter later qualification events. Identifying entry points for repair does not guarantee that all consequences can be reversed. It avoids portraying a single break as a fate that must continue.
Student-registration records, transfer records, transcripts, rankings, written evaluations, rewards and punishments, disciplinary actions, attendance, competition records, teachers’ recommendations, graduation certificates, examination eligibility, and archives are preserved by the corresponding teachers, homeroom teachers, student-registration or archive personnel, and school procedures. They constitute an educational past that may be located and extracted anew in the future. When current judgments are preserved as differences that can be extracted again in the future, write-back has already formed. But preservation itself does not mean that these records automatically take effect or automatically govern the future.
Results, written evaluations, recommendations, and rewards and punishments first produce changes in present evaluations and opportunities, and can be preserved in archives or through teachers’ communication. Only when events such as progression to further schooling, transfer, selection for honors, scholarship applications, job seeking, internships, or qualification review occur may admissions, review, recommendation, hiring, or other authorized personnel and procedures retrieve some of these records and give them different weights according to current purposes. An absence, transfer, disciplinary action, examination setback, or teacher’s recommendation affects new evaluations, admission, class placement, financial aid, trust, or qualifications only through this extraction in the present. Likewise, only when the content of write-back is identified anew, extracted, interpreted, or assigned weight in subsequent handling does it re-enter family judgments, changing parents’ expectations, resource investment, and arrangements of responsibility.
After receiving teachers’ evaluations, peer reactions, and changes in opportunities, students form new modes of participation and expectations of themselves through their own understanding, responses, and subsequent actions. These responses unfold from the present situation and need not wait for future retrieval to occur. Teachers’ evaluations cannot bypass these intervening steps and directly determine how students see themselves. Old records cannot cancel new materials, subsequent performance, and counterexamples. A transfer may explain fluctuating results; sustained improvement may change the weight of a low score; and new teacher judgments may correct old written evaluations. A single disciplinary action cannot automatically determine character and the future. Historical indices allow the past to enter the present while requiring current judgments to explain who extracts it, why it is assigned weight, and which materials will compel revision of the original evaluation.
Records may differ in version. An original written evaluation has not yet been amended, while new teacher observations have already formed. A paper archive preserves one instance of handling, while materials held by the family and student reveal another course of events. The bases for coursework and results may also differ before and after a transfer. Current users unaware of when records were formed and for what purpose easily mistake outdated materials for the latest state. Calibrating historical indices requires explaining together who formed the records, when they were formed, and in what events they are extracted anew.
Write-back also involves scope. A classroom evaluation can be used to adjust present teaching; it should not automatically expand into a judgment on graduation qualifications or character. A disciplinary record can establish that a particular instance of handling occurred; it cannot replace observation of subsequent actions. The more readily records pass across events, the more their users need to explain their relevance to the current problem. Only by preserving conditions of scope, time, and counterexamples can the educational past become revisable material rather than permanent labels.
Schools are easily compressed into several fixed images. An explanation of schools as channels of upward mobility can grasp the real opening of educational opportunities. But if this leads to the idea that schools will naturally open the future as long as one studies hard, a limited explanation is compressed into an image of upward mobility. Student registration, family fallback support, local qualifications, school resources, and market pressure, along with household registration, physical condition, and breaks in materials, are all obscured. An ideological-machine explanation can grasp some discipline and selection; yet an image that portrays schools entirely as machines of indoctrination and discipline likewise leaves no room for student registration, certificates, teachers' evaluations, peer relations, examination eligibility, and real opportunities. These judgments point in opposite directions; neither explanation’s role within a limited scope justifies swallowing up those carrying mechanisms.
Examinations and comparison also have a role within limits, from which an explanation in terms of ability rankings can develop. Treating scores and rankings as the complete expression of ability, however, downweights language habits, training resources, family support, physical condition, care burdens, and psychological pressure. If every outcome in school is then treated as a natural display of individual ability, question setting, materials, time, and evaluation nodes, along with the different ways students demonstrate abilities in different environments, all drop out of the image. Pointing out these conditions does not cancel differences in ability. Which materials present a particular ability, within what scope it can be compared, and which new performances can test and revise the original evaluation must still be explained separately.
When interpreters portray schools as “educational investment,” they produce another compression, as though investing money, time, and training would yield proportional returns in results, qualifications, and future income. Investment can indeed change some conditions, but it does not automatically turn into outcomes: entry points for materials, physical condition, language habits, teachers' judgments, peer relations, continuity of student registration, and qualification time points may all change how investment enters consequences. Portraying education entirely as investment once again attributes failures to obtain expected outcomes to insufficient investment or wrong choices.
Interpreters who adopt class theory can extract some real differentiating units from differences in family resources, school resources, and opportunities. This explanatory capacity within a limited scope comes from these differentiating units and the processes of extracting, assigning weight to, connecting, and compressing them; it does not belong to the class image. Classes do not exist. The capacity to differentiate within a limited scope does not prove that classes exist at either an overall or a limited level, nor does it turn class theory into an ordinary limited explanation such as Model A or Model B. The basic structure of class theory belongs from the outset to the total-image-subsumption direction of Model C. Interpreters who adopt class theory and its total image cannot subsume schools under a class image. Student registration, continuity of student registration, examinations, evaluation, teachers' evaluations, places, qualifications, transfer nodes, application timing, language adaptation, school space, physical condition, historical indices, write-back, breaks in materials, and future opportunities each have their own concrete bearers and relational chains. If interpreters downgrade all these mechanisms to subsidiary materials of the class image, this is precisely how total-image subsumption manifests itself in explanations of schools.
Schools are indeed complex, yet comparisons can still be made on the basis of concrete events. When a child encounters obstacles to initial admission, one must identify how application timing, residence documentation, household registration, school places, rental stability, and parents' work records operate. The applicable items of formal documentation are still determined by the local admission year and category; the child is not required to have student registration beforehand. In progression to further schooling or transfer, continuity of existing student registration, receipt of materials, grade timing, teachers' evaluations, peer relations, and family migration form another combination. For these qualification events, merely saying “schools provide opportunities” cannot explain who obtains which opportunities; merely saying “schools select” likewise cannot explain which material excludes whom in which procedure.
The materials extracted through examinations and teachers' evaluations are not entirely the same. Examinations involve training resources, language habits, family routines, physical condition, examination rules, and psychological pressure; in teachers' evaluations, classroom performance, family communication, language habits, attendance, conditions for homework, and physical condition are extracted anew. Comparison cannot stop at listing differences. It must also examine whether explanations identify real actors, explain how materials are formed and used, trace qualification, evaluation, and time nodes, and leave entry points for revision through new materials. This provides a concrete basis for distinguishing which explanations extract key differences, which obscure important nodes, and which compress schools into a single image. Explanations that make relational chains clear usually have greater comparative power than simply attaching an overall label to schools. Complexity does not mean that all explanations are equivalent, still less that judgment is impossible.
Acknowledging that explanations are limited and keeping omissions, boundaries, and counterexamples in view is not itself Model C. Only when complexity is used to cancel valid comparison, revision, and calibration, placing valid, limited, erroneous, and invalid explanations on the same level, does this move in the direction of Model C's erasure of distinctions between explanations. Limited models can each extract different sets of differences: one model is suited to analyzing how examinations form comparisons, while another may better explain how family fallback support or local qualifications enter admission events. Different explanations may be used for different events; one cannot retrospectively deny an explanation’s validity merely because a different explanation performs better in another, unrelated event. Comparison must specify the concrete questions being compared, the respective scopes of application, and the relevant evidence. Resolving a concrete causal disagreement at hand naturally requires returning to that question for checking and comparison, but this does not require all comparisons to be confined to a single event or the same set of materials. The models need not merge into a single image, nor can they be judged equally unsuccessful because each has omissions. Only by comparing their explanatory power, differentiation bias, and capacity for revision within clearly specified relational fields, boundaries, and evidence can complexity be prevented from becoming an excuse to cancel judgment.
Understanding schools requires identifying concrete events such as admission, transfer, examinations, class placement, teachers' evaluations, disciplinary action, rewards and punishments, progression to further schooling, graduation, internships, or qualification review. It also requires tracing how materials are received and how differences in life are extracted by teachers, homeroom teachers, admissions or review personnel, school administrators, and student-registration, examination, archive, and qualification procedures, then processed through certification, evaluation, ranking, recording, or recommendation to produce consequences for student registration, evaluation, qualifications, and opportunities. These analytical dimensions have no fixed order: an admission event may begin with residence documentation and application timing; a classroom event may first present teachers' observations and students' responses; an examination event may begin with question setting, answering, and the use of results. Analysts should follow the materials that first change qualifications or opportunities, then adjust boundaries in light of newly appearing nodes, avoiding a descent into rigid procedural checklists.
In this tracing, positions from which students and families can explain their circumstances must be preserved. Teachers, administrators, parents, students, and peers may hold different materials, and their accounts may conflict. Formal records have limits and cannot automatically be treated as the complete facts; the existence of objections, however, does not mean that all accounts are equally valid. Analysis needs to compare when materials were formed, the procedures actors control, and the relevance of accounts to the current event, then indicate which conclusions can stand and which parts still await revision through later materials. When old records are retrieved anew in current procedures, their connection to the present state must likewise be examined under these conditions, identifying which new materials and counterexamples require changes to the original explanation.
Student registration, examinations, evaluations, qualifications, and records can indeed change students' circumstances and future opportunities, but all must operate through specific personnel, materials, organizations, and procedures. Family fallback support, local qualifications, state materials, and market pressures enter schools along different paths. Materials and relations of the family, locality, state, market, body, and community are likewise extracted only within limited scopes in concrete events. Write-back forms when specific personnel, materials, organizations, or procedures preserve the results of school handling as differences that can be extracted again in the future. Only when specific personnel or procedures subsequently retrieve, interpret, or assign weight anew to the relevant records may they take effect again in family, local, state, market, bodily, or community relations, thereby affecting parents' expectations, resource investment, and students' subsequent actions. Such tracing neither portrays schools as natural channels of upward mobility nor confines them to the role of ideological machines, still less subsumes educational differences back into class entities and class theory's total image.
[F02] Articles 3–7 of the Ministry of Education's Measures for the Administration of Student Registration in Primary and Secondary Schools, Jiao Ji [2025] No. 1, provide for student-registration information, the management system, and the establishment and updating of student registration. Articles 12–15 provide for changes in student registration and continuity when progressing to another level of schooling or transferring. The two-month period for establishing a file under Article 6 applies after initial school-enrollment formalities have been completed; it cannot replace admission-eligibility and admission procedures. This note follows the official full-text republication by the Huainan Municipal Education and Sports Bureau (https://sjtj.huainan.gov.cn/public/118319840/1260535420.html, rechecked on 2026-09-30). The document is dated 2025-01-03; Article 30 provides that it takes effect on the date of issuance.